War child

I am a war child.

This is an unusual statement considering the times in which I came of age. I began to understand there was a world outside my immediate family and friends in the late 1960s, considered the peace generation. I then formed in what would be formally called the Me Generation of the next decade when everyone seemed to want to catch and express their feelings to anyone. If you weren't "sensitive," you weren't alive.

I've been insulted by that last accusation repeatedly in later years. I've tried to consider sensitive a compliment, but when it's spit in derision and accompanied by a shaking of the head, it's a bit more difficult. Eventually, as a Texas male of advancing years, I just shoved the sensitivity as deep inside as I could to join society.

Yet beneath those layers, I still considered calm and peace my preference. Until a recent random event made me realize how much hawk is in my history and system. But maybe not my soul.

The event was a quick business trip to San Antonio in which I skirted the air base there. While rushing down the highway, I caught a flash of a silver dart in the blue sky. It was some pilot practicing his skills and testing his talents. But his silent slip through the morning churned up a childhood memory I hadn't recognized in decades.

From the time I was about 8 until I approached teenagehood, I lived in a little suburb that was adjacent to an airbase and an aerospace research and production facility in Fort Worth. Almost everyone in the ill-named town of White Settlement worked at one of those sites or in some support business.

It wasn't a drab air base and barracks type of town though. In those 1960s underdevelopment times in Texas, there were still big open fields around my elementary school, a creek cutting through the western portion of the town ending in a decent sized canyon. But there was no doubt it was a defense town in function.

If nothing else screamed that fact, it was a certain kind of nonchalance in children of my age.

You see, in the beginning the air base was what was referred to as a SAC base, or Strategic Air Command. Rumor was there were atomic weapons on the base. That was spurred by the fact there were definitely B-52 airplanes on the base, the delivery system for atomic bombs in those days. Every day, those behemoth planes practiced taking off, circling around to the runways, almost landing and taking off again. They were called touch and gos. And they would magnificently roar over large portions of White Settlement at low altitudes keeping our nation ready for unbelievable destruction.

I lived there long enough for the ways of war to change and the nation to believe might wasn't in just whales of planes, but sharks of the sky, fighter planes that could deliver mass destruction with amazing speed. Next to the airbase they were developing and then building the F-14, one of the nation's first true fighter jets. Which meant they had to be tested. Their contribution to our lives were often huge screams of engines blasting what seemed like only fuselages with the swept back wings into hundreds of miles an hour. Even if they got high enough to give us some distance, the day was often shattered with a sonic boom as somewhere above they broke the sound barrier.

Living next to war might isn't what I think made me a war child. It is how institutionalized I and those around me became to it. Visitors would often physically flinch at passing planes. Some would fall to the ground at a sonic boom. They would cover their ears. But I can still see in my mind's eye my friends and I playing in a yard, never altering a step or squeal to what was going on above us. Oblivious. I remember simply going forward with my class work as the entire room shook with a passing plane. Unaware. I recall teachers simply pausing when a lecture was drowned out by flight and picking up right where they left off when the cacophony moved past. Undeterred.

Last week when I let the distant pilot catch my eye, I was surprised. My natural reaction seemed to have changed. Or maybe just sublimated like my sensitivity. I wonder if being a war child is a learned behavior and natural reaction is never really lost.

I am a coward

About four months ago, I took an emotional blow. It wasn't a surprise, had been building for months prior. No one else could be blamed either, I pretty much pulled the trigger myself.
Although I knew I needed to take the shot, I also knew it would hurt more than usual. Because it grew out of a time I made myself vulnerable and I lost.
So I made a conscious decision, something I call The Pretender. It comes from a Jackson Brown song in which he vows to just go to work in the morning, get up each day and live an emotional base life. I decided I would put all my energies into such a state, not review how I felt in either my mind or in written words.
I resigned from the world of writing on purpose. Because it makes me think about why I feel what I do, and I simply didn't want to shoulder that. I really thought it best. I probably thought I would wallow otherwise.
Ah, how those who think they know so much lie to themselves so easily.
I managed to honor my vow for quite some time. Even if I got the urge, I told myself to be strong. I needed to let my emotions find an even keel before we tangled face to face.
It's something I've done thousands of times in my life. The outcome is always the same. The emotions are still there. They don't settle, but seethe. I just try to kill them. In the process, I slowly kill myself.
But somewhere inside that seems better than fighting the battle I know is there. It is the worst kind of cowardice. It is internal cowardice. I'm not doing the rational thing. I'm giving in to fear.
I still haven't faced the exact situation that made me take such a radical step of self denial. That's a type of action I thought I had learned to overcome, and hadn't taken in about a decade. At least I admit there's a ghost lurking out there. Maybe that's progress. But I still haven't sat down with my own words and let them tell me how I honestly feel about it. And I still too often reach out for potions and powders to see if they'll salve the wound I haven't even located.
I've been pondering writing this for weeks. It's not a confrontation. It's kind of sneaking up on what I somewhere know I ought to do and maybe even want to do.
But I need a shot of courage, otherwise the right words never come.

