Paratrooping
“How Baseball Saved My Marriage”
“One happy hour drink in Orono and now I’m driving up the Penobscot just for kicks, past the bridge to Indian Island, past the just-closed Georgia Pacific plant, tidy yards of Milford, ‘Place of a Million Parts’ junkyard, the drink still warm in my belly, the strong, true edge of things glowing with rich clarity in the late summer, late afternoon light.
Dylan’s tangled up in blue on the radio, dozens of migrating nighthawks flit over fields along the river, crickets shrill in tall grass, window draft tickles my tan shoulders.
Later tonight, the Red Sox will win with another
Big Papi walk-off homer that will make me whoop to myself in the car.
But for now, I’m moving through Olamon, Passadumkeag, away from the river, into the woods.
It’s the end of a long day, but there still seems to be plenty of time and road ahead.
Something about the light, the beauty of the sky, makes me think I should keep going right on to northern Maine, all the way to Canada.
I could just keep driving all night, potato fields north of Houlton balancing the dark outside my car windows, lights across the St. John beckoning me over the border.
I’ve got a full tank of gas, credit cards in my wallet. I could drive all the way to Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island, stay in some quaint inn on a craggy coast, walk low beaches in search of sandpipers heading south from the Arctic.
How far north do roads go?
But it grows late, shadows deepen, and so far from home,
I realize I don’t know the station broadcasting tonight’s game.
So it’s finally baseball that curbs my sudden wanderlust.
It’s the simple pleasure of a good game coming up that makes me turn around to re-enter the bubble of radio reception, to start the long drive back to everything familiar and well-loved.“
– Kristen Lindquist (2011)
LINK
Garden Plains, Kansas (1966)
My parents and their Great Dane Sheba visiting my Mom’s people on their way to New Jersey where me and my older brother would later be born.
“Mulholland Drive”
“No, you’re not thinkin’. You’re too busy being a smart aleck to be thinkin’. Now I want ya to “think” and stop bein’ a smart aleck. Can ya try that for me?”
Sainte-Mère-Église, France (1995)
From FB:
“I arrived at the Replacement Battalion for the 82nd at Fort Bragg the week of the 50th Anniversary of D-Day. All of the actual 82nd paratroopers were in France for the celebration when they announced there would be an all you can eat and drink mandatory party for the bonafide veterans of the invasion who were coming to Bragg to commemorate their historic achievement. So, I’m a complete noob and I’m standing there with men who made four combat jumps and saved Western civilization from Nazi tyranny and one of them comes up to me and puts his hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eye and says, ‘So, which regiment do you belong to?”’And I looked that proud Airborne killer straight in the eye and squeaked, ‘Uh, I actually just got here, sir. I’m assigned to the Repo Depot.’ He just shook his head in disgust and walked away.
Exactly a year later I made my way over there on a free MAC flight from Dover AFB for the 51st Anniversary. Quite a memory.”
Song Of Ajax 