Marathon Camp Lesson #12 … “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Mr. Lincoln said that.
Marathon Camp Lesson #12.5 … It was raining when he said it. It had been raining for weeks. It was raining today when I went to “the Linc”. K. Newsome, the security guy told me he didn’t mind the rain. “It’s the Lincoln Memorial.” he said in explanation. Made sense to me.
Marathon Camp Lesson #12.75 … The rain drifts across the Wall. I walk the length of it. And back. A younger guy, Marine Corps fit, is checking names. He stops for a while in front of Panel E-24. August 1967. I was 21. As I leave, he is looking up something in the book. Father? Brother? It was raining years ago in March of ’68 when I left home for good. Went north. Stayed north for a long time.
Marathon Camp lesson 13.1…Came home 10 years ago to a hot and dusty place. Stayed for several years. When it got hard to stay clean I hunkered down and weathered the storms. I had a lot of help from my friends. Why is this lesson numbered 13.1 pointing, as it does, to the distance of the poorly named half marathon event? Because my journey has only half begun, despite whatever the chronological clock may say. I came home, put in my time, moved back to this place of big weather and ancient trees, fixin’ to begin again. And like the marathon, if you don’t make the starting line, you don’t run the race. I’m in it now and speaking just for me, I am damned glad I made it.
November 19, 2010
It was raining a year ago, it is raining today. You can go home again despite what Thomas Wolfe, an excellent writer, said all those years ago in an important novel about being an artist in the world. In fact, it turns out, you must go home again. I said that. ( It occurs to me that Bobbie Ann Mason, author of In Country, may have also said that.)
My father’s birthday came and went yesterday. He would have been 92. I associate the Lincoln Memorial, politics, political compassion , America and moral conscience with him. He tried to teach me that believing in something is crucial to a life of value, that belief is enduring despite changes in focus, that one cannot help others until one can help him/her self, that individual responsibility is the predecessor to the body politic and conscientious social change. In other words, there is a higher morality, go find it, and then live it to the best of your ability. All the rest is conversation. There are many days that I wish I had heard him earlier, that our last years had been less complicated by my addiction and his failing health; that we had spoken of what we knew to be true, that love abides and that I could and would be of value once my personal war was over and won. RIP M. Mickey Lebowitz November 18 1917-October 14, 2000.
This morning, like that of a year ago, I was out in the weather mixing my sweat with the falling rain, a middle ground between the earth and sky, connected by my actions and my dreams to the world of others. I came in, I dried off, I ate something and I sat down to look for the words. This is, after all, the life I have and it’s time to get it right(Mark Twain said something like that).
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