On All My Motions

Just 20 years ago now, I came back from my first Iraq tour. We staged back through Fort Bragg, and I learned that demobilization takes less time than mobilizing for theater, but it isn’t exactly quick. Finally it was done, and a flight was arranged to take my unit home.

For some reason, one of our guys elected to drive instead. And for some reason, I chose to go with him. Because there were two of us, we had no problem trading off time behind the wheel, and the others got back to our home state quicker than we did, but we made it to our own homes faster because we were able to go directly there instead of staging through the unit HQ.

His city was closer, so he got out there and I proceeded on to mine. Once I had arrived, I went to call on my mother. The subject of my return trip came up, and I indicated that I’d come through on a straight shot from Fort Bragg. She stared at me and asked, “When did you sleep?”

Actually, the other guy had driven while I slept, with him doing his own rest when I took over. I hadn’t actually mentioned that we’d been driving together, though, and she clearly thought I’d made the drive by myself. I paused a second while all this was going through my mind, and then I said dismissively, “Sleep is for the weak.”

I’d gone into the Army Reserve at … um, a relatively advanced age … after a life of no particular hardship, and did it for the express purpose of going to war, and now I was back from that. Ever after that comment, my mother went on and on about how much I had changed, and I’m pretty sure most of it was because of something I said off the cuff, almost as a joke, and simply never bothered to correct.

She didn’t know there was something she didn’t know, and yes, that was mainly because I failed to be entirely forthcoming (and did so purely because the whole thing was funny to me). Still, her view of an entire section of reality was less than accurate because she lacked pertinent information, and that makes me wonder just how many things I might be missing because something I don’t know I don’t know stands in the way of that.

Mostly, though, I still remember that because I still think it’s funny.

Saying my Rosary today, I happened to think of something. I entered the Catholic Church in 1996, the first member of my family to do so. During the time I spent with my kids (in that 10-year interregnum before my ex-wife became my again-wife), I’d say Rosaries with them more or less whenever we were together. Then, in 2007, my son came into the Church, and his mother with him — and she and I remarried at the end of the year — so now the entire family is Catholic, though my daughter remains not-officially-so, in that she’s living in Ireland and married to an Irish Catholic and that’s the only church she attends but never while in America stayed in one place long enough to finish the process of formally entering the church herself.

What occurred to me was that, though I said Rosaries with our kids, and my wife and I do them together now, I don’t think there was ever a single occasion when all four of us shared one. And, with my kids living on different continents now, from each other and from us, it could be a long while before we ever have the chance.

On the other hand, I still have the opportunity to do that with my granddaughter, currently the only member of my lineal family (my Irish son-in-law is a side-branch) to be born Catholic. Even if I’m not at all sure she knows the prayers in English.

Something to look forward to.

These days Susan works three days a week, in circumstances where (though not necessary) it’s convenient for me to drop her off at her job and then pick her up when I finish my own shift. Today on the way home we stopped at a Mexican restaurant for frozen margaritas and a beef fajita dish massive enough to feed us both. I consumed the entirety of my own margarita; wary of brain freezes, she let me finish hers, then — without my opposition — she drove us the rest of the way home, because I was competent to do the driving myself, but why argue when she had any concerns at all?

During the meal itself, I told her a story from my childhood, parts of which she had previously heard in various allusions but the entirety of which she had never had occasion to have related to her. Just because it came to me, and why not?

***

I was two years older than my younger brother, but due to a minor placement of birthdays I was only a year ahead of him in school. We lived on a farm in a very small town, and went to a very small school. Every day after school one of our teachers would drop us off at the highway entry to our farm, and Matthew and I would walk the rest of the way up to the little farmhouse where we lived.

(In my third grade, my parents moved us to the ‘big city’, not too far from an actual large metropolitan area, but at this point in my life the surroundings were emphatically bucolic.)

On one particular such day, my brother and I were working our way up the road to our house (probably less than half a mile, now that I think back on it, but it seemed a really long way then), and I looked back and saw one of the farm’s bulls starting up the same road in the same direction. He was far behind us, but I observed to my brother that it would probably be a good idea to finish the trip before he caught up with us, so we started hurrying. Well, even an unexcitable bull will increase his pace when he sees hurry in front of him, so he started trotting; and a grown bull, even not in that much of a rush, can move a lot faster than two small boys. The closer he got, the more frantic we got and the faster we tried to run — he’d covered a lot of ground in a dismayingly short time — and the faster we ran, the more excited he got and increased his speed, and the more terrified we became and tried to run even faster, and he was right behind us now —

At this point, Matthew tripped and fell down. On the road. Directly in front of the ‘charging’ bull.

This was several several decades ago, and to this day that remains the most awful moment of my entire life. My brother was about to die. And I couldn’t leave him. And I couldn’t accomplish anything whatsoever by staying with him.

It was at this point that my mother — who had seen the unfolding scene from the window and come running out to intervene — jumped over both of us, landed in front of the excited bull, and announced her determined opposition by the only means available to her: she snatched off the knit toboggan cap she was wearing and smacked the bull on the nose with the puff-ball on the top of it. Thank God the bull was Prince Russ, and not Proud Mixer (that vicious son of a bitch would have trampled us all and then turned around to gore the remains, just for the warm satisfied glow of having done so). Russ stopped, startled by the what-the-hell-was-that?, then ambled off in mild, befuddled confusion, and just like that it was all over.

My brother didn’t die.

I didn’t have to desert him. (Or stay and die impotently as well.)

My mother saved both our lives.

And this was just another day.

Life can be like that sometimes.