No time for nostolgia
The battle is always right here, right now.
Facebook memories, always dragging up things I’d forgotten about, both good and bad, did it again. It reminded me of this picture I posted eight years ago. The caption from them was probably topical, but I don’t recall the context. It said, “Some kinds of Big Brother are OK.”
Cute. Witty. Shut up.
It stopped my idle scrolling cold today. I stared at it. I remember when I took the picture. I remember the warm summer afternoon and our walk back from the park. We did a lot of family walks back then.
I stared because things are so radically, terribly different now. Looking at that picture, I imagine that combat veterans feel something similar when they look at photos from their pre-war days.
What curiously happy people. What strange clothing. It’s looks almost as if they can’t hear the air raid sirens…
The picture shows my oldest and my youngest. She has always had a huge heart and she absolutely loved her big brothers. They were pretty much typical boys. “You want to hold my hand? Okay, that’s weird, but I love you too.” She initiated the hand-holding. He grudgingly consented.
Eight years later, those minor but substantial differences between them have sent them both on different vectors. Their minor personality differences grew and expanded until they’re almost too different to get along. They do their own things now, and they argue a lot more.
The sidewalk in that picture is just around the corner from our former home in Manassas, now more than a thousand miles from my new home, a little duplex in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Family walks are now a memory two years in the past. My oldest doesn’t like to stay with me because it’s away from his workshop. He undoubtedly learned that creative obsession from me. My youngest draws pictures of dragons and turtles and dogs and cows and big clusters of hearts and gives them to me—the highest and most sincere gift she can offer her Daddy.
So, what? Let’s take a moment to cry about it?
No. That’s not what this is about.
Life is a battle in a much larger, epoch-spanning war. Things change. There are casualties. People are taken out by enemy fire and, perhaps more often than not, by friendly fire. Homes are destroyed.
We can weep and grieve over these lost things, as I have, but no one and no place is supposed to be our refuge on this side of the Veil. To linger on these things—these dreams or ambitions or passing moments of beauty—is to go AWOL. I’m tempted to call them “idols,” but when it comes to the spiritual perspective on things, I’m in no mood today.
I miss my boy, my Joe-Joe (a name he asked me not to use several years ago. He’s not Joe-Joe, Joe, or anything else. He is Joseph. Period.) I’m sure that if my family’s American Dream had continued apace I’d be feeling something similar as he grows into a man with his own ambitions and internal drive and interests. It’s the natural way of things.
The youngest, my “baby girl,” which she has repeatedly said she loves to be called, will move down her own path soon. For now it’s dragon pictures and fierce hugs any time we pass by each other. But the clock is ticking. She will no doubt be stationed elsewhere long before I’m ready.
Nonetheless, pining away for that time now lost infinitely, takes me out of today’s fight, which is a whole lot more complicated, difficult, and yes, beautiful. As I wrote when I reshared the post to a group of people who struggle with their own battle losses, “I refuse to despair over things lost, or the painful and bitter changes of life.”
I do refuse. Not out of some white-knuckle desperation or allegiance to sentimentality, but because I’m a kind of veteran now, too, and I know a thing or two about war. You bury your dead and destroy your enemies. You fight for those you love. You can rest when you’re dead, so get in the fight right now.