Here is Jim’s Red Clay Diary story: https://youtu.be/imtWDsZn_MY
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Life, actually…
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HOW TO PLAY PLOWSHARE PEEKABOO
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During my amazingly long life (Nature has been more than generous.) I have come to realize that just about everything repeats itself…repeatedly.
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My uncles returning home from World War II combat, brought with them small souvenirs, reminders of what they had endured under fire.
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There was a hollowed-out hand grenade, repurposed as an ashtray, re-imagined as a toy or living room gewgaw. There were small German-made toys plucked from bombed-out playgrounds. There was a section of silken parachute saved by my paratrooper uncle, two purple heart medals now available for children to wonder about, a cloth soldier’s cap ready for us young’uns to wear proudly. There was even a luger deactivated as a showpiece.
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And there were all those painful memories of combat that no-one dared share in unedited original versions. Our uncles told hair raising adult stories to adults…but only in private. They told the same stories to us tots and toddlers and teens, but only as carefully expurgated and humorous tales. They never talked about the horrors. They made sure we laughed at their wartime antics. They had learned the hard way how to turn swords into plowshares, how to compress the past and expand the outlier goodness that can also occur in conflict.
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They had already experienced in youth what we too would have to learn one way or another—that if you believe in “an eye for an eye…” pretty soon the world itself would be blind.
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When everything eventually repeats itself, when repetition itself is impossible to halt, then in between times become the most important, the most cherished times. Diving into the good life, holding on to family and friends and humankind…that must be the thing that there is always time for.
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We know that the repeated hard days will return, but we must learn to live as if this is not true. Hope and love and longing is the path worth taking. Respecting the past is reverent and human, but focusing on the good that is within us is worthy of our time here
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