September 2: Private Parts, Mysterious and Unreachable, Possibilities

Werner Gluck, the young guard, was a Dresden boy.  He had never been in the slaughterhouse before, so he wasn't sure where the kitchen was.  He was tall and weak like Billy, might have been a younger brother of his.  They were, in fact, distant cousins, something they never found out.  Gluck was armed with an incredibly heavy musket, a single-shot museum piece with an octagonal barrel and a smooth bore.  He had fixed his bayonet.  It was like a long knitting needle.  It had no blood gutters.

Gluck led the way to a building that he though might contain the kitchen, and he opened the sliding door in its side.  There wasn't a kitchen in there, though.  There was a dressing room adjacent to a communal shower, and there was a lot of steam.  In the steam were about thirty teen-age girls with no clothes on.  They were German refugees from Breslau, which had been tremendously bombed.  They had just arrived in Dresden, too.  Dresden was jammed with refugees.

There those girls were with all their private parts bare, for anybody to see.  And there in the doorway were Gluck and Derby and Pilgrim--the childish soldier and the poor old high school teacher and the clown in his toga and silver shoes--staring.  The girls screamed.  They covered themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made themselves utterly beautiful.

Werner Gluck, who had never seen a naked woman before, closed the door.  Billy had never seen one, either.  It was nothing new to Derby.

I remember being that young and inexperienced, when girls and sex were mysterious and unreachable.  I remember the talk in high school gym locker rooms, all of its crudeness and longing, guys bragging about things they had never seen or done.  When I think about those four years, that's what I recall:  the longing of that time.

Me?  I felt that longing, but I wasn't that excited about being an adult.  I liked the freedom from grownup things, like jobs and taxes and college.  Yes, I had my share of teenage angst.  Worried about popularity and dating and grades and the future.  But, there was also a lot of hope about possibility.  The possibility of seeing that girl naked.  The possibility of becoming a famous writer or actor or scientist or singer.  The possibility of having sex.  When there's possibility, there's hope.

Of course, possibility doesn't disappear when you become an adult.  They just become a little less abundant.  When you get married and have children, you HAVE to do certain things.  You have to provide for your family in some way, and most people will do anything.  Shitty jobs.  Shitty wages.  Shitty benefits.  Responsibility limits your possibilities.

I would love to quit my jobs and spend the next year or two writing a book.  But I have a wife with bipolar.  I have a daughter and son in school, taking dance classes, expecting birthday presents and Christmas presents.  I can't just quit my jobs to pursue a dream.  That doesn't mean that my dream is dead.  It's modified.  I carve writing time out of my day.  In the morning.  In the evening.  In the middle of the night. 

That's my reality.

Saint Marty is thankful today for possibilities.