MILITARY – ADVENTURERS IN SINGLE LIVINGNESS

HOW ONE SOLDIER CHANGED THE COMMUNITY OF SOLANA BEACH, CA

For many of us, the idea of aging is frightening. We have been led to believe it brings pain, loneliness, and idle time for regressing mentally. Remedies, products, prescriptions, and escapes offer youthful looks, energy, and vitality. The thought of aging is brutal; we pretend we can buy youth. What if you met a man who told you he could do everything today, at eighty-four, that he did all his life without injections, medicine, special diet, or specific training?

What if I told you all his family, including his brothers, mother, and father, is gone? His wife died twenty years ago. That he lives alone and is not lonely. He claims he is the happiest man in the world. Would you want to meet him? He wants to meet you. He would like to be everyone’s neighbor. He has much to teach in a country of strangers about meeting neighbors and making friends. We who know proclaim him an inspiration, a legend, an angel. And to that, he always replies, “I‘m just a regular guy.”

Maurice Roberts has lived in Solana Beach since 1936, and his recollections of the area are intact. I recorded his history and began writing everything down. Next week, I will start the first in a series of historical perspectives.

IT’S CALLED NON-CONVENTIONAL but on our own personal level, if you fall in that broad culture and it is a unique and historically significant tribe, especially in the arts and the military. Artists skip from creating to counting change, very few make a comfortable living. The Military are more unconventional than any other profession. I’ve tried to imagine choosing to fight our wars knowing I could be shot or tortured.

Do you think that not choosing the basics: family, friends and a comfortable living are enough? They are, now I know that.

How did this become my spotlight, like a bulb that flickered and whispered, you thought you knew more. Well, I didn’t and now I am adapting my fictional life to nonfiction. Beginning with: relinquishing luxuries, vacations, replacing outdated or broken furnishings, buying my favorite designer garments, and most important a monthly budget. Now instead of withdrawing from my savings account, I am depositing. Friends and family pose a more rigorous effort to the depts. I’m a loner. There is nothing glamorous or mystifying about this stain at least not for me, more like solitude for longer periods of time.

Photo by Philip Townsend. London 1964

As I watch and hear the interviews of Veterans, Gold Star Families, Military groups, former Iraq and Afghanistan Marines, Army, The Navy and Airforce, and the ones left behind because their hero was killed have one knot that holds them together, and it is their family, their comrades in arms and friends.

It’s raining, the tiniest little drops, like new bourns. The sky is a saddened muted white gray, like it’s in mourning. Hoagie Carmichael is singing Two Little People, simple lines that rhyme. Without music, and I don’t listen as much as I did a month ago, I’d be in bed today, it is a day for music medics to carry my pen where it sinks.

I was selfish, spoiled, and myopic, now I am awake to eternal gratefulness for being born American.

Trying not to watch the news as my heart needs a reprieve from Afghanistan. I’ve never appreciated, honored, respected, and loved our Military more these past two weeks. Do you know that feeling? What happens next? Eventually this presses to a USA attack.

Buck up guys and dolls and be a civilian soldier.