09 - The Heredity of Choice, Memorial Day

Hey there, Walking Buddy. Been more than a few days now since my last post, I know, and I want you to know that I've been using the time incredibly wisely. My character in Dead Island: Riptide has gone up, like, twenty-five levels. Also, I've taken a lot of naps. World hunger remains a problem, but I've got my top men working on that one, too.

Okay fine I didn't really do anything but rest. But I rested like a goddamn boss.

I began writing this post on Memorial Day, and wanted to dedicate it to both the holiday itself and, more specifically, to my grandfather. Since his passing in May of 2001 (the twelfth anniversary of which just recently passed), I have thought of him often, and ruminated in my signature fashion on the practical, genetic, and philosophical ramifications of his life and death. He was a rather remarkable man in several rather remarkable ways, so if it's alright with you, Walking Buddy, I'd like to take another aside from our journey down my personal road here and explore a length of the side path of why I am the person I am through the lens of who, and what, my grandfather was.

Those of you who know my father may already be fully familiar with the story of my grandfather's Navy service and brush with death during World War II; Dad knows and tells the story far better than I, so I shall provide but a summarized and incomplete account of the events here. My Grandaddy The First Of His Name served aboard a heavy cruiser, the USS Indianapolis, which was toward the end of the war (and unbeknownst to the noncom sailors aboard her) taking part in a rather monumental secret mission: delivering key components of an atomic bomb that would shortly thereafter be dropped on Japan, ultimately ending the war in the Pacific theater and averting the need for a long and bloody marine/infantry invasion of the Japanese mainland.

The Indy herself, in health and glory.

On its return from that mission (then proceeding to join the larger American naval fleet for a series of combat exercises in preparation for that very invasion) the Indianapolis was spotted by unlucky chance in the dead of night, targeted, and fired upon by a Japanese submarine, whose fan spread of six torpedoes struck the Indy twice and critically disabled her. One torpedo ignited an ammunition store, blowing the entire fore section of the ship clean off, and the ship (still moving forward at high speed) took on water so fast there was no chance whatsoever to save or salvage her. Ultimately, the ship would sink in about twelve minutes, less time than you probably spent in the shower this morning, and about 1/13th of the time it took for the Titanic to sink. Think about that for a bit, if you will (if you're into irony, ponder it for around twelve minutes and see where that gets you).

Twelve minutes is approximately enough time to:

• eat a very quick lunch, but risk mild indigestion.
• watch half an episode of a half-hour sitcom, but never know how it ended.
• do the warm-ups for a proper workout, but not the workout itself.
• brush your teeth thoroughly, use mouthwash, and quickly shave.

Twelve minutes might not be enough time to:

• come fully to terms with the idea that you could very easily die, at any moment, right now.
• travel by bare foot through fire, darkness, screams, oil and blood to find someone you know.
• locate and secure orders or permission to man a post, abandon ship, or anything else specific.
• cut loose and deploy a life raft, or procure a life vest, reach your bunk two or three decks down and retrieve any personal belongings.

Many of the men who were belowdecks when the torpedoes struck perished there. Some were killed by the explosions themselves; many more were taken by the rushing waters moving unchecked through the ship; the captain, thinking of the comfort of his men on a ridiculously hot near-equatorial Pacific night, had given orders that the bulkhead doors be left open to allow at least a minimum of airflow, a decision which ended up nullifying the separating purpose of the bulkheads themselves. Still, the majority of the Indianapolis's 1197 crew were able to reach the deck and escape into the water. While no accurate count is, of course, remotely possible now, it was estimated that around 880 sailors, roughly three quarters of the crew, were able to successfully abandon ship into the oil-blackened night waters. 

An estimated three hundred lives were snuffed out then and there within those twelve crucial minutes, including that of the Indianapolis herself. Twenty-five dozen sailors died with their ship, faithfully fulfilling the ultimate term of their contract of service.

Just a young sailor, he was, among thousands going to war.

Amid all of this, my grandfather awoke, reacted, thought swiftly, attempted to do his duty and survived to reach the water. He and any others who were of a mind had been given permission to escape the sweltering heat belowdecks entirely, and sleep up on deck underneath the stars where at least there was a breeze to cut the heat. Grandaddy, age 19, had elected to sleep beneath the No. 2 forward 8-inch ship-to-shore gun, and would later tell of having barely laid his head down when he felt the entire ship jump into the air beneath him, throwing him aside. The massive gun next to him likewise jumped its mount from the torpedo explosion which had occurred somewhere beneath him, slamming back to the deck with all of its tons of steel force. All around him the air erupted into screams and shouts and fire, and nobody knew what was happening. The ship came to terrible, terrified life, but the effective chain of command had been shattered by the first blow: the ship's intercoms were down, and no orders could be sent or reports made except in person, and there was to be no time.

     

My grandfather was a radioman-in-training, of the rank Seaman First Class (S1c), and he knew his duty in the event of an attack on the ship: he dashed to the nearer of the ship's two radio huts to send an outgoing SOS and report of the attack back to command and control. The explosion, however, had ruined all of the equipment in that hut; a few radiomen (and others in the other radio hut across the ship) attempted to send out the message anyway, in case the equipment was still able to send but not receive. Grandaddy, the still-young sailor who would one day be killed instantly by a heart attack walking across his middle son's front yard for a grandfatherly visit fifty-six years later, moved to save his own life once he realized his military duty was discharged as well as it could be under the circumstances. He procured a life vest and moved to the edge of the ship, only to discover that he was now travelling uphill; the ship was rapidly beginning to roll underneath his feet, so he vaulted the rail and scrambled across what had until a moment ago been the ship's hull but was now serving as the deck. Fires raging belowdecks were superheating parts of the bulkhead, and like the vast majority of the other sailors he was barefoot, making this dash surprising and painful, blistering his feet. Dashing to the edge faster than the rolling, he simply stepped into the water and its promised coolness below.

What he discovered at that moment, however, was what every escaping sailor had already discovered: the water was no longer blue and cool and clear, a plain and simple relief for their burns and wounds. Every sailor plunging in first sank through several thick inches of crude bunker oil, a spreading slick miles long which had begun pumping out of the ship's grievous wounds the moment the torpedoes had struck and fanning out further as the ship plunged, dying, onward. The stuff was thick like backwoods molasses, black as the night it emerged into, chokingly toxic if swallowed, and utterly impossible to get off of skin once it had adhered. Every man who hit the water was immediately covered in it, which would make recognizing one another in the following days by sight alone nearly impossible.

But the night's terror was nearly done, for now. The ship continued to roll in its great listing death throes, and young Grandaddy and all of the other sailors did what they knew they must do immediately: the ship would draw an enormous amount of water when it sank, and any man too close to the site would be pulled down with it by forces far too great for a tiny human man to resist or fight. They swam away as fast and as hard as they could. They swam until they cleared the oil, and then kept swimming until they had to stop, winded, exhausted, terrified and awash with adrenaline and wild-eyed awareness. They swam in all directions, having left the ship in all directions. They separated. Surely some were too late, and reached the water's relative safety only to be pulled back and down, dragged inexorably by the corpse of their lady Indianapolis to share her grave by dark and irresistible invitation. And when the great silence fell, who could have had the slightest idea of what to do but simply float, breathe the night air thick with the screams and pained moans of the wounded and the dying, and wonder with dull terror what was going to happen next?

It must have been a terrible and remarkable thing to have survived to see the sun rise the following morning over the Pacific Ocean's endless horizon. Knowing that they were hundreds of miles from any charted land, realizing that no one else knew any more than they did themselves; was an SOS sent? Did anyone know where they were, that they had fallen under attack? Was the submarine still out there? Was anyone coming for them?

During that first day everyone who could see anyone else gathered. Men tied their life jackets to one another to keep from drifting away; the Pacific Ocean was not, after all, some placid sea of calm glass, but an undulating, always-shifting maelstrom of pushing and pulling currents. Left on their own, a man must constantly swim to stay near another, or inexorably drift away. Some of the men had managed to remove and inflate rafts. Others had unslung and deployed broad netting with floats for edges, allowing the men to climb into the center and be at least somewhat out of the water. Nearly no one had managed to salvage food or drinking water, and what scant supply there was was scattered amongst men who were themselves spread out in clusters across miles and miles of open seawater, and jealously guarded.

My grandfather managed to be one of the very fortunate few who eventually found himself in a raft after several days, but until that time he floated in a life jacket just like over eight hundred surviving others. He was still in the water during that first sunrise when the initial effect, a symbol of hope, a new day dawning in which they were still alive, morphed abruptly into a horrifying illumination: in the rising light they began to see the dozens, then hundreds of dark shapes crisscrossing below them in the endless blue depths.

