There is so little to measure against.
I wake up. The sun is getting ready to come up.
I read a bit of James Clavell’s Noble House yesterday. He’s the guy who wrote Shogun which I’ve never read but it was a big book when? the 60’s or 70s, I suppose. He writes novels about East and West, Japan and China, and how they look to us, how they interact, what time and place do and how they happen.
I read carefully King Rat when I was a lot younger and the book was pretty new - when? Fifty years ago? It was a library copy. It was a war book, about a WWII Japanese Prisoner of War camp, with American, British, Australian, etc. prisoners. It was brutal, of course it was. And it was real.
The thing I remember is that one of the main characters, an Englishman had left a beautiful wife who he was unsure of. As he gradually starved he lost the ability to have erections and he knew he would lose her. And of course he does.
This Noble House which I grabbed from a book shelf in my house yesterday was a retired library book. I don’t know if I ever read it or not. It seemed a bit familiar. It’s set in 1950s or 60s Hong Kong when the Brits still owned it and it has some of the same characters that were in the POW camp. The guy who lost his erections and his wife meets someone from the camp at a business party - you or I can imagine how it would be.
I also watched the movie “Revolutionary Road” on YouTube. Leonardo de Caprio and Kate Winslet together again, older than on “The Titanic”, but just as tragic. It was based on a novel by Richard Yates, a man who had a tragic life of his own. I think it might be a Yates novel that had a bit about WWII veterans at a post-war party somewhere in the East of the US, where someone tells a heroic war story based on his experiences and gets rapt attention from the other party goers. When another couple at the party go home, the wife asks her husband who was also a veteran of the same war why he couldn’t tell entertaining stories at parties, he said nothing, but he remembered his war story, his private war story.
He had been in the US Army most of the war in an administrative role, he was one of the famous typists - it was said if you could type you wouldn’t have to carry a gun. I don’t suppose that was totally true but it mights have had some truth in it. This man was sent to European action at the end of the war, when all resources were poured into ending the war. The Battle of the Bulge. His group of soldiers were crossing a river. He had lost his raincoat. His commander was very angry with him. And that was his war story. Not very self aggrandizing for him or his wife at parties.
Those are pieces of my life that I carry with me. Stories from books. Stories from wars. Stories from my own past. Pieces of life that I understood, and still understand.
I worry about leaving life. Leaving my books. My dogs. My farm with its brilliant sunrises. My string of little fold up computers. My family. My house. My bare feet on the worn linolium. Linolium doesn’t look spelled right.
When I was little we went to visit my mother’s sister whose vocation was priest’s housekeeper. She and Father O’Sullivan had recently been assigned to the church in college town - a plum position for them both. My family went to visit them and there in the rectory was something I’d never seen before - ‘wall to wall’ carpeting. I was little and the language was somewhat new to me - I was entranced by the ‘soft ecnolium’.
(I need to save this before I hit the wrong key and lose it; I have more to say though, always, more to say.)
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So I’m back.
Two things.
I saw yesterday that Open Diary is closing for the last time. Open Diary is where a lot of us met. We were younger and life was newer and we poured parts of ourselves into our keyboards and the world was at our feet. Some of us are still here but most of us are gone… like the Japanese POWs. All we have left are vague memories and pretty soon they will be gone too.
Add that to pile of life’s regrets.
The other thing is Pat and Ernie. Jim met Ernie in town last week and they had an apparently epic conversation. They’ve been in my mind since. I worked with them at my old old old job - for 33 years. I suppose the factory was a POW camp of a sort. We went there every day and did what we had to do. We brought home pay checks and raised our families. We grew older and then it closed and we went home and we grew old. Pat and Ernie were a famous couple, a famous love affair, a famous story to be told at parties. And I suppose they did tell their story, or at least lived it, at a lot of parties. I see then in my memory, thousands upon thousands of days, conversations, good and bad, memorable. Maybe not so memorable.
When I go, they go too.
I keep thinking I could remember a semi-innocous story about them, but nothing comes to mind. Maybe deer hunting. Pat became a bow hunter after she married Ernie. They hunted on our land. She shot her prize buck (not Ernie) in the woods across the creek. They brought us a box of home-made food in appreciation. And after my husband died they came out and brought a cake. It’s nice to know they are still going. Still alive. Still doing what is important to them.
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