October 5, So It Goes, Saint Marty's Day, 50

Billy thought hard about the effect the quartet had had on him, and then found an association with an experience he had had long ago.  He did not travel in time to the experience.  He remembered it shimmeringly--as follows:

He was down in the meat locket on the night that Dresden was destroyed.  There were sounds like giant footsteps above.  Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs.  The giants walked and walked.  The meat locker was a very safe shelter.  All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine.  The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and  nobody else.  The rest of the guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden.  They were all being killed with their families.

So it goes.

The girls that Billy had seen naked were all being killed, too, in a much shallower shelter in another part of the stockyards.

So it goes.

A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards.  There was a fire-storm out there.  Dresden was one big flame.  The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.

It wasn't safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day.  When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke.  The sun was an angry little pinhead.  Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals.  The stones were hot.  Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.

So it goes.

That's a very long passage with a LOT of death in it.  The death of the guards and their families.  The death of the naked girls.  The death of neighbors and buildings.  The entire city of Dresden reduced to ashes and rock.

Today is Saint Marty's Day.  I have been receiving Saint Marty's Day wishes since early this morning, most people commenting on a specific number:  50.  That's right.  I have celebrated 50 Saint Marty's Days in my lifetime.  It's hard for me to wrap my mind around that number.

Now, I suppose I could get all maudlin and reflect on mortality.  I mean, that's the direction the Slaughterhouse passage points me in.  Everybody and everything in those few paragraphs, aside from Billy Pilgrim and his friends, are dead or in the process of dying.  So, it would be only natural for me to follow that particular path.

However, I do not want to think about death today.  I want to think about all of the blessings that have come into my life this past year.  I was named Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula.  I've been invited to give readings all over the U. P.  My kids and wife are healthy.  I'm healthy.  I have had no encounters with death so far this year.  I've reconnected with old friends, met many new friends.  Like I said, blessing upon blessing upon blessing.

Saint Marty's Day is a festival of gratitude for me this year.