December 13: A World of Peace and Freedom, Endings and Beginnings, Beer and Pizza

All this happened, more or less.  The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.  One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his.  Another guy I knew did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.  And so on.  I've changed all the names.

I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967.  It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has.  There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.

I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war.  His name was Gerhard Muller.  He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while.  We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing.  But things were much better now.  He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education.  His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm.  So it goes.

He sent O'Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:

"I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will."

Where do you go when you've reached the end?  Back to the beginning, of course.  The passage above begins Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse.  It sets up a lot of what comes later in the book--Dresden, the teapot, the incineration of innocent people.  These are details that pretty much appear and reappear in all the pages that follow.

I am sorry for my absence yesterday.  I have been grading like crazy.  Yesterday, I read and commented on about 70 short student essays.  By the time I got home at around 8 p.m., I was brain dead.  I barely had enough energy to celebrate the defeat of Roy Moore in Alabama by Doug Jones.  Today, I graded another set of papers before I held my last class of the semester.

That's right.  I am at an end.  My students left the room tonight, and I will probably never see them again, unless they decide to take another class from me.  In a few days, I will submit my final grades, and it will all be done.  Then I will have to start over in a few weeks.  Endings and beginnings.

Tomorrow evening, I will be giving a holiday poetry reading at the library in my home town.  I have many close friends showing up.  Afterwards, I will be going out for drinks and pizza.  It is one of the last readings I will be giving this year.  Another ending.

That's what I have this evening.  Endings and beginnings.  Grading and poetry.  Beer and pepperoni.

Saint Marty is thankful for the prospect of a little quiet time.