You Can't Get Here From There
In the culture to which I ostensibly belonged, in their first years youths liked to stand on the corner and rap with each other. In the culture to which I was supposed to belong, in their midyears males liked to sit near their basement bars, their cars, or their barbeque grills and rap with each other. In the culture to which I was expected to belong, men in their concluding years liked to sit on their front porches and rap with each other.
My mother probably saw early on that I carried a mindset in which I would never do any of those things. In any case, consciously or unconsciously, she made sure of that forever afterward on the day that she escorted me, at about age 10, downtown in Washington D.C. to a curious, gleaming, white marble building in the center of Mt. Vernon Square and got me a library card.
The first books that I checked out from that wondrous building were from a child's series on the battles at Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, and other places. I read those books ravenously and for the next several decades I thought the Civil War was a glorious, endlessly absorbing event.
Now it makes my stomach turn. It took that long for the smell of the blood, the pus, the gunpowder, the blasted and sawn arm- and leg bones, the feces involuntarily expelled, and the fear to reach my nostrils.
As the fates would have it, I have ended up living in the heart of the state that bore the lion's share of the desperate battles in that war, Virginia.
During his final maneuver to get away from the pursuing Union forces, Lee was generally heading in this direction, but he finally surrendered to Grant in Appomattox County, which adjoins my county on the southeast.
I like to say that my county is so low key that you can't get here from there. One proof of this is that, with Appomattox on one side and the Shenandoah Valley on the other, and with Richmond and so many other battle sites little more than 100 miles away, not one Civil War engagement of any size whatever took place here.
In my current heavily pacifist state of mind, I must be in the right spot.
My mother probably saw early on that I carried a mindset in which I would never do any of those things. In any case, consciously or unconsciously, she made sure of that forever afterward on the day that she escorted me, at about age 10, downtown in Washington D.C. to a curious, gleaming, white marble building in the center of Mt. Vernon Square and got me a library card.
The first books that I checked out from that wondrous building were from a child's series on the battles at Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, and other places. I read those books ravenously and for the next several decades I thought the Civil War was a glorious, endlessly absorbing event.
Now it makes my stomach turn. It took that long for the smell of the blood, the pus, the gunpowder, the blasted and sawn arm- and leg bones, the feces involuntarily expelled, and the fear to reach my nostrils.
As the fates would have it, I have ended up living in the heart of the state that bore the lion's share of the desperate battles in that war, Virginia.
During his final maneuver to get away from the pursuing Union forces, Lee was generally heading in this direction, but he finally surrendered to Grant in Appomattox County, which adjoins my county on the southeast.
I like to say that my county is so low key that you can't get here from there. One proof of this is that, with Appomattox on one side and the Shenandoah Valley on the other, and with Richmond and so many other battle sites little more than 100 miles away, not one Civil War engagement of any size whatever took place here.
In my current heavily pacifist state of mind, I must be in the right spot.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 8:25 AM
2 Comments:
I was wondering where you were going with that-- yes, perhaps it does come full circle in an appropriate way. Cheers from new orleans.
Hi! Thanks for stopping by!
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