Story in Fragments
Six weeks since the surgery so now I'm finally done with the sling, and not a moment too soon. The next step will be to get my range of motion back with physical therapy. I've been off the blog for quite a while now, dealing with recovery from surgery, getting back to work, and reeling from a death in the family that has been hard on everyone. Lately, for some reason, my life has been swirling before me in fragments of story, and I've found myself wanting to write some of these fragments down, thinly transmuted into fiction. At this point it really is a matter of fragments, and I have no idea whether they will eventually add up to something more coherent. Here goes:
***
We were just about done getting all the leaves raked into piles. I had spent the night over Frank’s house, and Frank’s mother had a way of getting some work out of you if you spent any time over there. He had the only backyard pool in the neighborhood, but you never got to swim in it unless you put in some cleaning and maintenance first. Now it was leaf season, so here we were. When we got done raking we were going to play our favorite game: war. Our specialty was World War II. We had been raiding the library for probably a year now, and we had seen plenty of movies, so we knew all the equipment, all the armaments—the tanks, the airplanes, the machine guns, the sidearms. The Germans were the bad guys but they had all the coolest stuff: the Luger pistol, the Schmeisser submachine gun (or “machine pistol,” as the Germans called it), the Panzer tank, the Messerschmitt fighter plane. The American Sherman tank had a rough-and-ready, “can-do” feel to it, and you could get pretty gung-ho imagining you were driving one of those around, but the Panzer tanks were definitely cooler, scarier. They weren’t made just to get the job done, they were designed for world domination.
But really, whether you wanted to play American or German depended on your mood. If you felt like being noble, plucky, determined, self-sacrificing, and resourceful, you played American. If it was a cunning, amoral, and brutal sort of day, you went German. Then you favored the lightning-quick assault, the blitzkrieg. The sight of a line of Panzer Tiger tanks, cresting a hill at close to 40 clicks an hour, the muzzles of their 88mm guns pointed straight ahead—this might very well cause your enemy to just shit his pants right there on the spot.
Sometimes we left the whole good guy/bad guy thing to a coin toss, and then you just had to get yourself into the right frame of mind. I wasn’t sure what sort of mood I was in today, but the leaves were swirling in red and gold and it was the kind of bright, spectacular autumn day that made you want to stay outside as long as you could, the kind of day when you would really feel, as they always said on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, “the Thrill of Victory...and the Agony of Defeat.” Right when they said that last part they showed the famous clip of that ski jumper taking a really nasty end-over-end wipe-out that just seemed to go on and on forever.
***
We were just about done getting all the leaves raked into piles. I had spent the night over Frank’s house, and Frank’s mother had a way of getting some work out of you if you spent any time over there. He had the only backyard pool in the neighborhood, but you never got to swim in it unless you put in some cleaning and maintenance first. Now it was leaf season, so here we were. When we got done raking we were going to play our favorite game: war. Our specialty was World War II. We had been raiding the library for probably a year now, and we had seen plenty of movies, so we knew all the equipment, all the armaments—the tanks, the airplanes, the machine guns, the sidearms. The Germans were the bad guys but they had all the coolest stuff: the Luger pistol, the Schmeisser submachine gun (or “machine pistol,” as the Germans called it), the Panzer tank, the Messerschmitt fighter plane. The American Sherman tank had a rough-and-ready, “can-do” feel to it, and you could get pretty gung-ho imagining you were driving one of those around, but the Panzer tanks were definitely cooler, scarier. They weren’t made just to get the job done, they were designed for world domination.
But really, whether you wanted to play American or German depended on your mood. If you felt like being noble, plucky, determined, self-sacrificing, and resourceful, you played American. If it was a cunning, amoral, and brutal sort of day, you went German. Then you favored the lightning-quick assault, the blitzkrieg. The sight of a line of Panzer Tiger tanks, cresting a hill at close to 40 clicks an hour, the muzzles of their 88mm guns pointed straight ahead—this might very well cause your enemy to just shit his pants right there on the spot.
Sometimes we left the whole good guy/bad guy thing to a coin toss, and then you just had to get yourself into the right frame of mind. I wasn’t sure what sort of mood I was in today, but the leaves were swirling in red and gold and it was the kind of bright, spectacular autumn day that made you want to stay outside as long as you could, the kind of day when you would really feel, as they always said on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, “the Thrill of Victory...and the Agony of Defeat.” Right when they said that last part they showed the famous clip of that ski jumper taking a really nasty end-over-end wipe-out that just seemed to go on and on forever.
posted by Steve Shoemaker at 12:26 PM
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