I'm a procrastinator. My father was a procrastinator before me, and both of us put off until tomorrow the things we should have done today. I think many men live by putting things off. But when a man finds excuses for not throwing away his army uniform for more than fifty years I think it's an outstanding example of procrastination.
This afternoon I held this ancient symbol of the second world war up to the dusty sunlight coming through the attic window. The buttons still sparkle bright and new as the day they were minted. They've obviously weathered the years better than I. Should I try it on? No, I don't think so. Even if I could work my way into it, I'm not sure I could work my way out of it again. I live alone here and there's no one to help me if I get myself in trouble.
╥Out with it I say! I ain't gonna follow war no more," and there's no sense keeping this dead soldier in the attic. Yes, and take your rakish hat with you, even though it╒s the only thing that will fit. I hold up the dark green whip cord pants that were always too tight for me -- even then. My God the fly had buttons! I forgot that. The crease is still knife-sharp -- no wonder the Germans surrendered unconditionally. What a splendid figure this old soldier must have made -- the symbol of the New World sent abroad to resurrect freedom and democracy.
What do you do with such a symbol? Age has sobered me, and I realize now it was the uniform, not the soldier that won the war. If he were battery operated, he would have marched through Berlin and gone on to Moscow spreading freedom and democracy like Johnny Appleseed. I came up here with the express purpose of throwing it all away, and now I can't. I can't take this jacket, this hat and this pair of forest green whip cord pants and stuff them in the trash, a soldier once lived inside -- he should be given respect. I gave my dog a better burial.
I remember the night my young daughter and I sat soberly by the side of the water closet and watched our goldfish, "Goldie" do a counter-clockwise waltz to wherever dead goldfishes go. By no stretch of the imagination could we have left her for the rubbish man. If she were here with me now she would never let me throw my dead soldier away. So I sit on the rough floor of my dusty attic with my dead soldier in my lap, lost in a flood of memories. Were he small enough, I might flush him down the drain, so he might find his way downstream through the detritus of life and hence to the sea. I might bury him as I did Patsy when he turned his yellowed eyes on me and whimpered one final time. It is a man's right to bury his dead and I will not abandon my soldier to the Staten Island landfill.
Some people might call it procrastination, but it╒s more than that.
I go through the soldier╒s pockets. his Immunization records, the stub of an old railroad ticket to Chelsea ....I can't remember having been there. The immunization records are in a small green leatherette folder. (there was no plastic then) Whatever my decision might be concerning my dead soldier, I decide to put the immunization records in a green metal box in which I keep a lot of things I can't make up my mind about.
The folder is dry and when I open it, it cracks in two. Between the records and the back of the folder there is a curl of jet black hair. My God, it's hers!! I remember now! I took it with me! She fought her way to Berlin with me. We fought together, she and I.
No, damn it! I'm not going to sit here and cry, but I may bury my head in the dusty jacket for a moment or two and listen to the rattle and the thunder of distant guns -- see young men bewildered and frightened by the blind fury around us. I have a misty vision of men wading ashore in water deep enough to drown in. She, and her jet black hair came ashore with me, and looking back we saw the others, floating like masses of kelp in the ankle deep water. "Who will bring them in, no matter -- we cannot wait for the dead." Is it my imagination, or does that wisp of dark hair still bear the saline smell of Normandy -- that black hair that turned to silver with the passage of time. No! I'm not throwing that away. Wherever I go, it goes with me.
I carefully replaced the little green folder in the dead soldier's pocket. They have been together so long. Back in the closet old soldier, as long as I'm here you've got a place to stay.