The Pacific's sharks had come to see what all the noise had been about, and discovered a feast floating on the surface, essentially defenseless.

Have you ever seen the movie Jaws? If not, you really should; while most think of it as a horror film, it's actually a rather fascinating Moby Dick tale at heart, a story of being drawn into a fight to the death with a beast on its terms and ground where you become the weaker being, the potential prey. In that film, a character named Quint is coerced into a discussion about scars and their origins, and eventually gets to this legendary monologue:

While the character of Quint is fictional and his version of the story (which was, history records, the brainchild of the actor playing Quint, Robert Shaw, who knew of the Indianapolis and pitched the idea of Quint's historical backstory to Steven Spielberg and was approved to give it a spin on film) is riddled with a few inaccurate details, the majority of his telling of the experience matches those the true survivors recount. It was a chilling tale to include in the fiction of the film, made all the more so because it rang rather terrifyingly true. And for good reason.

The sharks took the men, one by one, for days on end. There was no rhyme or reason to the attacks. They attacked in daylight. They attacked in the dead of night. They attacked at dawn and at dusk and any minute in between. Sometimes they took stragglers, those separate from the group, and the men gathered to prevent it. Other times they'd drift right below or through a group, and grab a man right in the middle of the line, pull him under and any men tied to him along with if they couldn't cut him loose in time.

Imagine that, for a minute, too, if you care to. Imagine feeling the cold bump of a shark's nose against your thigh as it brushes by and it's touching you with skin hard and smooth and cold; you recoil, but it goes right past and rears and sinks teeth into the man right next to you, the man tied to you with thick military webbing, to your jacket. And when that shark twists, rolls, and dives with that man in its grip, you go too, and your hands are covered in oil and thick and soft, pruned and slow and unresponsive from days upon days in the salt water, bloating your skin and leaving you weak. Imagine yanking desperately at a knot that was supposed to keep you all safe and together and is now the reason you are being dragged down to where fifty other sharks crisscross and are waiting, your fingers splitting and bleeding into the water and the hard material isn't even beginning to give, your drowning screams heard only by the predators all around you. Do you get loose, or do you die by drowning, or by teeth, or by terror itself?

Imagine that, and you'll know the barest sliver of a shadow of the nightmares the men who survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis suffered through for the rest of their lives. Every man among them to whom this didn't happen, saw it happen to the men next to them, around them, day after day after day for five days and nights until they were finally seen by a passing American seaplane (who, it should be noted, actually saw the oil slick and could not possibly have seen the men from its original operating altitude; thinking it could be a damaged enemy submarine, they circled low to depth charge it and saw men in the water only then) and their presence and plight was reported.

An estimated 880 men went into the water when the ship went down, of the original 1197 aboard. When the rescue operation was completed,  which took all night and part of the next day - and how many men died in the jaws of the frenzied sharks, waiting mere minutes or hours for their turn to be pulled aboard a boat that was finally there after five days of waiting and fighting and surviving - only 317 men were left. The Indianapolis had perished, and with her had died the vast majority of her complement. Over five hundred and sixty living young men had been attacked one by one, bitten, ripped screaming and alive to shreds in front of the rest of them, who were entirely helpless to stop it.

My grandfather was there. My father's father floated in that water, he stared down through the cold blue into the sea of hungry predators for days on end. He fought against the sea, against his own terror, against his own hunger and thirst for those endless days and nights, he fought and he survived as other men, no better or lesser, younger and older, stronger and weaker, died all around him. He faced all that, and he chose to live. He and three hundred and sixteen others, by luck, by will, by ingenuity, by patience, by prayer, by no reason they could ever identify and would weep in the silence of the night from the agony of not knowing why for fifty years to come... they survived.

Rescued. Brought to Guam.

Some of the men on the deck of a rescue ship.

Is it any wonder he accelerated the substantial drinking habits of an everyday sailor into full-blown alcoholism later in life?

Chief Petty Officer Grandaddy. Survivor.

Is it not a wonder that, of those 317 men, he was among the very few who actually re-enlisted in the Navy to serve in the Korean and Vietnam wars before retiring as a Chief Petty Officer, despite having been offered a Purple Heart and completely honorable discharge for having survived the worst Naval disaster in recorded American history?

Is it not the greatest of all wonders that alone among those 317 men, my grandfather was the only one who would take to wife a Japanese woman, father three sons in America, and enact a bloodline that would stand as utterly unique for so many disparate and interwoven reasons both philosophical and personal?

My Obaachan (grandmother), age 28.

Grandaddy and Obaachan, with my father and uncles.

Let me tell you some more about my grandfather, now.

My grandfather is the man who, when told by his eldest son who had suffered the abuse and mistreatment of the alcoholic military father his entire young life that he would never lay eyes on his first grandson so long as he continued to tip the bottle, put aside alcohol forever and drank Coca-Cola for the rest of his life. He did not attend a program. He did not go to a group. He did not follow twelve steps and report to a "sponsor" when he relapsed. He simply, by force of will, stopped drinking alcohol, and never did again. In this way my brother, the eldest son's eldest son and the forebear of the third incredibly improbable generation of my family, forever repealed my grandfather's retreat into alcohol and incepted the repair of my father's relationship with his father, an uphill climb that would proceed until Grandaddy's death 19 years later.

I, Gabriel, am palpably powerful of will.

My grandfather is the man who, upon re-enlisting into the military, gave them only one condition: that he never be forced or made to go to Japan ever again, and then found himself standing on Japanese soil six weeks later at an American military base. My Obaachan (grandmother) Toyoko, a young Japanese woman working in the mess hall serving food and drinks and who had been just a child during the war, likes to tell the story of the handsome sailor she noticed standing calmly and still by the door one day. He stood out in sharp contrast, she tells, because he took no part in the carousing and drinking, yelling and flirting and really just sort of sailoring about the place that the other dozens of off-duty men were doing; instead he was this picture of calm discipline, restraint, and poise... everything she had been raised to believe Americans could never be (and those traits which the loyal, dutiful Japanese prized most highly, culturally speaking). The next night she saw him again, and he was drunk as a medieval lord; what the young Toyoko had not realized, knowing no English and being unable to ask or be told, was that he had been on duty that night, forbidden to drink or take part. "But," she always says plaintively, "it was too late. I was already in love." This was the beginning of a terribly improbable love story, since we already know from his own account that he had been actively opposed to even so much as seeing Japan ever again just prior to this.

I, Gabriel, am one quarter Japanese, and knowingly unique for it.

Grandaddy during a late-in-life trip to Japan, with some of his wife's extended family.

My grandfather is the man who would, in his latter years and for the entirety of my lifetime, devote a significant part of his every day and week and month and year to growing and maintaining a garden in the backyard of his Waynesboro home, in addition to a broad variety of fruit trees planted about that yard. Each year he would care for, grow, then harvest and collect bushel baskets full of fresh fruit and vegetables, and use it in every way he could think of to supplement my Obaachan's cooking, to make homemade fruit-flavored ice cream, to pack and ship to his children and grandchildren by the cooler-load. And whatever was left over, he was well-known for simply giving away to anyone and everyone he encountered or was friendly with; it became nigh-impossible to drop by for a visit without leaving laden with the bounty of the earth in some form or other.

I, Gabriel, am always aware of the wishes and desires of those around me, and move unhesitatingly to help where and if I can.

I am what I am not by heredity alone, but by the choices afforded to me by my awareness of that heredity. I know who my grandfather was, and what he was. He was loud, brash, angry, cruel at times, and harsh to his children in raising them, a true military dad made sharper by alcohol and the shadows of nightmares forever perched on his shoulders. He was also indomitable of will, impossibly powerful in personality, loud of voice and heavy of aura and charismatic demeanor, even as an old man. Few who met my grandfather easily forgot him, and he had a habit of cheerfully engaging everyone he encountered, from the bag girl at the grocery store to the random passersby at Busch Gardens. Many of these traits I have come to embody myself as an adult, and while some small measure of this may be imparted by my DNA, the majority of it stands as a testament to my desire to carry on the memory of my grandfather's life, loss, sacrifices and achievements through the purest expression I have available to me: The Manner In Which I Live My Own Life.

