Ten Years Back

 

A post from May 5, 2014:

 

Ah, it was a cool early Saturday morning, particularly – no, exceptionally – clear and crisp.  The air felt lighter, and instead of breathing in the new season, it breathed me in.  The wife and girls back home were frantically preparing for a family obligation while I, already freshly showered and in my Sunday Bests, motored off to run a few quick errands.

 

I pulled into a shady spot at the library parking lot.  Rolled down the windows, reclined the driver’s seat by twenty degrees.  The library would not open until ten o’clock this glorious morning, and I had the empty parking lot to myself for forty minutes.

 

I opened A Stillness at Appomattox, and as if stepping through some weird spacetime portal I was on those Virginian fields, convoying with the Army of the Potomac as it rushed feverishly to beat – unsuccessfully – Robert E. Lee and his forces to a sleepy crossroads town called Spotsylvania.  And a few pages after that, poor old General John Sedgwick of Grant’s Sixth Corps, known affectionately as “Uncle John” to his troops, was tragically killed by a sniper’s bullet, shot below the left eye, after bragging to his flinching subordinates that those Confederate sharpshooters hidden in the faraway trees “couldn’t hit an elephant from this distance.”

 

I put the book down and studied the blue cloudless sky, fragmented and framed by budding tree leaves, and appreciated ever the more this spring day commune.

 

*****

 

How much can change in a decade!

 

Now I live 1,500 miles away in a hot, arid environment unlike the northeast. My girls are no longer in grammar school and kindergarten – my oldest daughter is studying in Italy and my youngest just returned from her job – her first “on the books” – at a coffeeshop. I work three days from home and commute the other two to an office building adjacent to the Dallas Cowboys practice facility.

 

Back then I’d worry about how to pay for roof repairs or a new paint job to keep my home from assuming the position of worst house on the block to worrying about how to pay for two college educations and a retirement creeping ever so closer. I’m healthier now in ways I was not back in those day, but I am also unhealthier in other ways I thought not about in 2014.

 

But – I am still a reader.

 

And – I have another one of historian Bruce Catton’s works staring balefully from a stack behind me: Mr. Lincoln’s Army, technically Book One of the trilogy that ended with the book I read ten years ago, A Stillness at Appomattox. It’s been calling out to me patiently and incessantly for several weeks now, but I’ve told it in no uncertain terms that I must read through my Clancy phase first. So, perhaps, I will get to it by summer’s end in another great synchronous echo of time that seems to loop back in forth in my life year after year.

 

Ten years ago today I had pulled into a shady spot in a library parking lot. Today I have a similar semi-secluded spot to escape for an hour or so here and there and get some reading and thinking done. The more things change, the more they stay the same …