The World of Our Making
There's a book out there somewhere that will change your life, a book that will leave its mark on you. Maybe you've already found that book. For your sake, I hope so. Because to my mind, the time to read that book is the sweet hazy edge of childhood, at twelve or thirteen, just as you cross over into the shiny sharp-edged world of adult awareness. As a child, you aren't yet fully formed, and as you read one of these books, your heart and consciousness are grafted like borrowed wings onto those of mythical characters and you stay up all night reading. Think about that. How long has it been since you stayed up all night reading a book. Jim Hawkins. Frodo. Frank and Joe Hardy. Huck Finn. Holden Caulfield. Peter Parker, if radioactive spider powers blow your hair back. When you are a child, one of these will pull you under as only characters from dreams can. I see it now in my own son, age seven. He loves Harry Potter and Lemony Snickett, of course. He is a product of his environment, after all. He worships Tom Sawyer as I did, and speaks of him in reverential tones. But it is Stuart Little, the orphaned mouse, who haunts and transports him. He first read the book a month ago and immediately started reading it again. He is now reading it a third time.
The first book that broke my heart was To Kill A Mockingbird. I lived every waking minute with Scout and Jeremy Finch for three days one dreadfully hot summer in Memphis, twenty-five years ago. I was eleven, and maybe too young to read such a book. But anything on my parents' shelves was fair game. I remember when I was twelve, my father raising his eyebrows when he saw me tucked midway into Deliverance; he told me to come talk to him if anything in that book confused or frightened me. And yeah, that rape scene disturbed me, but it didn't keep me up at night like the courtroom scenes in Mockingbird.
I didn't read it again until I was 19, on a rainy winter day. I needed to take a break from the grind of studying for midterms and for some reason picked up To Kill A Mockingbird and read it straight through while sitting in a coffee shop near campus. My girlfriend found me there five hours later, sleep deprived and crying. People were studiously ignoring me. I tried to explain to her that the boy I had once been was still kicking around in my head, and that boy was in love with Scout, while her older brother was the pale blue-eyed fearless second baseman philosopher I had aspired to be. And her father, Atticus, was my own grandfather living and breathing on the page.
I am sure he would chuckle at the idea, but it was my father's father that I saw in my mind's eye, as I read Mockingbird. My grandfather was, like Atticus, a small town trial lawyer, and a gentleman of the breed that is rare these days. He was cool and dignified and wise. He knew things, he could talk for hours about boats and chess and hunting dogs and religion and world affairs. He was Gregory Peck made flesh. And so I was weeping for the innocent boy I once was, but also for my grandfather, long since retired to Florida, who I had lost touch with.
Now, as I creep warily down the back slope toward forty, I realize that the internal flaws and shortcomings of a man's soul are infinite and complex to say the least. But at nineteen I was still very much a boy, and an overly romantic and brooding daydreamer sort of boy; I saw my grandfather through that boy's eyes. I was terrified of him, and in awe of him. His approval meant more to me than I could properly define, and certainly could not say out loud.
My grandfather fought in Word War II. He rarely spoke of it, as I recall. All I know is that he was stationed on a Navy gunboat in the Pacific. He was an officer, and received a variety of medals. I imagine that most of his time overseas he was lonely, wet, cold, bored, and scared as hell. I imagine that he saw some of his friends killed. I imagine that he wrote letters to his young wife, my grandmother, twenty and pregnant when he shipped out. I imagine how he must have felt upon returning home, staring out the window on the long train ride from New York City, nervous, wide awake with dry mouth and sweating palms. He was about to see his wife after a four-year absence. He was about to meet his young son, my father, for the first time.
The men of my family fought and died as a matter of course in every American war, going back to the Civil War, or as it's known where I come from, the war between the states. For those men, their lives were defined and forever changed by war. And as Tyler Durden says in a crucial Fight Club monologue, our generation, the first to grow up on the teat of MTV and Gap ads in the ashes of a world where splintered families are the norm and college students are handed credit cards as if they were bus tokens, was the first American generation of men to grow up without a great war.
