Thursday: Veterans Day

Basically retired a while now, no self-imposed discipline of writing a daily blog as for a decade; revolting and bolting in my ancient age.

So many cards and notes coming from dear people who over the lifetime saw my sister living her own life, or saw my sadness that her life ended as it did.

As our old Litany said,

From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood, from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death,

Good Lord, deliver us.

Kind folks writing to share my feelings, thank you kindly and lovingly.

Reading more than writing at the moment, in fact reading two books. Remembering that "A Soldier of the Great War" was an all time favorite, read during my January and February 2017 sabbatical. A novel: his life well lived, an old soldier telling his life story to a young traveling companion. Now, these, and others I read recently, books, and several films set in World War One more than a century ago, maybe I've acquired a sense of and taste for that era, life as it was, the history and horrors and facts of it, life for ordinary humans during that struggle. The two books I'm reading now are men's autobiographies of the Times, diaries, the miseries of trench warfare, experienced from each side, one an Englishman, the other a German. So far I'm deeper into "The Storm of Steel" by Ernst Jünger, and, comparatively so far, finding his original 1929 translation more vivid than "Goodbye To All That" by Robert Graves. Jünger is writing from his war diary as a young soldier and then junior officer. Graves is talking about himself and his family, ancestry; but Graves' book and writing are well known, and I expect him to get into the war shortly. Jünger's writing is vivid, well written, and well translated clear and honest at the Time, not edited and "cleaned up" as later editions. I do wish his translator had brought his French over, I can work out the German, not the French, at which he apparently was as fluent as his native tongue.

Why do I like these things? Honestly, I don't know, I've tried over the years to psych myself out about it. It isn't the cars of the Time, or the gore and blood and death of war, or the happiness or the simpler lifestyles or the diversions into love. Maybe from how my life was as an earnest young naval officer through my twenties, and then again in my forties at the end of Navy life and into business, seminary, travel, I like the constant tension with brief respites, personal moments to relax with others, comrades, loved ones, life as it could be if I let it and required it of myself.

What Graves may report from the trenches I don't know yet, but Jünger is interesting in observing character quality differences and relationship differences, between his English enemies and his French enemies, and also differences in French-German feelings, bitter hatreds; whereas in German-English feelings he experienced mutual respect and even some personal interchange in no-man's-land between the barbed wires.

Warfare that consisted of permanent trenches on each side, for months and years of men, in place, shooting at each other in attrition and the rear filling in to cover losses as needed, and life back home going on seemingly almost as in peacetime; as opposed to World War Two when there was total war economy at home, battle movement overcoming the enemy and advancing as enemy retreated and was beaten back - - far different sort of warfare the two conflicts. And then today, instead of battles, warfare of seeking out terrorists who melt away into the countryside and are invisible while they abide until.

What if anything will war be like a hundred years from now, or a thousand? Humans surely will not have learned to help each other enjoy life and conserve the planet and its resources. We are as mindless as the warring ants I often visualize as our equals, or murderous bands of violent chimpanzees. How long is enough Time to evolve beyond fear, hatred and violence into common, universal decency? Perhaps sixty thousand years from now there will be people who look back wonderingly, thankful that they are beyond what we were.

Why do I appreciate this genre, war? IDK, maybe because I grew up in it, hearing and reading and newsreels, with the news coming out of it, on the most subtle levels, propaganda inciting our hatreds. The hatreds: as I recall from Time to Time, during WW2 and in its immediate aftermath, seeing scenes of the Holocaust, incredible, horrendous atrocities committed as a nation's domestic and foreign policy, scenes going on and on and on and on without end, sans any shred of humanity or mercy of human kindness, scenes coming back to mind, my mistrust of an entire "race" of "Volk" not eased in the least, neither they nor we having earned Trust, or deserving Trust.

What I'm thinking now. Ludicrously almost comically, collapsing American and world economy and civilization because we are where we set ourselves up to be. Economies supporting extreme excess for people in wealthy nations, collapsing basically because there aren't enough truck drivers to continue delivering all the excess goods that we were accustomed to having. Restaurants closing because during pandemic menial laborers discover they have power. School systems closing and straining for the same reason, teachers discovering they don't have to suffer all the crap. Shortage is power. For us the "wealthy", shortage means watching inflation wipe out our comfort and security. The U S automobile industry relishing that it's a sellers' market, but on the other hand they have no inventory to price-gouge, there are no cars for transports to deliver, the automobile industry fading as the backbone of the American economy and way of life. For us, it's too late for trains, but maybe more buses for local transit? Bicycles, electric golf carts, walking.

Perhaps in our Time, a leveling. Someone (who?) wrote "either we give or they take". Once they really outnumber us and move into it, we will discover what it was like for them, and maybe even reflect that it would indeed have been better to have given.

Waiting for Kristen to empty her car so I can take it to Pensacola for the Volvo dealer to do what needs done to keep it running another hundred thousand miles.

Breaking my overnight fast: one Aleve, cup of hot black, twenty or so ounces of strong black coffee poured over crushed ice, a very good sip. Between two whole wheat Saltines, thick slice of liver pate with goose, slice of French raclette cheese, mayo to hold it all together, FuroForty for the ankles and feet. Happiness looking out my office/study/den window at what was the little town where my brother and I grew up. Once a fishing village with our own post office, drug store, hardware store, barbershop, fish houses, fishermen, working boats and docks, fish seines, wandering drunks, fish markets, ice plant, and filling station, not to mention the old train depot or Kelley's Super Market (we doze but never close) StAndrews has become a food boutique. We even have a traffic light now, and a paved road that's a straight shot from Beck Avenue all the way to Harrison Avenue over in Panama City. Where no longer On our city's northern border Reared against the sky ...

Thursday, 11 November: Armistice Day.

Still at eighty-six Life is Good.

RSF&PTL