Letter Never Sent

I love seeing my family and spending time with people I care about. I love the stress of it and the break from routine, the familial nosiness, seeing how everyone has changed over the intervening year. I love to see everyone laughing and teasing each other, my aunts and grandmother baking and cooking, and on the other side of my family, my dad and uncle cooking and roasting. I love playing dominos, drinking coffee, and watching movies, everyone packed in like sardines.

To everyone within shouting distance, have a Happy Thanksgiving. Spend time with your tribe.

At the risk of turning this into the adjunct Hollis-blog, another member from TM asked Hollis to be a guest blogger on his site because he too found his Armistice Day speech stirring. So, from the horse’s mouth, here is the full story as told by Mr. Baker.

After waking up from my toasty bed I headed down to IHOP to set up their banquet room for our Toastmasters meeting as is my duty each Monday morning a little after six am. Our foremost octogenarian, Hollis, was already there and had everything set up, of course, even though he doesn’t have to. As soon as I entered, he looked at me in all seriousness and said in his guitar string Texas twang, “Chris, I caught you flat-footed.” I had that sinking feeling you get when you’re in trouble, but don’t know what you did. I said, “How do you mean?” and he pulls out this stack of paper and throws it on the table.

It’s a print-out of a Google search he did for his name “Hollis Baker“. Right at the top of the search results is my website with the excerpted mention I made of him with regards to last week’s meeting and his Veteran’s Day speech, his name bolded out from the rest of the text.

Horror of horrors, my secret blog habit had been found out! This is like being unmasked as a cross-dresser since I generally don’t tell most people I know about my site. I’m actually a very private person, and it’s foreign to me to reveal the things I think about. The good thing was that he seemed flattered rather than annoyed and he gave his characteristic “My compliments.” Then he went on to tell me about how he started his own blog on Blogspot! He is an amazing and interesting fellow, so be sure to check out his blog.

I’m busily surfing and doing a few things here at the library where Jody works her second job. She works harder than anyone I know, with one full-time job, one part-time job, and enough projects to choke a horse. She’s already talking about getting her PhD now that she’s done with graduate school. Even though I do my freelance work in the evenings several nights a week, I still feel like a slacker. The woman is driven.

It’s nice to be able to look over at her reading and helping patrons while I mess around online, adding blogs to my feedlist, so I can view them from any computer instead of trying to store my opml files to the USB drive like I have been doing. She had to be at work at 9am, so I had a nice walk around until the library opened at ten. I went down some unfamiliar neighborhood until I found a McDonald’s swarmed with soccer kids and their parents. I got an egg McMuffin and some coffee then I walked back along this dry, grassy park (Rawhide Park, as a matter of fact) while I sipped my coffee.

There is a passage in the Hagakure “In the Shadow of the Leaves” that a samurai should meditate on death daily:

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, muskets, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

When I think about death I know that everything that exists is fleeting and temporary, like a mist, not just myself, but every aspect of the universe. All the works of man, all the bones of our ancestors, all the knowledge we have produced and compiled, but we still desire perpetuation and timelessness. Defeat of death is the defeat of time itself.

We move through time as if stepping from one crumbling stone to another. In a very real sense, all you have is the flow of each moment, although this is itself a form of timelessness. My memories of life live on in some fashion. That much is undeniable.

I started off the day with my weekly Toastmasters meeting, which is less nerdy than it may seem to outsiders. Try it out, if you’d like to get better at communicating and speaking in public. It’s a very social thing and you get to meet people from all walks of life, although most of the members are usually above 30. Most of the people in my club have husbands, wives, kids, mortgages, the sort of thing that is foreign to most if not all of my contemporaries and myself. I can remember when my dad was my age. I remember walking around Sears around that time, him, my brother and I. My father had bought us each a padded satin jacket, and we wore them proudly. My brother wearing the navy and silver of the Dallas Cowboys while I sported the light blue of the Houston Oilers. My kid timeline seems to be running behind schedule.

People of my generation are waiting longer to have children and get married, if they do it at all. There seems to be a general sense of avoidance about these once ubiquitous facts of life. Is it too foreign or painful or precarious a subject to even consider realistically? Is it because many of us are the children of parents who dissolved their marriages in divorce and acrimony? Are we stuck in an extended state of adolescence? Or, has marriage become superfluous? That seems unlikely in an age where homosexuals fight for the right to legally marry. I could go on.

Anyway, the meeting went well, although I still haven’t gotten over my serious sense of nervousness that makes me freeze up for painful seconds whenever I have to get up there and try to speak. As someone who is fairly extraverted I have difficulty in the spotlight.

At the end of the meeting, Hollis Baker, 81 years of age, closed with a poignant story from his childhood about the importance of Armistice Day, what we now celebrate as Veteran’s Day. He told of his beloved math teacher who went off to fight and die in the Battle of the Bulge. When this man was sent home to be buried, the entire town turned out for his funeral. He told how after all the town preachers gave their eulogies, the local ne’er-do-well, a veteran of the First World War threaded his way through the crowd and up to the lectern and took a yellowed piece of paper out of his bib overalls. Then, although this man was not scheduled to speak, he recited “In Flanders Fields“, a poem of remembrance from the last Great War. As Hollis spun his yarn, he recited the poem from memory. It was a classic, profound Hollis moment.

We could stand to learn a few things from our elders. Namely that as individuals we have a place in this world, if for no other reason than to accept the torch of our fathers and grandfathers (or mothers and grandmothers) to light the way for those who follow.