Open Writing

Somewhere during the early Pittsburgh experience, a war broke out. They called it "World War Two" because there'd apparently been a "World War One" some years before. It was tough on a by-then-six-year-old kid. Did this mean that everyone in the world was going about the insanity of killing one another? Oh hell no ... it couldn't mean something as crazy as that. But what then? Who?

From newspaper accounts (I was walking and actually reading by then — crossed eyes or no crossed eyes!), I rather imagined that bad guys with yellow skin were trying to filch some pearls from the folks in the nondescript Hawaiian harbor I kept hearing about. Back in Mansfield, Uncle Christ, thirty-four years old and the father of none, prepared to go "over there" somewhere and lend a hand. I later learned that he was the "Old Man" of his entire military battalion, even though sergeant was the highest rank he would achieve.

I suppose it's obvious that much was going to happen over the next several years. But I'll guarantee you this: If you were hearing the damned story for the first time, there is no way in bloody hell you'd believe one shred of it! People just couldn't BE that stupid! If, on the other hand, it had been offered forth as mere fiction, the writer, I think, would have been given his own comfy bed in a purely white room, where he could've permanently stored his spats and dangled his aging, wrinkled dingle-doo for years and years to come. Or maybe he'd have just been knotted and strung up on the spot. Whatever!