SURPLUS
It was one of those army surplus jeeps, World War 2 vintage, the kind you’d see advertized in the back pages of comic books. 99 bucks, unassembled, crated to the Colonel’s house, for his son who built It from the ground up.
The son, a senior in high school who shared his father’s Military bearing--buzz-cut, axle-straight, nothing surplus about them, and like the jeep, built for combat terrain.
The father was off in Vietnam and his son had his own mission—to transport his band of younger friends back along the path through the woods, to the most level and pristine football field ever, all the more pure for its lack of bleachers and fans.
To get there he had re-trench the rutted road, 12 of us crammed in the uncapped windshield-less jeep for the 20 minute scuttle to play.
If I had to describe it now, at this very moment, I’d say it was as choppy as the final presto movement of Shostakovich’s 6th symphony, written on the eve of war. I say this, watching my daughter on the far right of the stage (the world stage) scraping and slapping her bass.
A ride just as perilous as our jeep run.
We had no equipment other than a ball, no goal posts beyond the perfect hedgerows. It was to be a game of touch, but it was always more.
It’s only now as I ride out the vertiginous music that I recall the huge fenced-in farm tract along the path, with its put-to-pasture racing mares, and dusty oval where their offspring were pushed beyond endurance, Prodded, poked, whipped into a froth of speed.
Or the unshorn lambs, floating like rain clouds over the hillside, their twig-like legs an undecipherable scrawl—that if it spelled anything, spelled for us the littleness of everything but the bump and grind Of slipping gears and our destination.
Which was, I learned years later, the back lawn of a secret Mental Hospital that catered to the children of the worldwide rich and famous. ….
(unfinished)
It was one of those army surplus jeeps, World War 2 vintage, the kind you’d see advertized in the back pages of comic books. 99 bucks, unassembled, crated to the Colonel’s house, for his son who built It from the ground up.
The son, a senior in high school who shared his father’s Military bearing--buzz-cut, axle-straight, nothing surplus about them, and like the jeep, built for combat terrain.
The father was off in Vietnam and his son had his own mission—to transport his band of younger friends back along the path through the woods, to the most level and pristine football field ever, all the more pure for its lack of bleachers and fans.
To get there he had re-trench the rutted road, 12 of us crammed in the uncapped windshield-less jeep for the 20 minute scuttle to play.
If I had to describe it now, at this very moment, I’d say it was as choppy as the final presto movement of Shostakovich’s 6th symphony, written on the eve of war. I say this, watching my daughter on the far right of the stage (the world stage) scraping and slapping her bass.
A ride just as perilous as our jeep run.
We had no equipment other than a ball, no goal posts beyond the perfect hedgerows. It was to be a game of touch, but it was always more.
It’s only now as I ride out the vertiginous music that I recall the huge fenced-in farm tract along the path, with its put-to-pasture racing mares, and dusty oval where their offspring were pushed beyond endurance, Prodded, poked, whipped into a froth of speed.
Or the unshorn lambs, floating like rain clouds over the hillside, their twig-like legs an undecipherable scrawl—that if it spelled anything, spelled for us the littleness of everything but the bump and grind Of slipping gears and our destination.
Which was, I learned years later, the back lawn of a secret Mental Hospital that catered to the children of the worldwide rich and famous. ….
(unfinished)
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