Before Coffee: Restorative

It’s windy this morning. Fall is blowing the last vestiges of summer through the cemetery gate. It will rain later; the clouds are already gathering outside. Inside, my personal clouds are clearing and I’m starting to feel like me again.

I slept a full night without aid—no Benadryl, no melatonin. “Sleep is for the weak” is something my friends and I say when we don’t get enough, but it really is vital to our health and mental well-being. Sleep makes us stronger, helps us keep our defenses up against the storm clouds and brain weasels.

My appetite is slowly coming back, too. Nourishment goes hand-in-hand with sleep. When I don’t sleep, my Crohn’s disease kicks up, and when that happens, I don’t eat much. I’ve lost 10 pounds in the last month or so. While I’d like to keep it off, I also need to fuel my defenses against illness.

So, sleeping and eating. And also creating. I wrote a poem Saturday night, sitting in a quiet attic library with black cat flirting with me. I’d slipped away from the party downstairs for a few minutes alone, and discovered a book of Charles Bukowski’s poems and short stories about cats. Buck is one of my favorite poets, and I thought I shared his poem “tough company” here before, but now I can’t find it. Reading his words made me want to jot down a little drabble of my own. It’s short and it’s terrible, but it’s a seedling pushing up through newly moistened soil. I am feeling the old itch to start writing again.

The party I temporarily escaped from was restorative. Aaron and Anneliese were the hosts, and their parties are always a mix of familiar faces and new ones. They know fascinating people. I met interesting new friends, talked to old friends, and heard the kind of bawdy stories only a former sailor can tell of the Banana Lady and the Bottoms Up Club and Korean sex shows. There was a fire out back and good food inside and joy everywhere.

I drank a little, but not too much. I ate too many of the fantastic egg rolls my friend Travis conjures up, as well as more than my share of my wife’s delicious monkey bread. I watched my friends’ faces in the firelight, and listened to their stories.

But I kept slipping upstairs to the cat and the book and the quiet, just for a few minutes each time, whenever I felt the jittery devil’s hand upon my spine. I read half that small book over the course of the night. Sometimes, I found a friend or two up there, escaping like me, and we had quiet chats.

Toward the end of the festivities, my friend Julieanne said she’d “eddied through the party,” which I thought was just a lovely turn of phrase that perfectly captured the feel of the night: the slow swirl of conversations and people, moving through the house or out into the back yard, seeking the fire or the shadows or the quiet places filled with books and cats.

There are worse ways to spend a night, but if you ask me, there are few better.

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This is the cat who kept me company. His name is Tom Servo. (Photo credit: Anneliese Knoff)

 

 

Writing about Reading: The Forever War

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is one of those landmark science fiction classics that any good sci-fi reader should have read a long time ago. Either I’m not a good sci-fi reader (HA!) or I’ve just been distracted by other, equally landmark SF titles, because I didn’t get around to reading Haldeman’s book until recently.

I didn’t know much about the book when I bought it, other than it was categorized as “space opera.” From the introduction, I learned that Haldeman had a hard time finding  a publisher for the novel because it was heavily influenced by his time in Vietnam, and publishers in the early 70s didn’t think readers wanted books about Vietnam. Boy, were they wrong.

The plot centers around Mandella, who we first meet as a private in the space marines, going off to train on the outermost world in our solar system, Charon. From there, we follow Mandella through his career as he reluctantly advances in rank and continues to fight—for 1,000 years.

Maybe it was knowing that Haldeman drew on Vietnam for this book, but several times throughout The Forever War, I was reminded of the novels and short stories of Tim O’Brien — particularly The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato. Like O’Brien, Haldeman’s book isn’t about battles and killing the enemy so much as it is about the time in between the battles and the experience of being a soldier in a seemingly senseless and endless war. It’s about coming home to a society you don’t recognize anymore, about being an alien among your own people—or, more accurately, about “your own people” being the aliens.

The Forever War is simultaneously dated and relevant to right now. Haldeman’s interstellar war began in 1997, so right away the story seems a little musty. But the experience of being a soldier—be it in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or on a distant planet in the far future—that doesn’t change much. You train, you fight, you lose friends and parts of yourself, you fear, you dread, you love, you hope, and you sometimes die. If you make it home, you find that home is a strange, alien place into which you no longer fit. If you’re lucky, you’ll find someone waiting for you to help you make sense of it all. If you’re not, well, you probably end up going back to the war.

In his foreword to the edition I read, John Scalzi sums up what makes The Forever War a classic:

“The first is that it speaks to the time in which the novel first appeared. There is no doubt that The Forever War did this … The second thing is tougher, and that is that it keeps speaking to readers outside its time, because what’s in the book touches on something that never goes away, or at the very least keeps coming around.”

As much as we wish it to be otherwise, it seems that there will always be war. And as long as there is war, Haldeman’s novel will remain relevant, and thus remain a classic.