A VIEW FROM THE BONEYARD

I think about Sheldon when I use the ladder or the gas can or any of the other good, solid things he left behind, and when I finish any of his projects like the loft, or the electrical work.  Then I remember the industrial woodworking machinery we had to sell to pay his back rent, because he lost hope and went to Colorado to kill himself.  Several of those machines just needed some little adjustment or troubleshooting, which he could have done as well or better than I if he hadn’t been depressed, if everything didn’t just seem to be too much for him.  I think about him every time there’s a voice or just a feeling in my own head that says, you can’t do it.

He didn’t have a remarkably oppressed life, just a grinding one.  He’d been in the Navy during Reagan’s glorious conquest of Granada.  He had a new Harley and an SUV.  There was just something in the air around him, something in the commands from superiors, that kept telling him you can’t win.  You can do rubbings on the placards of large, old buildings, you can work at the power company but you can’t get in to the places from which the power is doled out to the chosen ones.  You may be strong and handsome but women don’t like you because you care too much, you shrink from conquest.  You do not warm their hearts like winter sunlight.  Your seed is inferior.

I can still feel all those long, bumpy trips out to the homeless vets' shelter next to the boneyard at the air force base and it’s like I’m still asking, in lieu of the real questions,

'

How’s the group therapy going?

O, OK.

And taking him to apply for a commercial woodworking job and him saying,

I’m just not ready. 

Always the same approach/avoidance problem, getting really close to the top of the mountain and then turning around and going back down, leaving all his gear behind.  And who am I to take advantage of his camping equipment?  Someone just a few inches closer to the top of some mountain that’s not worth dying on? No, wait, that’s what he’d say.  And what can I say?  Sheldon, I want to tell him, we don’t owe anybody that much respect.  Respect has to be earned and throughout all of human history, the mass of men have squandered their moral authority.  The value of a flag that’s been bought and sold hundreds of times over is incalculable.  So until the accountants get that figured out you may stand at ease, soldier. As a matter of fact, DISMISSED! Go, do, be what you need to be on behalf of all those whose failures were only a bogus construct of group ego.  I now declare you a free man.  But it’s useless.  Like those who oppressed me, stood on their crumbling podiums and talked about themselves while they thought they were condemning me, his demons are destroyed by bomb after bomb and just reconstitute themselves out of the rubble.  I can’t take the stones out of his heart. 

The planes in the boneyard will never fly again.  They just sit there under the sun and rain, weathering all the storms, the desert stretching beyond them, heavy covers on their windshields, like people blind to everything beyond what they're told.