byChrisWhite – 2014

In the half-light of early morning, before the keening of crows and the purr of coffeepots, I sit with a pen that fails to distinguish between wisdom and whimsy, and I write. About nothing in particular. About everything at once. This, perhaps, is the nature of those born with restless minds—and knees that crack when bent too quickly.

If you’ve been kind enough to linger with me over these past six months, you’ve likely noticed the scattershot nature of my topics, the way my musings lurch between the metaphysical and the mundane, like a hound chasing a scent only it can smell. I am, by confession and compulsion, drawn equally to theology and barbecue, to meditations on death and the peculiar obstinance of Bassett Hounds. My subjects wander. As do I.

Now, those who know me best—a dwindling tribe marked by patience, prescription refills, and half-forgiven debts—have wondered aloud and often why I do not, with so much time and terrain underfoot, devote my words to what I am said to know best. Guns. Tactics. Training. The lexicon of recoil and precision. I could, they insist, write volumes. And I have. Manuals, hundreds of pages long, whose prose is dense with ballistic terminology and annotated with footnotes like tombstones. There are institutions, some with gates and others with sandbags, that still use my work to separate the wheat from the chaff. If a man can survive this book, they jest, he can survive anything. But jest is too kind a word for some truths.

The truth, plain and splintered, is that I write here not to instruct but to breathe. This space is not for pedagogy. It is for exhale. I keep the details of doctrine for the range, for the clink of brass casings on concrete and the smell of cordite clinging to canvas. I come here instead to unburden myself of thought—not sharpened, but softened. Not aimed, but loosed.

I am not one of those parched souls who struggle to find a subject. I could write about the patterns in spilled sugar, if pressed. But style, you see, style is a thing other men seem to pursue with trembling care, like curators of a delicate fossil. I cannot be bothered. I have never aspired to cultivate a literary signature, only legibility. What spills from my head comes unvarnished, unfiltered, and occasionally unwise. I do not apologize for this. There are greater sins than transparency.

When my son was thirteen, all long limbs, adolescent odors, and unspent rage, I told him something I hoped he might carry into manhood like a tool or a weapon. Son, I said, when a man begins to take himself too seriously, everyone else stops. I said it without irony and with the full authority of someone who had once rappelled down a cliff to impress a girl and landed in a nest of angry wasps. My son blinked once. Nodded. Whether he remembers or not is immaterial. I remember.

That bit of dubious wisdom was born of a man I once knew, a friend more fantasy than flesh. He was the sort of fellow who wore his exaggerations like medals. One day, a weekend deputy; the next, a covert intelligence officer with tales of narrow escapes in exotic cities whose names he mispronounced. My mother, whose mercy is boundless and whose judgment is sound, said only this: Well, he has a good imagination. Which was her genteel way of saying he was full of it.

And now I am fifty. Not ancient. But enough. The last vestiges of what once passed for cool cling to my curls, still black in the right light. The rest of me has fallen into negotiations with gravity. My mornings begin with the sorting of pills, and somewhere in the midst of that ritual, I must decide whether to admit I forgot what I was supposed to do today, or if I simply declined to do it. One is forgivable. The other is harder to explain.

There was a time when I moved with purpose, with agility, with the foolhardy confidence of someone whose joints had never issued threats. I was not fearless, but I was shameless. I have scars that serve as landmarks on the terrain of who I used to be. These days, I eye the ladder with suspicion, calculating angles and probabilities, as if climbing to the roof might provoke the wrath of the gods.

Emily met me too late to know that man. She found me when the adrenaline and testosterone had thinned to a trickle and my ambitions had been largely archived. Still, I have kept up appearances. The occasional story, well-paced and just vague enough to impress. The hair, miraculously intact. The bravado, trimmed to domestic proportions. I take the trash out with a swagger.

But the truth leaks through. It always does. One day, she will ask why the roof still leaks, and I will have no excuse. Only the quiet admission that it is not forgetfulness that kept me from the task, but vertigo. The kind that starts in the knees and works its way up into the part of the brain that used to be brave.

And when that day comes, I imagine she will laugh. Not cruelly. Just enough to remind me that I am not who I was, but I am still hers. And that is, perhaps, the only identity I care to maintain. Let the rest of it fall away. The manuals, the medals, the myths. Let them crumble. Let them rot.

I am not here to impress. I am here to remember. And if you find something of yourself in these words, then perhaps we have both won something worth keeping.