50/50 Exercise #13: Address Book

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:27:59 +0000

Dear Grandma,

I’ll bet you thought you were never going to hear from your youngest grandson again. I wasn’t too regular about writing to you for the last decade or two of your life, so you certainly shouldn’t be surprised that you haven’t heard from me since you left us.

From your vantage point, I would think it’s easy for you to see why I didn’t stay in closer contact. Not long after the last time I saw you, when we got together with Laura and Yvonne, Karl and Edith, little Karl, Linda and her kids, Jane, Dad, and all those others at your place in Middle River, my life started heading in a direction that I wasn’t ready to share with you. I hate the way that time and circumstances isolated me from you. It wasn’t that I thought you couldn’t handle the secret I was carrying around. It was just that I couldn’t handle it, and I didn’t have the first clue how to talk to anyone else about it. Looking back, I can only imagine that if I’d told you, you would have behaved true to the sweet, patient, loving, saintly Grandma you always were.

I hope you can see how much of you I carry inside me. I can’t scrape uneaten food into the garbage disposer without hearing your voice say, “It’s a sin to waste food.” I don’t hear it as a taunt, just a gentle reminder that abundance is a gift for which we should be profoundly grateful in this world of endless need. I’m glad you’re there reminding me. I’ve never known real hunger, so it’s easy to take what I have for granted.

And there’s a lot more than that. I would like to think that I took into my heart something of the lessons you taught us—about how a life with more than its share of pain, loneliness, grief, and deprivation could be lived with optimism, humor, generosity, and piety.

I wonder sometimes what you would think when I see pious people on TV spewing messages of intolerance. Your constant faith was never a weapon to use against people less faithful than you were. You sat by your radio praying the rosary hour after hour, you surrounded yourself with holy pictures, with prayer cards, with rosaries and statues—the Infant of Prague scared me a little—, with Crown-of-Thorns plants and crucifixes and every other sort of devotional object. But I never once heard you accuse anyone else of being un-Christian, or less Christian, or less worthy in any way of God’s love.

You were a model of faith and humility more real to me than any of your saints (dead or living). I hope you’re not disappointed that I haven’t held on to your kind of faith. I hope you know I try as hard as I can to cultivate your kind of humility.

I remember a story you told me once about Dad. It still fills me with pride for what it said about both of you. You told me of a day when some members of the local draft board came asking about him, wondering whether he planned to volunteer to serve in Korea. He was in college at the time, or maybe already in graduate school. You told the board members that your first three sons had all served in the military, and that you wanted your youngest son to stay in school.

One of the recruiters said, “You know, if he volunteers, he can become an officer. But if he gets drafted, he’ll be digging ditches.”

And you said, “And they’ll be the best danged ditches anyone ever dug!”

My memory might be a little shaky; I don’t think you ever used a word as strong as “danged” (unless you said it in Polish). But I’m sure of the sparkle in your clouded eyes when you delivered that punch line. “Danged” seems about right.

If you’re reading this letter somewhere out there, then I guess you already know I don’t believe in heaven any more. But I never lost my faith in your love.

Author’s note: The assignment was to write a letter to someone with whom you have not been in regular correspondence, but to whom you still have something to say. I don’t think this piece needs any further explanation.

50/50 Exercise #7: Pick a Card

Edward F. Gumnick — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 21:58:17 +0000

Loteria is a traditional Mexican game similar to bingo, played with a tarot-like deck of picture cards. In card number 34, El Soldado, I see M., my “ex‑husband” of eight years and still one of my very closest friends. Long before I knew him, M. was one of the thousands of Mexican-American soldiers from Corpus Christi, a native of the area where his family has probably lived since it was still part of Mexico.

The brown and smoky tones of the card remind me of a photo of M. from his service during the first Gulf War. He served as a specialist in the U.S. Army stationed in Saudi Arabia and worked with communications equipment during the liberation of Kuwait and the advance into Iraq. He’s told me stories of his service in that war—of the Russian tanks used by the Iraqi Army, which became useless piles of molten plastic and metal under American artillery fire. He talks infrequently about one of the few times that he himself was under fire, laughing off the experience.

“We just ran away!” he jokes. I have to imagine the details he leaves out—the noise, the smoke, the omnipresent dust, the thunder of air cover as our Air Force drove back the Iraqi assault with a disproportionate counter-attack. I admire the casual shape his courage takes. I cannot imagine being fired upon. I was never tempted to sign up for military service.

El Soldado’s murky background makes me think of the oil wells that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, ordered set on fire. Some burned for many months before well-fire experts could put out all the fires and get the Kuwaiti wells back into production. M. has experienced some health issues—worrisome, but so far, not serious—that I’m inclined to blame on smoke from the well fires, or toxic ordnance, or maybe on the experimental vaccines that were tested on Gulf War soldiers. He dismisses my suspicions, preferring to blame his quirky liver on his intemperate youth.

In the photo, M. sits in the back seat of a jeep. He’s wearing desert camouflage, with a floppy camo hat of the style I usually associate with fishermen. His eyes, heavy-lidded and -lashed, always have a sleepy look, but in the photo, they’re squinted even more tightly against the desert sun, which washes all colors in the photo to dull browns, olives, tans, and beiges. His skinny frame accentuates his aquiline nose. His skin is walnut-brown from weeks or months of exposure to relentless Saudi Arabian sunshine. A thin adolescent mustache and the way his uniform hangs off him remind me that he had barely outgrown boyhood when he volunteered for service, received basic and specialist training, and was shipped around the world to fight for our Kuwaiti allies’ freedom—and oil.

Who is El Soldado? What acts of heroism does he shyly dismiss as duty, as cowardice? What horrors of war are preserved behind his stoic expression?

Author’s note: The assignment was to choose a playing card or tarot card and to write a description of the person of whom it reminds you. I like to be different, so I went looking for images of the standard Loteria deck instead. As soon as I saw El Soldado, the choice was obvious.

Even though many of my readers know M.’s identity, I’ve decided to conceal it here to protect his privacy (at least a little) from the general public.

Incompleat Iconoclast » Profiles

50/50 Exercise #13: Address Book

50/50 Exercise #7: Pick a Card