When my grandfather passed away in 2001, falling to the ground with the life struck abruptly from his body by a heart attack in the grass in front of my Uncle Bill's (the middle brother's) house as he and my Obaachan walked up the lawn to begin a family visit three hours from home, my mother received the phone call informing us of what had happened minutes later. I vividly remember her falling to her knees, and then to the ground with this terrible cry of sorrow and loss made ever more so because it had just come from the mouth of my own mother. I was standing right next to her at the time, up on a step, and though I did not know what had happened until she shudderingly told me seconds later, I knew that the gravity of whatever it was had been... substantial. I dropped to a crouch and took her in my arms as she began to sob, and pulled her to the step upon which I'd stood, and held her as she wept into my shoulder. And when she told me what had happened, I nodded and then, wonderingly, realized I felt no sadness whatsoever. I was 17 years old, and was about to graduate high school in a month. I held my mother's sobbing form and whispered to her that things would be alright, that I was here.

As the funeral approached I still felt none of the weeping sadness that had engulfed all of the family around me. And man, did they come from far and wide. My grandfather's touch on this earth had spread far indeed, and a calm and clinical section of my mind made note of the size and shape of an entire human life outlined by the spread and variety and reach of the many lives it had touched, and found it all very fascinating. But still, though I carefully spent some time alone to give myself the chance without embarrassment, I did not weep. I even deliberately tried to, once, thinking that perhaps I was simply shocked into shutdown, and could with a careful tap of the hammer to a chisel shake my emotions loose... but nothing came. I wasn't numb. I felt interested in everything happening around me, happy to see some of the people I hadn't seen in a long time, and meet some I'd never met before at all. Yet they came all dressed in black regardless of their clothing's hues, and I felt only subtly different. Days passed, and the funeral finally was to be tomorrow, and my Uncle Jack (the youngest brother) came around to let me know that if I wanted to speak the next day at the funeral I was welcome to write something and give it to him and he'd put me in on the list in proper order. I paused thoughtfully, but realized I still had no idea what was wrong with me, why I wasn't feeling sad. Why I hadn't cried. What was I supposed to do? How could I stand up and speak to anyone and say anything about my grandfather with none of the tears, none of the emotions that were rocking each of them to the core? They would immediately know that Something Was Wrong With Me, that I was broken inside somehow and didn't have feelings, apparently. I didn't understand it, and I was suddenly worried that if everyone knew, I might be told I had a mental illness, or something.

I passed the opportunity. Uncle Jack looked at me oddly, as if a bit surprised that the one who wanted to be a writer had nothing to say, but didn't pursue the point. He just left to go tell someone else. My brother was there with me, and he said he'd be writing something, if he could just figure out what to say. I knew I had plenty to say, but was afraid of not knowing how. Should I pretend to be tearful, and hope it was convincing? Would anyone see through it, and wouldn't being caught faking sorrow be even worse than not feeling any for whatever broken reason? I gnawed at the fingernails in my mind, worrying. I thought about my grandfather, about the life he'd led. I thought of him glowering down at me, terribly disappointed that his grandson couldn't even have the human decency to feel sad that he was gone. I sat, and waited, and slept at some point, and then I was being told to put on some dark clothes and get in a car and we were going.

It was an open casket, and my grandfather looked exactly the same and completely different. He was an empty shell, familiar but vacant. None of the aura of his personality, none of the echoing power of his will and feelings came from that casket. It wasn't him; it had as well have been a photo of him, framed on a stand, for he had gone away and this was all that was left. Even that didn't sadden me. I walked by the casket when it was my turn, and cocked my head curiously and looked at my grandfather's well-worn vessel. I memorized the shape of the lines on his face and wondered if mine would ever look like that, a silent tale of the sheer number of things I had seen with none of the details. Then someone else wanted to come and say words to him, and I walked on and let them talk to the air he wasn't using anymore.

Then we were all sitting in a great audience room, with a lectern at the front. The carpeting was red, the walls were an amber yellow, and everything was somber and mahogany and solemn in execution. I sat amongst all the others, and wondered if anyone had noticed yet that I hadn't taken a tissue at the door. Then people got up and started talking, telling stories about my Grandaddy. They talked about his life, about his accomplishments, about his dreams and wishes and projects and the room he'd built on the house. They talked about his wife and children and his nature. My father talked about being raised by this man, and the marks visible and invisible it had left upon him, and the long journey back from those dark memories that my brother had unknowingly catalyzed by simply being born. They talked about everything, but no one talked about mowing grass, and I suddenly realized all at once that I knew exactly what I had to say, and why I had every right to say it whether I had cried or not.

My Uncle Jack stood up, because it was his turn and they had made a proper list and everything, and I stood up too and was three rows in front of him, so I got to the podium in time to see him looking very confused and possibly a little miffed as he sat back down in his chair. I was being terribly rude, I realized, but I felt compelled to speak my mind while the realization was still fresh, and after all he was the only person who actually knew I hadn't signed up to be on the list like everybody else anyway. Sorry about doing that to you, by the way, Uncle Jack. I didn't really have or take the time to think of a better way.

So I stood up there and did what I always do when facing a whole room of people on the other side of a microphone: I said "Hi," sort of hesitantly, which always makes people chuckle quietly to reassure me that it's okay for me to be up there taking their time, but is actually a perfectly-practiced, calculated performance opener that subtly encourages people to willingly accept me before they even know what I have to say. Even at seventeen and all of its signature awkwardness, I had amassed some social survival skills.

Then I told them about cutting the grass with my grandfather every week of every summer for the past three years at the Waynesboro Moose Lodge, where he had been a member. My brother drove a big tractor and cut the great big back field; my grandfather drove the riding mower and cut the entirety of the flat ground along the front and sides; I, the youngest, was relegated to the push mower and assigned every piece of uneven, slanted, hilly ground. It was hot, sweaty work, and I had always secretly hated having to do the part that was technically the smallest job square-foot-wise but was actually the only one with constant physical labor involved. I told them how much it had sucked, but also how it was a job he hadn't had to let us in on (we got paid perhaps more than the lodge itself was offering anyone to cut the grass), and that it wasn't lost on me. I told them about being scared of my grandfather's big voice, and about how everyone always knew when he was nearby. I told it honestly, but I also told it funny because life is just like that when you're looking at it the right way, and I managed to make this entire room full of crying people chuckle once, and then laugh two separate times, which I realized was the greatest gift I could give my grandfather just then, and only me, and only then. And then, finally, I wanted to tell them what I had just realized, because I wondered why no one else had realized it yet and that if they did there would really be no reason for them to be crying anymore, and maybe that would be helpful to someone.

So I told them that I had been confused and unsure of myself since I'd gotten the news, about why I had not cried. I confessed that I hadn't yet cried, openly, to this entire room full of a hundred red-eyed people. And then I told them I had realized that I saw no reason to be sad.

My grandfather had died. His life had been struck from his body in one swing of the cosmic hammer by a critical stop to the blood flow in his old body, commonly known as a heart attack. And that same final endpoint was going to happen to every one of us. The catch here, I said, was that he had died where and when he did, and not in the water fifty-six years prior. He lost his life in the bare split second of a moment (the doctors said, perhaps kindly, that he had most probably been dead before his knees even struck the turf) on the lawn of a beloved son who existed, about to visit grandchildren who existed, having just left the house and town where two other sons existed with children who also existed, none of which would have ever existed had he surrendered his life or been overcome and had it taken from him all those years ago in the water. He had lived a long and full life, and there was no sadness or sorrow in its ending where and how it did, compared to where and how it could and, purely probability-wise, absolutely should have.

I paused in my speaking and closed my eyes, and willed my odd mind to do something weird and new, and opened them and asked it to show me the people who wouldn't exist today if he had died back then. And my brain tried to obey as best it could, highlighting all the people I could immediately identify as having been his progeny or those only here because of his progeny, and good lord, a full third of us in that auditorium glowed in my sight and I realized the real measure of living through something harrowing and improbable against all odds.

I am quite sure everyone there simply took my pause and closed eyes to be me gathering my thoughts or emotions for a moment. 

I didn't share what I'd just mentally done, and seen. But I did say a silent thank you to my grandfather's soul, wherever it may have been at that moment, for I finally, fully understood what I am trying to convey to you now. I finished telling them all why I was not sad, and then I took my seat, and Uncle Jack got up to speak about his father, and I wondered if anybody would be mad at me for interrupting like that.

No one was, for some reason.