How I came to dislike my muse

Like any good long-term relationship, I met my muse in our childhoods. I was an elementary school kid in North Texas, standing against a brick wall to avoid the winter wind and feeling about as forgotten and empty as possible. I was still too young to recognize the feeling. But from somewhere I found this almost sing-songy expression of that feeling. Letting it have voice made me feel better.

In junior high, I used an assigned essay to become an inanimate object, a blade of grass, and express my life as such. I never knew from where the idea sprung up and the teacher gave me a cockeyed look for my seventh-grade strangeness. But a reluctant "A."

The muse and I really got personal in high school. That feeling from back in elementary school had never been resolved, but the muse's voice had become more focused and louder. It went directly into print. I'd crawl into a secluded corner with the muse and simply be surprised at what came out. It was about me and those around me, but it was things about which I was consciously unaware. Until the muse told them to me and made me say them.

Throughout all those years I'd had a relationship with words, but there was a growing delineation between what I said and the muse said. By the time I was a high school senior, I had a bi-weekly column in the school newspaper. But I always knew that was a character that I'd created, in part to hide the muse and the relationship I had with her. I could be a "writer" without being in danger of exposure.

About that same time, I also formed a relationship with alcohol. For several years, it was as if the drinks were my muse's portal. I'd become more uncomfortable with how well she knew me and what she made me admit and say. So I'd tried to be the character from the column more than the one the muse knew and used. But after a bout with alcohol, I'd sometimes awake to find the extended and sloppy scribbles of the muse and I wrestling in the deep night. I was stunned at how truthful and open they were. I learned from them. But I didn't want to live with them.

There came a time when I found I could drown the muse in that alcohol. I could refuse to speak to her, not see and hear her wisdom and truths. Decades later, I found that I wasn't really silencing those, but delaying them. They'd lay in wait somewhere inside me, quite often fermenting into something ugly and decimating to my life and my other relationships. I came to view the muse and her truth as a demon. Finally, I knew I had to look that demon in the eyes or it would kill me. It became a monumental struggle, but once the muse and I regained trust, we returned to lovers.

I still find it hard having a muse. She makes me uncomfortable because she calls me on my bullshit and makes me want better for myself. My muse has shown me I'm often someone who settles by speaking to me about what I really want and what reality should be. It infuriates me. It also makes me more than I show. So, I listen.

All my life, I've found having a muse to be a burden. My muse is so beautiful, I'm uncomfortably aware how others desire her. I feel unworthy to have her. I fully expect her to desert me, so I treat her badly to beat her to the punch. She cries softly for the longest periods, which disturbs me even more. But when I lose my insecurity and we make love, it is so far above anything else in my world or what I see anyone else has, I try to make amends.

But I became especially weary recently. One of the things my muse harps upon is taking chances. I had managed to completely stop that. Except in one special instance. I trusted. And it went wrong. Of course, the culprit was my muse.

For a self-mandated two months, I locked my muse in a far away room. If she whispered or screamed at me, I refused to listen. I wanted to live like those who have no muse, to see if it is a better, at least simpler, life.

Those two months have passed. I didn't like the time. It wasn't difficult, but it felt so bland, so ordinary, so pointless. It was like a clock just ticking to get to the next second.

This is my reintroduction letter to my muse. I don't know if she'll accept it. I'm honestly not certain I want her back with the same previous gusto, although the intensity has never been a choice. I'm lightly tapping on the door I myself locked.

I don't really know if there's anyone in there at all.