The univeral soldier was once very short
I have been thinking a lot over the last week and a half, living in my head. I do other things too, I write, I walk, I've proctored tests, I've hung out with friends and kissed the geek, but all along, there has been a part of me solidly living somewhere else. There has been so much anger, disappointment, on-the-fly solutions, musing from above or beyond & other things going on on the internet around me. I've read, sometimes more avidly than other times, when I skim or just take a step back. I've also been away from the net a bit, but I have it in what I do so much, that' it isn't possible to any great extent.
The whys are always more important than the whats, I am amazed at how easy it is to forget this. I've explored the whys quite a bit, let's just leave it at that.
A friend I have on LJ has posted thoughts and songs over this time, and I've traveled a bit in my head with that too. These 2 songs are from the days of my father's youth, and they made me remember my father and reconnect with him from the time before I was born.I make it sound as if my father isn't living, which is absolutely not the case. But my father changed so much over the years. Everybody changes, but people I've followed over lengthy times or even most of my life have often remained a kernel of inner "sameness" for lack of better expressions. This was not visible to the same extent with my dad. I know the whys and this post won't be about that at all. He made many mistakes and sometimes he was a regular a-hole and sometimes far from impressive. I love both my parents, but more often than not, as a grown up, I don't care to be around them much. This is something that is sad, for both me and them, and sometimes I wonder if I didn't run so fast and far to not be like them, that I ended up running in a full circle.
But my father...there was a time, from before I was born, when I knew him and liked him. A few of you may know what I mean by this. When I was a little girl, there was a shadow of that person left and there were stories from himself and others still alive, and stories make you get to know someone just as much as anything else, and there were photos and things he had created with his hands.
I thought all those stories about my father were stiffs by now, but one still crawled out of an old cocoon my mother had kept in her pocket for many years and she told it to me back in early October this year, when they visited me.
That story was just for me, but here, I'll say that the father I knew before I was born was a person I might have been friends with. He was a boy who played in a band and had great artistic skill (he played both guitar and piano). He was a boy growing up with hunger and poverty in a dictatorship with tanks around, surrounded by countries that had so much more, and tourists from all those countries coming in to flaunt all that abundance. He was good at chess and he had to become an engineer. I think those things didn't change him in a bad way, and perhaps I shouldn't speculate what did. I will say that some other things that changed him was the army, leaving and re-rooting in one of those rich neighborhood countries from where the snotty tourists had flaunted their privilege during his childhood came, and finally by being rejected by his own father as a war-time bastard.
My father fled the country of his birth because the dictatorship that owned his country back then was sending young men like him to Prague, to fight and kill the kind of people he himself felt he belonged to. He escaped, but young men he knew from home, were forced to go to another country and shoot innocent unarmed protesting civilians.
Whatever my father did wrong later, he made the choice to disobey orders and not kill innocents and it was a good and strong choice, made when he had barely entered his 20's. He had already been in the army and knew what could happen there.
These two songs say more about my young father than my words probably ever could. The first one is a modern version of a Buffy-Sainte Marie song form the sixties. It is sung by two Swedish sisters called First Aid kit. I love their voices and what they do, and they are so young.
The second one is Donovan. So much of my father in that too, and they are the same age.
I am most probably never going to have children and what I've written here, as an only child, and what my father or mother did or didn't do will fade into complete oblivion, but in my kinder moments when I am at peace, I tend to think that there will be others like me, like him, so alike that it will and it won't matter at the same time. And in my kinder moments I think that this won't be such a bad thing.
The whys are always more important than the whats, I am amazed at how easy it is to forget this. I've explored the whys quite a bit, let's just leave it at that.
A friend I have on LJ has posted thoughts and songs over this time, and I've traveled a bit in my head with that too. These 2 songs are from the days of my father's youth, and they made me remember my father and reconnect with him from the time before I was born.I make it sound as if my father isn't living, which is absolutely not the case. But my father changed so much over the years. Everybody changes, but people I've followed over lengthy times or even most of my life have often remained a kernel of inner "sameness" for lack of better expressions. This was not visible to the same extent with my dad. I know the whys and this post won't be about that at all. He made many mistakes and sometimes he was a regular a-hole and sometimes far from impressive. I love both my parents, but more often than not, as a grown up, I don't care to be around them much. This is something that is sad, for both me and them, and sometimes I wonder if I didn't run so fast and far to not be like them, that I ended up running in a full circle.
But my father...there was a time, from before I was born, when I knew him and liked him. A few of you may know what I mean by this. When I was a little girl, there was a shadow of that person left and there were stories from himself and others still alive, and stories make you get to know someone just as much as anything else, and there were photos and things he had created with his hands.
I thought all those stories about my father were stiffs by now, but one still crawled out of an old cocoon my mother had kept in her pocket for many years and she told it to me back in early October this year, when they visited me.
That story was just for me, but here, I'll say that the father I knew before I was born was a person I might have been friends with. He was a boy who played in a band and had great artistic skill (he played both guitar and piano). He was a boy growing up with hunger and poverty in a dictatorship with tanks around, surrounded by countries that had so much more, and tourists from all those countries coming in to flaunt all that abundance. He was good at chess and he had to become an engineer. I think those things didn't change him in a bad way, and perhaps I shouldn't speculate what did. I will say that some other things that changed him was the army, leaving and re-rooting in one of those rich neighborhood countries from where the snotty tourists had flaunted their privilege during his childhood came, and finally by being rejected by his own father as a war-time bastard.
My father fled the country of his birth because the dictatorship that owned his country back then was sending young men like him to Prague, to fight and kill the kind of people he himself felt he belonged to. He escaped, but young men he knew from home, were forced to go to another country and shoot innocent unarmed protesting civilians.
Whatever my father did wrong later, he made the choice to disobey orders and not kill innocents and it was a good and strong choice, made when he had barely entered his 20's. He had already been in the army and knew what could happen there.
These two songs say more about my young father than my words probably ever could. The first one is a modern version of a Buffy-Sainte Marie song form the sixties. It is sung by two Swedish sisters called First Aid kit. I love their voices and what they do, and they are so young.
The second one is Donovan. So much of my father in that too, and they are the same age.
Click to viewI am most probably never going to have children and what I've written here, as an only child, and what my father or mother did or didn't do will fade into complete oblivion, but in my kinder moments when I am at peace, I tend to think that there will be others like me, like him, so alike that it will and it won't matter at the same time. And in my kinder moments I think that this won't be such a bad thing.