I am the sum of what I have chosen to be, and I have chosen to be many things which my heredity highlighted for me. My grandfather's strength of will, his enduring spirit, his indomitable nature, his sense of irrepressible presence, his charisma and its power when wielded wisely, and now, most recently, his will to survive... they have all been communicated to me, and I have chosen to set them alight and hold them aloft in my own life to light my own way. I don't do this necessarily as a tribute to my grandfather, any more than I respect my mother as a human and a woman and an elder just because she is my mother. I do it because his life and its stories are a testament to the effectiveness of those traits, those qualities. Insofar as each of our lives is a decades-long genetic imperative to survive and maintain only the highest order of traits and qualities to pass along to our children, my everyday life is an attempt to do and uphold and be likewise in character: only the highest order need be given ground-floor accommodations. I express my love of my family and my respect for those who have come before not by laying flowers on a grave or by praying to the sky and hoping they are listening, but by living in such a way that they are remembered every day.

I'm telling you this now, Walking Buddy, because so many people have commented or complimented or in some other way communicated to me recently that they find my spirit in the face of this cancer to be unusual. "Remarkable" is a word I'm hearing a lot, which makes me scratch my head a bit uncomfortably because what do you say to a person who is willing to just come right up to you and praise you to your face like that? And I need people to be able to understand that I am not the original source of that power. It was given to me, by way of hereditary example, and I have just deployed it and fueled it and maintained it by way of choice. We are, each of us, the authors of our own lives and stories, and we all bear ultimate credit and blame for the ripples we make as we travel the long road of our lives, the choices... but we must never forget that our choices are only the last, most recent shockwave to be sent out from our genetic line. Others came before, and by our will more can come after. And I find enormous honor in the idea of choosing to infuse a layer of those that came before you in your own present actions, for it is as though you lift the banner of your forebears aloft for all to see every time you do so. Even if they don't recognize the sigil, even if they never knew your father or his father or ever even met you before, you have done your family honor in this way. There is beauty in the subtlety of it, this acknowledgement of the overarching Heredity of Choice.

I was going to tell one last story about the Indianapolis survivors that my father shared with me, but this walk's gone on pretty damn long already and it might be a good time to pause awhile and rest our legs. Let's break out some trail rations and have a sit for awhile, and maybe once we're up and going along again if you still want to hear it I can tell it before we pick up the linear tale again next time. Leave me something in the comments if you'd like to hear another tale about a man who may or may not have been my grandfather, which another survivor (but recently deceased, and may he have his long-earned rest at last) distinctly remembered on the rafts during those long endless days, and I'll be glad to share it then.

A gathering of survivors at the USS Indy Memorial in Indianapolis, IN. And my father in the center back! See him?

Indy survivors. My many grandfathers.

In the meantime, though... thanks again for walking with me a ways. We're really making some distance here, and I'm brightened every day by your hand in mine (...ladies) and your steady footfalls by my side.

Let's have a break and maybe a nap, and I'll see you again when we each open our eyes.

- Gabriel, Survivor-In-Training

08 - The First Man Who Saved My Life

Hey there, guys. Sorry about the slightly longer delay between posts from the last one to this one... the truth of it is, writing that story out affected both Kathleen and I more deeply than either of us had anticipated. For her part, she thought she was just out to set the story straight and let everybody know things she'd kept to herself before; instead, it turned into something of an inward Dive To The Heart, a term I've borrowed from Kingdom Hearts that I think perfectly captures the action of deliberately submerging yourself into the darkest corners of mind and memory. She found things there that were not lost so much as cast away. For my part, I underestimated the relief I would experience from letting go of the weight of it all... the lingering result of years of feeling untrusted and generally suspicious in the eyes of people who had no real reason to be treating me that way. That has no reflection on those people, since many of them were not even actively treating me poorly and may never have even had negative thoughts about me at all, for all I could possibly know... it is instead a manifestation of how I felt about myself, for keeping such a secret for so long at cost to myself. Years of reflexively resisting feeling proud or happy for my actions that night, since either of those would be too visible, left me with an opposite reaction to the tale at first; I actually felt uncomfortable in the telling of it, this secret I had kept for so long I had to cut and sweep away the vines and roots of habit before I could unearth and lift it out. Now I feel a little freer. Maybe a lot.

My best friendship had a pretty exciting beginning, and I should be allowed to feel a little pride in what I learned about myself that night. Right? I mean... I acted like not just a human being, but a pretty decent one, and during a period where for years I'd grown used to thinking of myself only as a sort of anti-academic sex-seeking-missile shaped vaguely like a young male person.

It's nice to have another impression of myself to replace that one.

Anyway, yeah. It was a bit heavy, but what worthwhile endeavor isn't? I think we are defined to the greatest degree in the shortest amount of time by the choices we make when there are no real stakes or cost, just the desire to self-examine. Life forces us all the time to make decisions with consequences, and we're all defined by those choices one at a time and all together... but it is the ones we enact ourselves, without life standing over our shoulder threateningly with a billy club, which get us the most mileage in character development per minute and brainpower terawatt spent. The boy who goes out for football because his dad always wanted him to be a player like he was, he learns a lot about himself, sure. But the kid who goes out for the team when his parents couldn't care less what activity he chose, he feels the weight of every minor decision along the way differently, because he's acting (and knows, feels that he is acting) on his own steam and nothing else. No safety net, no timely assistance... just himself, gazing into the mirror in his mind and making decisions based on what he sees, or wishes to see, reflecting back. There's a purity there. He succeeds or fails on only his own expectations, and emerges from either outcome with a sense of the power of his own will, its limits and total acreage.

It was good that Kathleen and I opted to tell that story now. We didn't have to, and nothing was going to break if we didn't, and that is precisely why we were able to learn so much extra in the doing of it. So thank you, Walking Buddy, for coming along with me for that bit of side journey. You didn't have to do that, just like you didn't have to show honest curiosity and ask to hear it if you're among the ones who did, and I appreciate that as well.

Every one of you has brought such light into my life and stoked the fires in my furnace beyond even my considerable ability to explain, and that's saying something, because I know words like "elucidate" that I wanted to use instead of "explain" just now in this very sentence. I stopped myself only because I don't have a monocle or any other traditionally-recognized license to act like that much of a pompous toolbox right here in front of you for no reason. Flexing one's vocabulary, just like flexing one's muscles, might be a semi-unconscious habit to those who spend a great deal of time working it out as a hobby or a job, but that doesn't make it socially okay to do it everywhere you please unless you want to look like a complete meathead. Or in my case, an arrogant jackanapes. See, I used different words to further illustr-ohokayIseeyougetit.

Let me tell you about Dr. Blay. You can follow that link there and get the address of his little clinic in Harrisonburg, but a Google search won't turn up too much more than that. This is, I discovered, because the good doctor does not waste too much time or money on advertising or promoting himself and his business; he's a bit too busy helping people who don't have any insurance. In fact, Dr. Blay does not take insurance. He exclusively assists people in the Harrisonburg area who cannot afford to go anyplace else for help, and I never would have known about him if chance hadn't had me sharing my frustrations with the near-complete lack of help I had received from the emergency care clinic I had already visited, with my friend Rosemary.

Which technically makes her The First Woman Who Saved My Life.

Rose told me about this doctor she'd been directed to by word of mouth when she had first moved to Harrisonburg and had no job or insurance, and what a great job he had done with her. Coming off of having just wasted my father's money on the emergency care clinic visit, I was initially on the fence about spending more money again, but I immediately saw the (potentially fatal) flaw in that logic: if I was disappointed at not having gotten the help I'd sought the first time, my need for that help could only have risen as more time passed. It was not less important that I get a second opinion now due to cost concerns, it was more important that I get it due to time constraints. My neck was swollen, the lump was there being all silently threatening and darkly mysterious and whatnot, I had rashes appearing and disappearing like sasquatch sightings in the great northwestern forests, and I was tired of not knowing what was going on with my standard equipment loadout. I was only going to spend so long looking like a football player from the shoulders up; I had my completely non-existent love life to consider, after all. How was I going to continue sabotaging myself from getting decent dates if I couldn't even effectively criticize my own looks because they kept changing on me?

...Ladies?

I called and made an appointment; the nurse asked if I wanted to come into the office right then and there. Nonplussed (I was in my pajamas at the time, and hadn't yet taken my daily shower), I asked if there were any times available the following day; she made me an early appointment, and I hung up feeling satisfied. Maybe this time I would get some real answers.

The next day I left with twenty minutes to spare and headed toward the clinic. Unfortunately, I had neglected to maintain situational awareness: JMU's grand move-out day was underway, and the streets were choked with the parents of every person who ever lived or drank beer from a Solo cup, ever. I waited at each traffic light between my duplex and Main Street for two or three cycles apiece, and by then realized I was going to be late for my appointment. Drawing my phone from my belt holster like a wild west cowboy, I mentally put on my best Clint Eastwood voice and redialed the number from the afternoon before.

