Lord of the Rings

I sat at the table in the library for some while before really taking in what was in front of me: a shrine to Lord of the Rings – complete with a fluffy Smaug. I gazed into the glass & was transported to the first time I was given The Hobbit. My high school boyfriend was going to Vietnam. In full uniform, head shaved & sheared, trim, muscular. We faced off in the bus terminal as he said something like, “You’ll enjoy this, I think.” But I don’t really remember his words.

He handed me off to a book. He asked me not to write as he wanted a clear break from, what? Childhood? Atlantic City? High School? His life so far? No matter. I took the book & turned away, walking through the bus terminal to my own departure point.

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien. A series written to keep sons alive in war, awaiting the next chapter. I skirted the cliffhanger delays by reading every other one, thus following the tale for each character clearly. I was good for little else that season, save Frodo & Samwise, Gandalf & the Nine. I took on the series as substitute for my young man. I was eighteen, just finishing high school & headed to yet more education at St. Joseph’s School of Nursing in Patterson, NJ. It took four buses to get there from the beach. And although I was always good in school, at studies, I did not do well there; was walked to the door by Nurse Carlett in December & told to go home. I was unfit to be a nurse. It was a singular failure to one who had not failed scholarship before.

I gazed at the library display, close to sixty years past my introduction to the topic. I had not read a book as encompassing as this in my early life: wizards, yes, but not balrogs & caves & dwarves & elvenfolk. Not big-footed hobbits & rings of power, an all-seeing Eye over fiery lands. I had no experience of characters nor presences such as these. My world snapped open. I would come to read the entire series three more times in my life: once aloud, creating all the voices. “What has it got in its pocketssss?”

On the other side of the world, war has always raged. My brother was sacrificed to the politicians by its gods. Names trickled back into town with shakes of heads, the young men I had sat next to in English & Religion, stiff in starched collars, stuffed into suit jackets now wrapped in flags for burial.

And for what? Did we stop the flow of Communism? Did we do other than tear apart a watery country, laying waste to it with chemical fire & the blood of brothers? Did we dim the drama of war to a backdrop of peace? We reaped the whirlwind we spread as yet another teardown of culture & peacenik wishes. My generation fled to Canada or to cannabis to escape. After a lifetime of Gospel & Commandments, thou shalt not kill, we were handed unreliable weaponry & told to go forth & murder or die ourselves, for a questionable cause which was not ours, nor worthy.

The War Machine ground through an America in destruction & woe. I heard nothing from that handsome young man until fifty years later when I though to take to social media to find him & I did: on a ranch in Montana, working with recovering soldiers & young men stripped of hope & sometimes limbs. The world tip-tilted & estranged itself from all that came before. And I?

I held jobs, husbands, a baby, friends, thoughts, words…

I still write, as I did then. I am victim & victor as are we all in emerging from war. I lost family & friends to Agent Orange sprayed so evenly over our troops too. The phrase, “Kill ‘em all & let God sort it out!” hummed a backdrop to music based on darkness.

There was a part of me that boarded the ships to the Gray Lands where only those who clung to the past could go. There was another part that moved in & out of marriage & found parenthood the least of its desires. There were dreams squeezed for the love they contained for that’s where love has always lived for me.

I left the last page unread for I did not want the books to end.

There were more wars, more “operations” fated to bring no healing home.

I cannot say still, what I want in life, except to make others laugh. I have shied from love, finding it a deceit & a disappointment of promises. I have outdone betrayal & lied to myself & others heartily in good cheer. I am tired of all of this, wanting only an affectionate cat to share my life. But this is another notch on the long stick stirring my future. My splintered life has held me to the long way back to a childhood of salt water & still bays where I paddled on my boyfriend’s surfboard before he opened a way out for us both. He took to sea while I found my land legs & learned to never look back.