This was perhaps even more bitterly palpable for boys of my world, growing up in the South. Our great-grandfathers were the last Americans to be soundly defeated at war, to have their land violated, their farms burned, their hearts broken. As a nation, we were humiliated in Vietnam, certainly. Our pride was trampled and our unity severely tested, and thousands of brothers and sons were needlessly killed. But humiliation is not quite the same as heartbreak. Americans of the South are the only ones among us who can identify with being invaded and occupied.
My own father, I should note, was narrowly spared going to Vietnam because he was in medical school, and because he had an infant son. He was opposed to the war but would have fought had he been called. As for the first Gulf War, I was about twenty-five at the time. I had registered for the draft upon turning eighteen, of course. But in the late eighties, registering with the selective service office was just something you did, like applying for your driver's license, and anyway it seemed unlikely that there would ever again be a draft in this country, what with perestroika and the Berlin Wall coming down.
I remember being acutely horrified by George Bush the elder. Even after growing up with Reagan in the house, W's old man was truly frightening. He was the former director of the CIA, for god's sake. I remember honestly and naively believing that the Iran-Contra affair would take care of the bastard, and that would be that. It would be bigger than Watergate, I was sure. And somehow, as a nation, we just yawned and rolled over and a few years later, a friend of mine lost his brother in Kuwait, a sorry victim of the GI Bill. He joined up because the Army promised to pay his college tuition, and two years later he found himself in the desert with a lot of very expensive weapons, fighting not to stop Saddam from slaughtering the Kurds, but to stop him from taking money out of the Saudis' pockets.
I would love to ask my grandfather what he thought of the ongoing fuck-up that is the second Iraq war. I imagine he'd have taken his time about answering, and would have said eventually that it was unfortunate. My grandfather was a Democrat to the end, cheerfully canceling my grandmother's Republican vote for seventy years. He might have opposed this war in Iraq, and he might not have. But I think he would say that if your buddy tends to drink too much, and is inclined to start a fight at a party or in a bar, you should first fight to restrain him, to stop him throwing that ill-advised punch. But once the fight is on, you should fight alongside your buddy. He would have said that once shots were fired, it no longer mattered whether you leaned to the left or the right. There were American soldiers in harm's way, and that was all that mattered. I think he would say that now war in Iraq had begun, we should stand beside our brothers and sons, sisters and daughters. I think he would say that once the war was on, we should try to win it, we should end it as quickly as possible and get the Christ out.
I can't ask my grandfather what he thought of this war, because he died a month ago, in Florida. He was 91. I hadn't seen him in five years, when I took my own little son, Elias, to meet him, a meeting the boy does not now remember, as he was just two at the time. My grandfather at 87 looked like Hemingway without a beard. Tall and still muscular, he was tan as I imagine God should be tan, with white hair on his chest. He took art and philosophy classes at the community college, and went canoeing in the Everglades, and delivered meals on wheels to seniors younger than he was, and drove a beat-up Toyota with sand on the seats, and still swam in the ocean every day. He was Atticus Finch retired to paradise; he was the man I hoped like hell to be when I was his age.
Now I look at my son and wonder what manner of war he will have to contemplate when he is twenty, or thirty. I wonder if we will simply be in a constant state of war between now and then, hopscotching from one third-world conflict to another for the sake of a Democracy hazily defined. My son's expression barely changes when the war news comes on television- I doubt his blood pressure rises at all. He speaks of Saddam and George W. as if they were cartoon villains from a movie, wildly animated and grotesque caricatures of "bad guys." And of course, that's exactly what they are. I realize that my son is much like I was. At seven he already reads one book after another, barely coming up for air between imagined worlds. And I realize that the world I prepared myself to live in, to walk and talk and breathe in, was likewise somewhat imagined. The world in my head was idealized but also righteous, beautiful, savage and very often cruel. It seemed I was prepared well enough.
I don't know how much it costs to fly from LA to Orlando these days. Four hundred dollars, maybe. Five hundred at the most. I just always believed I would get down there next year. It would be easier to take a week off from work and get down to Florida, next year. Next year I would go see my grandfather and talk to him about dogs and chess and books and life and the world of our making, and next year never came.
-will christopher baer, may 2003