"Dr. Blay's office, Dr. Blay speaking," the man answered. I forgot to be Clint Eastwood. Did I just call a doctor's office and get the doctor himself on the phone?

Not that Doctor. Regrettably.

I informed him that I was driving behind every human in existence in a massive lemming exodus, and he very kindly told me not to rush or put myself in danger, that he'd be glad to see me whenever I arrived. I thanked him and hung up, feeling a bit whimsically comforted about my upcoming visit; it was a bit like calling what you thought was the DMV and instead getting a friendly neighborhood barbershop, who could handle your DMV issue for you. However, he wasn't the boss of me, so I drove extra recklessly the rest of the way just to do it. (This isn't actually true, Mother. In fact, I drove like an old lady, which is to say delightfully slowly and with an ever-increasing need to pee.)

Dr. Blay's clinic, the Cooks Creek Clinic, was so unobtrusive I actually drove right past it thinking it was a regular house. This wasn't too difficult to do, as it sat at the corner of a highway and a side street that was otherwise lined with just regular houses. The clinic itself had clearly been one of those everyday houses until it was converted to save lives and uphold a kind of bygone economic era that already felt like justice. When my GPS told me quite cheerfully that I had arrived at my medical facility at the corner of Cornfield and Cow, I doubled back and finally located the building. I identified it pretty much entirely by the handicap-access ramp running up the side of the house to the high porch. I, however, took the stairs, because I am a man (who had to pee very much like an old lady who'd been driving too long).

The reception area had once been the kitchen. The waiting room was a living room. I asked to use the bathroom, and was shown to a small half-bath. Everything was very quaint. Two other people, a young Hispanic man about my age and a middle-aged woman, waited in the waiting room when I emerged. The only remaining chair was a rocking chair in the corner, and it was all just too Mayberry in total for me to handle anymore. I sat in the rocker, picked up an issue of Better Homes and Gardens, and surrendered to the sense of old world values and domesticity. I had never felt less like I was in a doctor's office. Maybe a doctor's grandmother's sitting room; the only thing missing was a bowl of hard candy.

When Dr. Blay came out to see me, he shook my hand and led me down a side hall to what might have originally been a bedroom; this room, unlike the waiting area, felt fully medical. The bed in the center was covered with paper, and was clearly an adjustable patient's examination bed. Along the wall were cabinets full of medical supplies. Everything looked disinfected and purposeful. The disarming sense of folksy homeyness fell away, and was replaced with a hospital-like feeling immediately, but this wasn't alarming at all; in fact, the progression from the one to the other only added to the sense of competence one hopes for in a medical visit. Dr. Blay told me to have a seat, and started by just plain old asking me what was wrong.

I told him a brief description of all of my various symptoms, and he listened very patiently, never interrupting me or moving to examine me physically as I spoke. When I hesitantly pulled out the handwritten chronology I had written, a listing of each of my symptoms arranged by the approximate date they had begun to show up over the past few weeks, he seemed delighted that I had prepared in such a way. He took it and read the whole thing, both full sides of a college-ruled legal pad sheet filled with handwritten text, and nodded periodically, jotting notes on his chart as he went. I looked out the window while he read it, remembering the way the emergency care clinic doctor had glanced at the page and then handed it back, as if it were beneath his notice to try and read my semi-legible handwriting for once. That doctor had only asked me to summarize for him; Dr. Blay seemed intent on gathering as much information as possible. I remembered that Rosemary had mentioned that she thought or heard he had been an Internal Medicine specialist at a hospital somewhere before he'd opened his own clinic; if that was true, he was specifically trained as a diagnostician, a thinker about the body and it's problems as much as a fixer. I thought to myself, This feels right. This is the man I needed to see.

When he was finished, Dr. Blay asked my permission to examine me. He listened to my breathing, he examined the swelling in my neck and the lump, and then asked me a series of questions about my symptoms, building off of the information I had written. He had been paying close attention to what he'd read, and each of his questions were identifiably specific to one purpose: he was seeking links between the symptoms. I hesitantly mentioned that I had heard there was a mumps outbreak recently in Virginia, which I knew often started with a swelling of the neck, and he nodded, then shook his head. While it seemed to fit, he said, there were other symptoms that didn't match up. He looked thoughtful for a minute. Then he asked if I would consent to let him do an EKG on me.

Not knowing what exactly that entailed, but on guard for hidden or additional costs, I replied that I would be happy to let him, but that I had few resources and could not afford any expensive additions to his $50 fee. He only smiled at me and told me that it would be included in the regular examination fee, not added to it. I could see no reason not to go ahead; more test could only mean more information. He hooked up a series of electrodes to me after wheeling in a little machine, and I got a chuckle out of him by asking if I was being subjected to a lie detector test on the sly. I assured him that I hadn't lied on the symptom sheet; my disparate ailments really were that awesome. He did me the courtesy of not calling me an idiot, only smiled. I thought that was awfully nice of him.

Once he had gotten the EKG results, his demeanor changed subtly before he even spoke another word. Being who I am, I began a mental readout of the details of the shift and determined that his mannerisms had tensed across the board, indicating concern and perhaps a preliminary shade of dismay. These in turn indicated information which led to a conclusion I might not enjoy hearing, and I was unexpectedly grateful to realize it; it meant that my visit and the extra cost (which I didn't tell my father about or ask anyone else to pay for, but paid myself out of my own meager funds) might turn out to be maximally worthwhile after all. If Something Was Wrong With Me (spoiler warning: 'twas), I wanted to know what it was, not be told that it was nothing again and that a touch of steroid cream would clear it right up. My instincts had already told me otherwise, and I was ready for some bad news if it meant not having to wonder any longer.

What Dr. Blay told me was that something was definitely wrong in my chest, and that whatever was going on in there, it was something someone needed to look at relatively immediately. I asked a clarifying question, if I was being told it needed to be looked at soon, or if it needed to be looked at now. He replied that he could not in any event tell me what to do, but that were it him he would be on his way to an emergency room as soon as he left this office. I reminded him rather stupidly that I did not have insurance, as though perhaps he had forgotten that one defining trait that his entire clientele shared in common, and he again replied quite solemnly that though he could not say for certain he suspected that the economics would turn out to be the lesser of my concerns.

I had heard everything I needed to hear.

With a (mildly internally surprising) lack of fear, I stood up and shook his hand, and thanked him for his candor. I would be taking his advice immediately, and heading straight to an emergency room. He asked if I needed the phone number or directions to Rockingham Memorial Hospital, the Harrisonburg city hospital, and I replied thoughtfully that I would not be going to that hospital. Something in the back of my mind had rolled over sleepily, and underneath where it had lain I found the suggestion that I instead travel a bit farther to Augusta Health, the hospital in which my grandfather had been treated (oh so reluctantly) for an infection in his leg which turned quite serious on him in his latter days back in 2000-2001. I wasn't clear on all of the reasons just yet, but I am no stranger to my intellect accomplishing feats at the subconscious level that my conscious brain has to catch up to. I trust my instincts, because I recognize them for what they are: no mere base id impulses, but rather my brain working on multiple levels at once to create prefabricated conclusions whenever all of the puzzle pieces are already gathered and available... even if I haven't consciously recognized them as pieces, or sometimes even that there was a puzzle needing solving. I don't pretend to understand everything that my mind can do, but I do try to keep up with it when I can; when it quickens to a jog, I'll run to keep up before I need to know where we're going.

Dr. Blay told me that the E.R. would be expecting me, because he would be calling them himself as I was on the way. He photocopied my EKG results and all of his observations and notes, and gave them to me to give to the E.R. doctors so they might have a head start on things. Then he took my card and as he was taking payment for the visit fee, proceeded to extract from me a promise that I would keep in touch with him, and I was again disarmed by just how human this man was. Intuition readout told me that underneath his outwardly calm demeanor and thoughtful words, this man was actually going to worry about me if he didn't hear from me soon, a young fellow he'd known for all of an hour of his life, a life filled with strangers and patients.

It was rather like having a conversation and medical examination from a young Mr. Rogers, now that I think about it. He was, in retrospect, as attentive to how I might be feeling at every step along the way through our examination as he was to the medical specifics of what he was examining and revealing.

It was very comforting, but beyond all of that, it was absolutely and irrefutably informative. I needed to go to the emergency room, and I needed to go now. This was Thursday, May 2nd, 2013, and it was the last day of my life as I knew it, a fact I would remain unaware of for about eight more hours.

