Aaron celebrated his third birthday last night with friends, family, burgers, dogs, and birthday cake in the house:
It was nice to have a pleasant event at the end of an otherwise rotten week.
Wasn’t a great evening to be standing over the grill, though. It was 95° everywhere else, but it was about 110° in the driver’s seat of the Char-Broil. Whew.
You can’t tell 16-year-old kids how dangerous driving a car is and have them really hear you. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, and they might even understand it superficially. But I’m convinced they don’t yet have the wiring to feel it in their souls at that age. I don’t think anybody gets it at 16, and a hundred thousand bloody, mangled cars parked on a hundred thousand high school lawns the week before a hundred thousand senior proms won’t change it.
Then one day in traffic, maybe as late as 25 or 26 years old, it clicks. You finally get your visceral self all the way around what you’re doing, and how close to serious injury or death you are anytime you’re on the road. You understand that driving is, by far, the most dangerous routine activity you undertake. And suddenly it’s not quite so important for you to beat that guy to the gap, and you decide that waiting for the 3:35 freight train to pass won’t be a tragedy after all.
Or perhaps you think, as I did on my commute one night about nine years ago: “Hey Bo, if you just relax a bit, you’ll get home about two minutes later than if you continue to drive aggressively–but your chances of bending your car and/or breaking your body will go down considerably.”
Click. I got smarter.
I’ve noticed the click before in my adult life. It feels deceptively immediate, though I suspect my brain is working subconsciously on whatever the problem is well before I realize it. The click is merely the culmination. “Suddenly,” I know something. Before I might have known bits and pieces of it, but the larger truth comes remarkably instantly.
The most significant click for me recently was with the base reality of the Holocaust. I was reminded of it today by this Time story on “dark tourism.” My original click on it happened with the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, about two and a half years ago.
I’ve known intellectually what the Nazis did since high school, of course. In fact, I’ve known pieces of it since the fourth grade. I can remember seeing a filmstrip at eight years old that included footage of mass graves at Nazi death camps. I remember Mrs. Dillard warning us about it before she showed it.
But something in that 60th anniversary remembrance, and in particular this site that I explored when I was reading about it, spoke to me in a new way. Perhaps it was the first time I’d carefully considered it as a father. Children have a way of generating new perspectives.
I’ve thought of the pictures the inmates drew on the walls, depicting the innocent lives from which they were so ruthlessly and senselessly ripped. I’ve tried to imagine working 18 hours’ hard physical labor, then trying to get to sleep hungry and thirsty. I’ve strained to hear the desperate cries of a mother in the barracks whose children were taken from her as she got off the train. I’ve thought of another mother trying to comfort her, when she knows in her heart there isn’t a thing she can say that will make it better.
I’ve thought of the frantic screams and claws at the door and walls when it hits home that no, this isn’t a shower or a delousing.
I’ve considered the horrors of learned men–the leaders of a nation proudly including what was unambiguously a highly successful industrial complex–calmly and soberly planning and attempting to execute the extermination of an entire race. Memos, telephone calls, meetings, consultants–just as if they were planning civic improvements. In their twisted minds, of course, I suppose they were.
I’ve thought “hey, this was only a little more than 60 years ago.” It’s incredible how much shorter that time seems to me now than it did when I was, say, in college. And it blows my mind that when I sat in a classroom on Leighton Avenue in Anniston at eight years old and saw that mass grave on an educational filmstrip, it was only 35 years ago then.
Click.
In too many places in the world today, there is evil and hatred of this strength, if not this scope (yet). As concerned as I am about radical Islamic fundamentalists successfully killing thousands of my countrymen again, part of me is even more concerned about a second Holocaust. Perhaps they are different sides of the same problem.
It’s easy to denounce “nation building” from the comfort of an ergonomic office chair and a keyboard. I find the deaths of our young men and women as repugnant as anyone, particularly when American interests are not obvious. But how many were already dead in Nazi Germany before we realized the gravity of the problem? How many in Stalin’s USSR? How many in Pol Pot’s Cambodia?
How far up this horror curve was Iraq five years ago? How far up the curve (now) is Iran? North Korea? Syria? Cuba? Zimbabwe? What’s Venezuela going to be like in ten years?
