Returning home... .

I spotted it yesterday in the dirt along the edge of the driveway, a small green glint in the broken particles of asphalt, small pebbles and loose earth over by the fence. A little plastic green army man brought out of the compacted dirt by the recent hard rain, returning home after being absent for two decades, buried out of sight but not out of mind.

These toys have returned home before, about a dozen over the years since my middle child Johnny, now in his thirties, put away his toy soldiers as he grew into an adolescent and ceased having backyard battles with these tiny warriors arrayed in long battle lines of good versus evil. I haven't seen Johnny since he was 16 nor  heard from him since he was 18 and wrote me a letter asking me to provide full funding for his college tuition and fees, which I did. (No, no letter of thanks afterwards nor any invitation to his graduation.)

Whenever one of these soldiers returns, I feel a tug at my heart and lament the extrajudicial and apparently permanent loss of any natural affection for his father by this somber, serious and very smart boy, who loves his mother so and had his will overborne as an impressionable adolescent by her and her coterie of "professionals" through the pernicious application of PAS. I took the broken little man upstairs to the bedroom Johnny used to occupy and laid it on the shelf next to the other broken soldiers who have also returned home.

Someday, maybe, Johnny'll come marching home again, hurrah, hurrah. Till then, or if never, I'll have to assuage my continuing grief with these sudden reminders of his and his brothers' presence still in the yard, where he and his brothers used to play, and wish him and them all the best.

Buried Treasures

The earth yielded up its treasures readily on Father's Day, for some reason. I was weeding a long-neglected garden in my yard on Sunday, yanking out unwanted growth by the fistfuls, when I saw the first object lying half-buried.

Glittering in the freshly-exposed dirt like fool's gold was a medium-sized yellow Leggo block. I pulled it out and set it aside, a relic from the days long ago when my yard rang with the happy cries of three boys at play, long before the divorce wars started and the permanent estrangement from them all ensued.

Next to be encountered was a toy soldier lying on his back embedded in the earth. This would be the playground of my middle son, I smilingly mused, the only one of my three sons that used to actively set up battle lines with opposing armies of toy soldiers.

Last up was a pint-sized green plastic toy grenade that I could easily enclose in my hand. I imagined Johnny's chubby little boy's fist holding it, looking for the best spot to toss it into the enemy camp.

Memories. Treasures.

Green Pastures and Still Waters

I cried this morning when I found out. Alone in my house, I cried.

I stopped blogging earlier this year when I figured that I’d said everything my estranged kids should know about the father they cast out years ago when they were children. Since then I have posted on facebook, although it is so much less satisfying than blogging.

Facebook is informative, however, sort of like wandering by a public bulletin board. When you glance over the tiny posts your friends publish, occasionally something will absolutely rivet you.

This morning while scrolling down the long list of all my friends, I lazily clicked onto the profile picture of someone whose page I hadn’t visited lately, a woman who participated in several of the running programs I directed in the past for my former running club. As a coach, I ran with her on Saturday long runs occasionally, and became friendly with her.

Her portrait showed a happy smiling woman standing next to a handsome virile man in uniform, her husband, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division. I ran with him a few times, doing repeats on the track whenever he accompanied his wife on program speed workouts.

She ran 400s with the other coaches and the rest of the trainees while he did his own repeats, rushing around the track at a much faster pace. Being competitive, and a better runner than most of the others in the program, I tried to run with him.

Only I couldn’t keep up. He was young, tough and strong.

Army strong. Later that year he ran the Army Ten Miler with a stress fracture and still beat my time.

This morning I looked at the picture of the winsome couple on her FB page, then glanced nonchalantly at the opening lines of recent posts on her wall. Horror instantly assailed me.

"I am sorry for your loss... ." "Your husband was... ." "Although I can’t know how you feel... ."

I knew from a post on her FB page last year that her husband had been deployed to Afghanistan. She left the area around the same time and I hadn’t seen nor heard from her her since.

The long string of posts from her friends were all dated within the last few days. With my heart pounding, I googled his name.

The search result was instantaneous. He was killed by an IED in Afghanistan on Thursday.

I knew him and had run with him, and now he was gone. I cried, yes I did, for him and for her, and for all the rest.

Bag of Dreams

HO is for scale (1:72), not Christmas.

I was in the toy section of a thrift store over the weekend when I found a bulging bag of small WW2 soldiers, HO scale, with some little vehicles and supply-train items in there too. Among the infantrymen, machine gunners and tanks in the bag were rubber rafts (for the commandos to paddle across rivers in), pontoon bridges (to lay across the Rhine River when Germany was reached) and blasted storefronts (so the tiny soldiers could lay ambushes). (Below: British Commandos on the job.)

There were hundreds of lilliputian-sized combatants in various poses of combat, wielding automatic and semi-automatic weapons suitable for clearing any street during an intense firefight. The bag was priced at $2.50. Some volunteer store clerk had taken this clear gallon baggie loaded with a boy's dreams and put it out to the uncaring public for a song.

This treasure trove represented scores of dollars (for the soldiers when new) and hundreds of hours (of memories for the boy who played with them). Put out for...anyone.

These soldiers were of a type I played with as a boy. Purchased at hobby outlets and stored in raisinette candy boxes in my room according to their nationality, these servicemen were always ready to stem the tide, hold the line, not let them pass, take the fight to the enemy. The Germans (gray) were there to provide opposition and the Tommies (tan) and Yanks (olive drab) were there to win the war. I never had any use for Russians (bluish green), after all, what did they do in the war besides partition Poland with the Germans in the first place and get it started? (Left: The Opposition. Germans.)

This bag had Russian soldiers in it though, and even some Union (blue) and Confederate (gray) Civil War troops. With this supply a boy could conduct a century's worth of pivotal campaigns from Gettysburg to Tet in one long weekend of play, alone in his bedroom with armies waxing and waning across the floor.

I felt bad for the boy whose Mother (or the decedent whose estate) had so cavalierly packaged up all of these memories and sent them down to the local secondary retail outlet. I purchased the bag full of soldiers and put it on a shelf in the empty bedroom of my son who used to play with toy soldiers. (Last summer I came across three decrepit green plastic armymen embedded in the dirt behind the garage, at an old battle site of his obviously, and I near to cried.) Although I examined the tiny soldiers in their various poses through the clear bag, I didn’t have the heart to open it and paw through it. (Below: The wages of war. A Barclay Podfoot Dimestore Lead Soldier (bigger than HO scale) sporting a wound and perambulating about on crutches.)