Whew... it's gotten late, Walking Buddy. This story marches on, though; soon we'll be caught up to where we are today, and can proceed at a more measured pace from there. How are you doing, anyway? You've kept pace with me for some time now, and I do appreciate the company. This would've been a much darker road to walk without you here to ramble on to as we go. Your patience alone deserves a Nobel prize; the way I string prepositional phrases together into run-on sentences would give a normal person (or an English teacher) heart palpitations.

Next time we'll pick it up from the afternoon of that same day, the last day of my previous life. Meeting my mother at the emergency room entrance, and then a whole lot of sit around and wait that would've made a military man feel right at home.

Until then, Walking Buddy, keep your shoes handy and your legs loose and limber. We've got a ways yet to go together.

- Gabriel, Recklessly Obedient To Authority

07 - How My Best Friendship Began, Gabrielside

Before we begin on tonight's walk together, Walking Buddy, I need to ask you for something I would not normally ask, and probably will not again. I need you to promise me that if you read beyond this point, you will also go visit Kathleen's blog directly afterward and also read her parallel account of the events I am about to describe. This story is not actually mine alone to tell, and I am only telling it now with her blessing and permission. Moreover, my account alone is not the complete tale. I want you to stay with me here, and then I want you to visit her. Will you promise me that you will do so, as soon as you are finished here? Please acknowledge in the comments, if you can and will do so. It's important to me.

You guys know Kathleen by now, right? Here she is, wearing a mask so she doesn't get me sick with her coughing cold while we sit and write out our respective sides of the story of how we began our unique journey together. As I'm right in the middle of my "nadir point," during which my white blood cell count is critically low, a state referred to as neutropenia, we are attempting to get through this tandem tale-telling without causing me to die from a sudden fever since that would sort of be an anticlimactic ending to this whole thing, and frankly a little disappointing to me as a storyteller.

She might be smiling, or this could be rage.
The mask makes for mild mystery.

As I've said before, this whole process of evolution into a new chapter of my life has been hard on her. All of our carefully-laid plans of measured-pace transition into healthy, distinct, separate (financially, primarily) lives were shattered the day of my diagnosis, leaving her suddenly and completely on her own in an unfamiliar town with little for company but my empty desk chair and a handful of boxes of my stuff. That's not really a great way to begin much of anything, but you know how life can be sometimes. Adventure doesn't so much knock on your door as it does smash down a wall and see if you were sitting right behind it, like the Kool-Aid pitcher but without the exuberant smile. Kathleen has embarked on an adventure into adult independent life, and I'm a bit sad that I don't get to go along on the first leg of the voyage to see her off the way we'd planned so carefully to allow.

So I asked her, since I'd received more than a couple of requests and interest, if it might not be a good time for her to consider helping me tell the story of how our friendship began. It's a story neither of us have ever told, and the simplest reason for that is because it does not make her look or feel very good. There are aspects of things that happened during that night which were fairly traumatically frightening for her to face, and the fact that my intervention may have prevented them from coming to pass does not make them suddenly flowery and easy to hold up and examine after the fact. It was easier overall to just put those things away, so they got buried, and I respected her (never spoken, but completely understandable) desire to just never bring it up or talk about it again. What was less evident over time, however, was what my respectful and absolute silence on that score was going to cost me over the following years.

Kathleen's family has for a long time been sort of... unsure what to make of me, I think is a fair way to put it. My position in my best friend's life was in many ways far too similar to the standard positions held by a significant other to be entirely defined as a mere friendship. We were more than that to one another, and it can't really be called a mystery when people start to assume or believe that "more than that" must necessarily mean romantic entanglement. It didn't, though, and people heard that from both of us often enough. What they didn't hear, and what they would have needed to hear in order to not just assume we were being coy or were just embarrassed to admit it for some reason, was that there was a different reason which was no less valid, and that reason was one that would make more sense to a soldier than to a civilian. We had survived and faced a threat together, stared down a trauma and come out the other end intertwined in intention and memories that would not be freely shared outside of our binary pairing... well, until now, anyway. That is the wellspring source of our friendship. That is the missing piece everybody never knew about. And that is why we have consistently responded with frustrated irritation at every simpleton know-it-all who responded to our truthful declarations of not being lovers with a half-sly look and the ignorant certainty that they in their plastic-world threatless limited experience knew better than we did what could possibly be the truth.

The majority of that suspicion fell on me, naturally. I was the older and stronger of will of the two of us, so people simply assumed that I was the one calling the shots; if we were telling a twin lie about not being lovers, it was most likely at my direction and by my intention. Maybe I was ashamed of being seen as being with a woman like her (those who believed that in the silence of their hearts, please accept a heartfelt and sincere fuck you from me right now for applying your meaningless social hierarchy into a situation you don't understand; Kathleen is twice the golden-hearted woman just about any of you are, and a lack of capacity to be a vindictive bitch in self-defense is only a negative quality to vindictive bitches trying to find a way to be able to look at themselves in the mirror), or perhaps I was just playing with her but unwilling to commit and wanted to keep my own field open to sleep with other women as well (those who have believed that of me... I don't blame them as much because there was a period of my life - the exact same period in which we did begin our friendship and which I'm about to tell you a story from - in which I would predictably have done exactly that to a woman like her. I simply did not in this case, because I had other goals and things to learn about myself. I was not a saint, nor even a particularly moral guy; I was actually more the charming rogue you fathers out there would have loved to greet with a bat, to be plainly honest about it, but Kathleen was no victim or plaything of mine even as other women around us quite willingly were). Whatever they believed, people generally believed it of me, and I chose to say nothing to contradict them from years of suspicion and annoyance and general disdain for the underlying strength of our friendship due to peoples' natural need to believe that they know best in any given situation. Very, very rarely did I meet anyone who responded to a general overview of my friendship with Kathleen by saying "You know what? That's nice. I really respect that," and to a person those people turned out to be the ones who themselves had a friend they were bonded to in a rare and solid way beyond the simplistic.

I said nothing, because this story was not mine to tell. I did not protect her that night in order to undo the good I'd done by cashing it in later just to spare myself a little suspicion and misunderstanding. Truth be told, I was sort of used to being misunderstood, so it really wasn't out of my way to remain that way for an actual good reason: allowing Kathleen the time to process and the choice to share with others how and when she was ready. But she has agreed that now can and should be that time, and I will confess that I find it a bit of relief to be able to just tell the story and have done with it.

Long preface, huh? Sorry about that. But hey, Walking Buddy, if you aren't used to a little long-windedness from me by now... 'Sgonna be a long road. For you. Just putting that out there now. Might want to pack a sandwich or something.

The night in question was Halloween, and the event was the holiday swing dance. Both of us were members of the JMU Swing Dance Club, and though we had met before that we had only ever talked in an acquaintance capacity. Here's a photo of me and some of the other people in the club from that era, the year I had very first joined:

I'm often red-eyed in photos, due to having these great big cow eyes.

The day of the dance I dressed up as Indiana Jones, and went to work at my job at the campus library. I actually worked the entire day as Indy, though I didn't wear my pistol (fake, airsoft, but rather real-looking black metal) until the evening. I got a lot of compliments on my costume and the reasonable facsimile of abdominal muscles I was sporting underneath it, so I was in pretty high spirits around dance time that evening. I was young, I was single, I looked and felt good, and I was ready to go and work some charisma on some very nice young ladies that I knew. It was, overall, a very good day.

Here's one of the very few surviving photos of me dressed as Indy, taken in the gym where the dance was held that night:

I think it was a fair effort overall, don't you?

When I arrived at the dance I launched into full extrovert mode, a skill I'd learned in recent years that I'd finally gotten a handle on but which exhausted me quickly. I could laugh, tell jokes, and be the relative life of a party for a few solid hours before I began to run dry and have to return to my pod back at home to recharge my mental and emotional batteries. Most dangerously, I had discovered that whilst in this mode, I had a newfound and frankly devastating effect on some of the ladies around me; it turned out that I was actually somewhat charming, once I got over the barrier of feeling all emo and misunderstood all the time as I had during my first four years at JMU.

It wasn't too long into the dance, however, that I noticed Kathleen was upset. I was not close with her, and did not notice for any particular individual reason; the sheepish truth of the matter was I was aware of the presence, name, and evolving disposition of every female at that dance, because I had very little intention of going home alone and a fisherman should know the population of his pond if he hopes to, ah... have dinner. *coughs* ...Sorry about that, Mom. Dad probably understands, though.

Kathleen wasn't really my type, though. She was quiet to the point of being paralytic when I was nearby and in full social mode; there were times when I felt like I might need to take her pulse to make sure she hadn't gone into shock or something. What it really came down to was that she was a small-town girl who'd only been in college a year and some change by then, and was wholly unprepared for a fellow with a personality of the sledgehammer variety like the fake-but-functional extrovert me that existed as my metaphorical fishing rod at that time. It was a prototype, of sorts; you should see my current model. The technology has come a long way.