What is the moral obligation of the most prosperous and powerful nation in human history to the systematically and brutally oppressed?
I really don’t know the exact answer, but I believe it isn’t “none.”
Long live the click. May I never be deaf to it.
Thanks to csisd.org for the car image. Thanks to cbc.ca for the Auschwitz-Birkenau main gate image. Thanks to cnn.com for the barracks drawing image.
That’s the total rainfall we received at my house from yesterday and early this morning. The big stuff was all around us, but we never got pounded. We’re about 18″ behind for the year, and we’re in “exceptional drought,” which is the most severe category.
Basically, in the heat of the day, the lawn spontaneously bursts into flames.
A third of an inch is enough for the yard plants for a day or so, but it won’t matter at all to agricultural interests or water supplies. I’m counting our blessings, though. Usually, the mosquitoes at our house are so bad by this time of year that we don’t use any standard exterior doors after sundown. The process is to come in through the garage door, use the laundry room as a buffer zone, and then enter the house.
(This was a lot more important to me when the boys were well and truly babies, but it still sucks to hear that damned high-pitched whine in your ear when you’re trying to go to sleep. Plus, I hate waking up to find the bitch roosting on my bedroom wall, ovoidly bloated with my blood.)
The laundry room buffer zone has been unnecessary so far this year, and with 58° forecast overnight, I might even forget that my lawn is dead as I sit on the deck late tonight with a snifter of Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel (always neat; water or rocks is heresy), pet my dogs, and reflect.
Thanks to cornellcollege.edu for the image.
I can remember every telephone number I’ve had since I was 2 years old–home, work, and mobile. There are 23 in all.
I have a good memory for details, but another large factor is that I occasionally think “hey, I can remember every telephone number I’ve had since I was 2 years old,” and then I think of all of them. That’s a big reinforcer, of course.
My telephone number at my first apartment was a simple transposition away from the Residence Inn (I was 837-8709, and they were/are 837-8907). I got eight or ten calls a week for them. Sometimes I thought about making fake reservations and the like, but I never did. These were people making simple and understandable mistakes–hardly deserving targets of something so heartless and potentially disrupting.
My next place was 772-7190, and the Madison Police Department was/is 722-7190. I didn’t get quite so many wrong numbers there. When I did, I never considered any foolishness, because a) people calling police are often having a bad day already; and b) I’m pretty sure there are laws against impersonating law enforcement officers.
It’s been useful knowing that number off the top of my head, though. I called MPD from the truck to report a stepladder in the center westbound lane of I-565 just a month or so ago. I probably wouldn’t have bothered had I not just known the number.
I had three more numbers before I got the one I have now, and had no regular wrong numbers.
But now, I get occasional belligerent wrong numbers. It seems my current number (which I picked myself, by the way) used to belong to someone who ran up a lot of bad debt. So I get collections calls asking for her, and when I say “You’ve got the wrong number,” I’m frequently not believed. “You don’t know her?” the caller says. “No,” I say. “Who am I speaking with, please?” the caller says. I give my full name. Sometimes I also share when I bought my house, when I acquired this telephone number, what I do for a living, and the fact that I’ve never even so much as bounced a check, much less made a late payment or defaulted on anything.
“You really do have the wrong number,” I say. “It hasn’t been hers for some time. Please remove this telephone number from her record in your system. I have no idea who she is, and I don’t care for your agency to call me again looking for her.” That’s usually enough. I did end up yelling and cursing at one jackass who wouldn’t quit, though. I wasn’t putting one over on him, by God. When I finished my directions to him with “Do you understand?” he hung up.
Lea fielded our first one in probably a year tonight. That’s a reasonably strong indicator that more are to come.
Lea’s father died this morning. He was 83.
Lea and her family are doing well under the circumstances. He had been terminally ill for a year, and I think everyone is relieved that his suffering has ended.
As I said earlier, he did many significant and wonderful things with his time in this world. He was wholly undeserving of the slow and painful death he stoically endured. It further reinforces my gradually jelling belief that while God may occasionally intervene in His creation in one way or another, there are also things that He merely sets in motion.
Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. We deeply appreciate them.
BoWilliams.com is using WP-Gravatar