August 16: Silver Boots, Unstuck in Time, My Dad

The temperature climbed startlingly that day.  The noontime was balmy.  The Germans brought soup and bread in two-wheeled carts which were pulled by Russians.  The Englishman sent over real coffee and sugar and marmalade and cigarettes and cigars, and the doors of the theater were left open, so the warmth could get in.

The Americans began to feel much better.  They were able to hold their food.  and then it was time to go to Dresden.  The Americans marched fairly stylishly out of the British compound.  Billy Pilgrim again led the parade.  He had silver boots now, and a muff, and a piece of azure curtain which he wore like a toga.  Billy still had a beard.  So did poor old Edgar Derby, who was beside him.  Derby was imagining letters to home, his lips working tremulously:

Dear Margaret--We are leaving for Dresden today.  Don't worry.  It will never be bombed.  It is an open city.  There was an election at noon, and guess what?  And so on.

They came to the prison railroad yard again.  They had arrived on only two cars.  They would depart far more comfortably on four.  They saw the dead hobo again.  He was frozen stiff in the weeds beside the track.  He was in a fetal position, trying even in death to nestle like a spoon with others.  There were no others now.  He was nestling with thin air and cinders.  Somebody had taken his boots.  His bare feet were blue and ivory.  It was all right, somehow, his being dead.  So it goes.

Billy is on his way to Dresden with the other Americans.  He knows what's going to happen.  Edgar Derby facing the firing squad.  The firebombing of the city.  All the death that he will witness. So it goes, as Vonnegut says over and over.

Sometimes I wish I could become a little unstuck in time.  It would make my life simpler.  At the moment, my 90-year-old father is in the hospital.  One of my sisters took him to the ER this morning.  I'm not going to get into details, but he's going to there for a while.  Tomorrow, he will be transferred to another facility.  Most likely downstate in Alpena. 

He's angry about his situation.  My dad has always been a difficult man.  He can be belligerent.  Sometimes physical.  A couple times today, he tried to walk out of the hospital on his own, only to be escorted back.  He's resting now, after a really bad couple of days. 

If I were Billy Pilgrim, I would know how all this is going to turn out.  I would be able to jump back to family vacations in Gay, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Superior, when I was a kid.  Or the time my dad came to see me play the Stage Manager in Thorton Wilder's Our Town in high school.  Or a few months into the future, so that I would know how all this is going to turn out. 

Unfortunately, I am not unstuck in time.  I have to take it one day at a time, just like everybody else, and hope and pray for the best.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for compassionate nurses and doctors.