Ladies.

There was something about Kathleen regardless that had caught my attention beyond attraction (which is saying something, as my list of "things that concern me beyond sex and attraction" was not exactly long at that stage of my life). She was so ridiculously innocent... it was like meeting a doll that had magically come to life, and had no real experiences yet with actual human people and how violently dangerous some of them can be. I had for some time felt an odd scratching in the back of my mind when I looked at her during the meetings and such, a strange impulse to find and gather and approach and attach pieces of medieval armor to her, without explanation, just to sort of casually encase her in steel instead of saying hello. I never had but had always quietly wanted a little sister growing up, and I think some part of me even in that primitive development recognized an independent, non-romantic urge to find someone worth protecting and then protect her until she told me to go away.

I asked her what was wrong, and received no concrete answer, so I cheerfully pressed her with the fact that she could either tell me or I could just stare at the side of her head until she changed her mind. She responded by getting up and going outside, but not as if fleeing from me, exactly; it was more of a combination surrender and invitation to follow, which I did a couple of minutes after. I found her outside the gym, sitting on the curb, and it was clear she had been crying. I sat down, all Indiana and whatnot, and asked her what was going on. And she still wouldn't answer me at first. So I just stared at her for a little while until it was clear I wasn't going to go anyplace until she lowered the gate and answered my question, and I think she must have had the alarmed thought that I would have quite contentedly just skipped the rest of the dance entirely if that's what it took to out-patience her on this one (I am skilled at projecting an attitude of infinite patience when I sense another person's impatience or time-sensitivity as a barrier; it's kind of a hilarious subtle aggressive tactic, when you think about it a little bit, as it isn't actually passive-aggressive as it might seem but directly, if weaponlessly, combative). So she finally cracked and started to tell me a story, and that story went something like this:

A guy had come into town, an acquaintance of her dorm-roommate's. Subtext told me that this male was not entirely unattractive to her, or at least that he had not been at first. This fellow, who was named Adam, was a Navy cadet and a wrestler from some academy someplace who was on a trip and had stopped by JMU to visit, had met Kathleen through her roommate, had followed her about like a puppy for the past day or so, and then had spent the night in her dorm the night before. The short-form version she gave me then and there was that he had been offered the couch in her suite's common room to sleep on, but at some time in the night had come into her room to see if there might not be more to her kind offer of room than just "room." She didn't go into great detail, and I didn't waste her time asking stupid questions: the gist of it went that he put his hand in her pants after a short conversation, she freaked out in a mild-to-moderate way, and he left before her roommate could wake up and things could get even less comfortable. Kathleen had then had to put up with him following her around all day that day as well, and was worried about what else might happen when he was going to be sleeping there the next night. Beyond that, he had all but convinced her to loan him $700 to fix his car, apparently one of the reasons he was still staying in town at all. She was, for her part, completely unarmed. She had no idea what to do, no idea how to say no, no idea what sex was all about with anybody at that point (much less some guy she had known for a total of hours still in the double-digits), and no idea what she was going to do since he was at the dance right now and seemed to have pegged her as his landside "girlfriend" while the storms kept his aspiring sailor self trapped in this particular port.

I didn't have the perspective then that I have now, but I did recognize that the scratching sense of need to armor this girl that had been living in the back of my mind was more of a clawed pawswipe now, pushing me to act. She was in trouble, and had no clue what to do. I had no clue what to do either, but felt that someone needed to do something, and I was the only soldier on the field.

I am not a confrontational person by nature. I'm not even a competitive person by nature. I derive slim joy or sense of triumph from defeating or hurting or besting another in pretty much any scenario, and what little enjoyment I do get is easily dwarfed by the sense of accomplishment and goodwill I get from cooperatively accomplishing something with another person. So I know that you, Walking Buddy, might be thinking masculine thoughts about exactly what would have come naturally to you in this situation: find guy, beat guy, explain to him the general basics of gentlemanly conduct, perhaps. In that order, probably. I am not built for conflict resolution in this fashion, however. My greatest weapons lie in the areas of relative espionage and strategic information retrieval: I can look at a person and tell you his or her greatest fears, their weaknesses, the areas in which they experience doubt and dismay. I can tell you where they would be weakest, I can undercut their egos with a single comment if need be, and I can drive a person from calm to rage in two sentences when and if I choose to poke them in the right (or deliberately wrong, more accurately) relevant nerve that way. Physical confrontation, however, has never been my primary area of expertise, and I've never found too much benefit to be gained from pretending as though it is. So it was with something of a disadvantage and no real plan that I found myself turning to face Adam the Navy cadet wrestler when he came outside to find out where Kathleen had gone, much as I had done mere minutes before.

Adam was not pleased by this state of affairs, my very first glance told me. I turned the full force of my abnormal perception on him and took a rapid-fire readout of all of the hidden information I could gather, which read (from his perspective, then from mine in parentheses) approximately like this:

- He is not supposed to be out here alone with her (note: possessive intent)
- Who the hell is this guy (advantage: surprise)
- What did she tell him (note: body tension / subnote: something to hide / inference: ill intent)
- We're alone out here for now (warning: tactical disadvantage, overmatched physically)

This wasn't much to go on, but it was better than nothing. And I have something of a talent and a history of being able to make do with relatively little in social settings; I can MacGyver verbally, is what I mean to say. The problem was that this particular situation was outside of my sphere. My plan was no plan at all. Instead what I had come to realize was that my intentions were not coming from the usual place, where my intellect made choices which fueled my capabilities and created a cohesive and potentially successful plan of action. Instead I suddenly noticed that what I was feeling was not a plan, but a conviction: this situation was not going to end the way it started, the way it was slated to end had I not gotten involved. It did not matter what I had to do in order to make that true. Adam was not going to leave with her tonight.

I am not commonly ruled by conviction alone. This was a startling realization for me, that I was capable of such a departure from logic and the comfort of its predictable probability matrices. I can remember my passive mental processes calmly pondering this even as I stood and faced off with him in the coming minutes. My brain is a strange and multilayered thing. I stood up and turned around, but paused. I drew the metal pistol out of my holster and handed it to Kathleen barrel-first. I asked her to hold onto it for me, and keep it safe. I did not tell her that I wanted the fight that might be coming to not involve a too-realistic looking firearm even as a blunt force weapon in case the police should arrive and become involved. I might have been better able to defend myself with the heavy fake gun, but logic dictated that I not complicate the situation any more than necessary; it was a judgment call, and the first sign that I was less concerned about my own safety than I was about other factors in the situation, another new realization that had not previously ever been tested or revealed to be the case.

Adam asked Kathleen what was going on.

Kathleen said nothing, staring into my pistol as if it could answer for her. Since it belonged to me, I took that for a transfer of executive privilege.

I responded that I was being told a fascinating tale about a lost boy who seemed to think he was on a hunt of some kind in someone else's forest.

He asked me what the hell that meant.

I told him it meant that he needed to find another place to sleep tonight.

He told me that his sleeping arrangements were none of my goddamn business.

I assured him I could care less about his "business," whatever he considered it to be, but that Kathleen was not and would not fall into that category.

Kathleen said nothing, but made a funny sound like a whistling intake of breath. It was very poignant.

Adam informed me that he had both the power and an increasing desire to kick my ass.

I responded quite calmly that it didn't much matter if he did or not at this point, because either way someone else already knew he was hitting her up for hundreds of dollars and had tried to force himself on her the night before, and beating me up wasn't about to change the fact that his plan to try it again tonight was already ruined. In ten minutes everybody else would know, too.

He stared at me, working that out in his mind. I am quite sure that he was methodically on his way to the conclusion that if he was going to lose his chance for sex and relative anonymity in manipulation all at once, he might as well kick my ass and at least have that. My spider sense was well tingling, the same feeling I used to get when I knew that my brother was charging at me from behind to hit me when I turned my back after a scathing comment as children. I didn't move, though, just hooked my thumbs into my belt loops and rocked back on my heels a bit, a completely fabricated picture of purest calm, as if we were just discussing the temperature.

And that is when a small group of five fellows, friends from the club, wandered out the front doors ten feet away and saw the three of us there. Me, dressed as Indiana Jones, standing calm as one can make himself appear to be in the street in front of the gym. Adam, dressed as a Navy cadet dressed as a normal guy disguised as an angry person standing on the curb in front of me (which put him at head height to me; he was actually quite short, but very stocky and powerful-looking, as a wrestler should probably be). And Kathleen, sitting on that same curb about six feet to my left, still staring as hard as she could into the metal slide of my airsoft pistol. She probably doesn't remember that her knuckles were white, gripping it.

