I took my God-damn little private’s stripe home in the absolute bottom of my pocket. There were already some paper officers, lieutenants and captains, on the block. I didn’t even bother to have the stripe sewn on my coat. I just threw it in a drawer and covered it up with some socks.

I spent the next few days cynically looking for paper and lucked into a medium pile of Collier’s from somebody’s basement which was enough to get my corporal’s stripes that immediately joined my private’s stripe under the socks.

The kids who wore the best clothes and had a lot of spending money and got to eat hot lunch every day were already generals. They had known where there were a lot of magazines and their parents had cars. They strutted military airs around the playground and on their way home from school.

Shortly after that, like the next day, I brought a halt to my glorious military career and entered into the disenchanted paper shadows of America where failure is a bounced cheque or a bad report card or a letter ending a love affair and all the words that hurt people when they read them.

Lint

I’m haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.

I’ve been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.

A Complete History of Germany and Japan

A few years ago (World War II) I lived in a motel next to a Swift packing plant which is a nice way of saying slaughter-house.

They killed pigs there, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month until spring became summer and summer became fall, by cutting their throats after which would follow a squealing lament equal to an opera being run through a garbage disposal.

Somehow I thought that killing all those pigs had something to do with winning the war. I guess that was because everything else did.

For the first week or two that we lived in the motel it really bothered me. All that screaming was hard to take, but then I grew used to it and it became like any other sound: a bird singing in a tree or the noon whistle or the radio or trucks driving by or human voices or being called for dinner, etc.

‘You can play after dinner!’

Whenever the pigs weren’t screaming, the silence sounded as if a machine had broken down.

The Auction

It was a rainy Pacific Northwest auction with kids running all over the place getting into things and farm women interested in buying boxes of used fruit jars, secondhand dresses, and perhaps some furniture for the house while the men were interested in saddles and farm equipment and livestock.