Zwischenraum

Posted on March 20, 2003 in Ancestors Reflections

I’m thinking about my friend chari tonight and how, though only five years separate us in age, we are of different generations. Holding her in the light. Thinking more intensely about her father, who fought in Vietnam. People spat on him. Called him “baby killer”.

Once she told me that I reminded her of her Dad.

My father was one of the “Greatest Generation”. No one spat on him for being a soldier, not even in Italy. They were the liberators, the people who deposed the fascism that the grandfather of George W. Bush did business with. His records show that he was an ammunition carrier. Eisenhower wanted to test his men, to see how far they could go without proper winter clothing. He sent my dad and his company up an Italian hill, in support of troops attacking Monte Cassino. Dad was one of three survivors. A few weeks later, his feet froze and he was sent home. Out of the mud, the ice, and the blood, came me, one of those inexplicable happenings. There’s no reason for it. Though I suffer from an axis of three evil diseases — diabetes, asthma, and depression, — and though shit happens, I am glad to be alive.

You need a knife or a gun or poison or a homicidal will to strangle me with your bare hands to take that away from me. I’m not losing sleep over it.

I look around me now. My adult neighbors are the children and grandchildren of those who fought in World War 2. Some of the older ones — beginning with those who are four to five years older than me — fought in Vietnam. I remember when some of their peers came back and told me the horror stories — not of the war, but of being back here in America. One fellow that I worked with at a Jack in the Box used to brandish spatulas like bayonets when he forgot where he was and went into a rage. Another, who lived on the other side of the country, told me about how he’d hit the floor and screamed when some friends threw him a surprise party. He said that he thought the Cong had tracked him down to America and were coming to punish him for the things he’d done under orders.And as I remember these people and the statistical miracle of my birth, I think, too, of those fathers who never came home, who never took wives, and who never begat families. The German’s have a word that might be useful to describe what I feel now: Zwischenraum. The space between things.

I see ghosts, standing between the condominiums. Had a German sharpshooter aimed slightly to the left instead of the right, who would be here in my stead? He or she is out there on the street, in the spaces between the lives being lived here in Portola Hills. Together, we look up at the night sky, at the great spaces between the stars, the great emptiness between solar systems and galaxies, and we know no reason why we occupy our respective places.