My friend Andrew was one of those fellows who came outside to find me that night. I wonder sometimes if he remembers that night at all, or that moment. The rest of them were all friends of varying degrees of closeness from the club. The guys, some of them at least, detected the tension in the air, but had no idea who Adam was nor what had been about to happen. Adam himself looked as though someone had just put a bare unwashed toe in his pudding cup right in front of his face as a way to tell him he couldn't have any now.

I looked into his eyes and made mine as hard as they can get, like agates when I do it just right. I told him, "It would be a good idea to walk away right now. Otherwise things get complicated." He waited and looked back at me for a long moment.

Then he turned and walked off, and I watched him all the way down the long drive, up the hill on the other side and out of sight. Something inside me uncoiled, but only slightly. I was out of immediate danger. Kathleen, however, was not.

Where things became complicated was that she did not seem to realize this fact. Her shame and embarrassment at having just been a part of such a scene were overpowering; there was not at that time room in her head for further thoughts, such as that Adam was completely unlikely to feel comfortable being so anticlimactically defeated by being outnumbered, or that he actually did not have anyplace else to go except back to her dorm, which was where he was most likely to be heading right now. She was overloaded, and I took my pistol out of her hand gingerly and just let her spin for a minute.

I was still thinking, however, and both of these facts had occurred to me. As Kathleen fought my strong suggestions that she accept a ride home, that she be alert for him to show up again, my sublevels were rapidly forming two counterplans: one in which I could protect her myself, and a second in which I could arrange for her to be protected. Weighing the two even while I was still talking, I found the second one to be far more effective.

I told the five fellows who had come out a very basic, detail-less version of what had happened, basically amounting to that the guy had been bothering Kathleen and I had asked him to leave, and thanked them for coming to find me when they did as they'd likely prevented my being rendered into a different shape and I was sort of fond of the one I had now. The guys laughed and blustered a bit, and asked me if she was going to okay, etc. I asked if one of them could give her a lift home, and Kathleen flat out refused. Then she walked off, the same way that Adam had gone. I weighed following her and fighting her into understanding the situation, deemed it quickly improbable and messy even if it succeeded, and pulled out my phone instead.

JMU's campus cadets are a non-police, student-staffed safety option that goes a long way toward making girls feel they have a safe middle option to not be overreacting but still be reacting to the threats that shitty guys can and do represent on many college campuses, and I utilized them that evening for that precise service. That Kathleen had no idea they were coming and would be watching her, I reasoned, wasn't actually a betrayal of our newly-minted trust, since she'd chosen to walk off before I could ask her permission. So I called them, informed them that there was likely a suspicious and potentially dangerous male individual on his way to or outside of her dorm hall right now who looked like a tall pudding-less dwarf with a stormcloud where his face should be, and also gave them Kathleen's description and her likely range of location. The cadet dispatch fellow stayed on the line with me and I actually heard in the background within five minutes that two cadets had found and intercepted Adam outside of that dorm and forcibly removed him from campus entirely. He assured me that a cadet would find Kathleen and make sure she got home okay and in company. I thanked him for his help. Then I went back into the dance and danced with attractive women for awhile, because "dinner" still sounded good. Would you believe I did end up going home alone that night, though? It was a real shame, all things considered. I'd have written the ending a bit differently, myself.

I never told Kathleen that Adam had been there waiting for her, until tonight, seven years later. She was already scared and mortified; it wasn't the right time for an I-told-you-so, and I wasn't exactly thrilled at having been right. But I did have the brand new notion that I had done something selfless for another person, a young attractive woman at that, and hadn't once had the thought that maybe I deserved some base gratitude in return. I was wrestling internally with the new idea of my invisible, irreversible sense of obligation to this girl I barely knew.

Our friendship has spanned many heights and valleys since that night. She's gentled me even as I've steeled her over years of experiences, and through it all I held my tongue about the way it all began because Kathleen was better, safer inside never having to know that she had almost walked directly into a predator's claws. I've met and truly come to know over a dozen women, good and beautiful and undeserving women who were subject to some form of sexual assault at some point in their lives, and I knew that the irreversible realization of that dark potentiality forever changes the woman it happens to. She becomes wary, colder, harder inside or out. Her definitions change, her guard reaches a minimum base level above zero. And Kathleen was innocent, pure and complete. I thought... I guess I thought she deserved the chance to grow and develop without having to have that shock of icy water thrown over her all at once. She could learn caution, she could develop better instincts and a more reasonably realistic view of the threats of the world without having to form them as scar tissue over trauma like that, and I could prevent that from being necessary.

And she wouldn't, in the meantime, need that scarred flesh to armor her, because instead she would have me. I would stay near, I would keep watch over her, and I would protect her from anything and everything that might try to do her harm until she had grown into a woman who could defend herself, and at the pace her innocence and unique beauty deserved to be permitted. I could do that.

So I did. I have.

My Best Friend, Walking Buddy, is also my Little Sister, and she is also my Greatest Human Treasure. She reached young adulthood and college never having yet been attacked or hurt by the world, and I encountered her at a time when I needed to know that innocence still existed and could be preserved and valued. I made my choices where she was concerned, and the fact that nobody else ever fully understood or could be permitted to was immaterial in the face of the fact of that friendship.

So now we've parted ways, she and I. The stage of our lives that lasted for nearly seven years in which our finances, our living arrangements, our every personal development was shared with the other, it came to a close two weeks ago when I was diagnosed with cancer and entered the hospital and so abruptly exited her home life. Now I live a town over, and she sits across the room from me emanating with the ache of the emptiness and unfairness of that change, and I know she will be okay. She isn't the girl I met anymore, not by a long shot. She would slap that girl now, shake her about the shoulders and wake her up to the way the world is and will be to the unprepared, and I am comforted by the reality of that fact. Kathleen isn't the doe-eyed deer anymore, she's a sharp-minded young professional woman who can and will last on her own. And she has a genuinely great and solid man standing beside her who does love her like a man can a woman, and can be for her all of the things that everybody has wasted my time trying to tell me I must or should or could be for her. Her boyfriend is everything she deserves, and you should take that endorsement for what it is worth, coming as it does from her greatest sentinel and staunchest protector.

That's How My Best Friendship Began, Walking Buddy. Or at least, it's half of the tale. I know this was a long entry, and I know you may not be much for monologue of this length, so thanks first of all for sticking with me through it. Now I need to hold you to your promise, the one I asked you to make if you were going to keep reading past the top paragraph of this stretch along the long dusty road. You promised you would go and visit her and hear her parallel telling of the same tale, and I want you to do so, for me.

If you're a member of Kathleen's family and you are reading this, please know that I've always held you in the highest of regard, even during the long periods when you were looking upon me with legitimate unanswered questions and perhaps a little suspicion. I always believed that you in particular deserved to know the truth of these things, but Kathleen was not ready to tell, and it was not my tale to share. But I also want you to know that I love your daughter, your sister, your cousin and your niece the exact same way that you do, and that I would never and have never let anything happen to her. I value her as the unique being she is, the irreplaceable member of your family you know her to be, and I have fought and would fight again to protect her from anything that would ever seek to do her harm. I did not keep any of this from you lightly, nor do I resent not being trusted completely. It was my choice to remain silent, out of respect for Kathleen. It was my choice to leave room and reason for suspicion of myself and my intentions. But neither do I remotely regret that choice. It was the right thing to do, and I would do it again.

I'm leaving off for now, Walking Buddy. This has been a long and rather intriguingly emotional entry to write, a relative comparison which should seem equally so to you when you consider the subject matter I diverted from to write about this today. But honestly, I care far more about Kathleen, my sister, then I do about myself and any marginal peril I may be in from cancer. I can fight my own battles with a steady hand and the confidence that win, lose, or draw I will be far greater a man at the end than I was going in.

I've only ever wanted to offer Kathleen the same, and I think I've done an okay job so far.

I'll catch you again soon here by the roadside, buddy. Go visit my sister and pick up the coin's other side, if you haven't already come from there. You did promise, after all. Next time we can talk more about me instead; I'll probably pick up the linear tale from the day I decided to go visit Dr. Blay's clinic in Harrisonburg, the first of several people in a line who actively Saved My Life. Until then, be well, and hug someone who is dear to you for me, will you?

The things that truly matter in life.

- Gabriel, a.k.a. Henry Jones Jr. Since They Named The Dog Indiana