Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 4
It has been such an exquisite autumn day, Chaplain Chase! It started with a brisk two-hour morning class, which I had the honor of instructing as the Flying Dragon’s understudy. Today I spent a great amount of time teaching the yellow belts how to stand correctly in their three basic stances, front, back and horse. It takes years to train a good stance, and that’s why an expert can size up a fighter from the way he stands. Stance is earth in martial arts, the foundation for all the water, wind and fire of techniques. [Editor’s emphasis, in all cases]
After class Master Yu invited me and several of the better color belts to join him at coffee in the dojang anteroom. He instructed them in the points of etiquette of the Korean coffee ceremony as I beat a rope-covered board with various techniques to toughen my hands and learn to focus my blows. After drinks were distributed properly, we assembled and paid him Korean courtesies. Using a mix of English and Korean, I engaged him in a short conversation on the long staff, and he recommended that I begin to fence with a stick hung (in balance) from a tree.
Color
belts are not invited to speak, so they kept quiet waiting for him or me to
talk more about tae kwon do, but we didn’t.
They shifted their expectant eyes from me, who sat like a fool staring
at the wall sipping the steaming coffee, and Master Yu, who sat staring into
the opposite wall petting a favorite snapping turtle. When I finished, I bowed and paid my
instructor Korean respects, and received farewells in English and Spanish from
my motley crew of students. They didn’t
know why I was smiling as I walked out.
It was because in his one sentence of advice the Flying Dragon had given me a task that will challenge me for years!
Afterwards, guitar in hand, I went to my coffee house to watch the theatre of bourgeois white folks. It was still too autumnal for them, though (Texans are wimps in the cold), so I enjoyed a cup of French roast alone as I sat outside on the chilly terrace, watching doves and waiting for Mrs. May to meet me for a morning out on the town. Mr. Ramirez, a philosophical worker friend of mine from Mexico, came around the corner of the plaza with a big bag slung over his shoulder, sweating as he picked-up the trash (elegantly-dropped by the high-class folks of River Oaks while they were busy admiring one another’s prospects and pudenda).
Usually we don’t talk while he’s working, because his boss is a Gringo who employs him thirty-something hours each week to avoid paying him benefits, but begrudges him the time it takes to catch his breath. Mr. Ramirez has two jobs like this, with which he supports his wife and a child. This time, though, the coast was clear for him, so he greeted me with a hearty “Hola, mi capitan!”
I smiled and replied in
Spanish. Soon enough, we were talking in
earnest and I was offering the observation that the same kind of dumb white
trash he is cleaning-up after are the folks who are ruling the world. He agreed, but said that he hoped that one
day he and his children would be able to live like white trash, too. We laughed together. He is my Spanish teacher (he speaks little
English) and, equally importantly, is my contact with the way the world appears
a few hundred miles south of
After five minutes of revolution, Mr. Ramirez sighed and reshouldered his burden with an “Adios, mi capitan!” He is cheerful for all the woes of his lot, which never fails to make me feel less-oppressed by mine.
Next Jim came out with a cup of coffee. He’s a fiftyish freethinker who plays baby-boomer gigs for respectable clubs. He’s my guitar teacher, and has taught me the Beatles’ Eight Days a Week, Let It Be and (today) the first twelve bars of Strawberry Fields. He’s patient as I fumble with the instrument. I laugh at my own errors and keep on trying, which I suspect to be the secret of success in most pursuits.
The sun stood at ten o’clock, and things were warm enough for the local Bohemians to appear in force and join the conversational circle. I handed the guitar to Jim because I can’t talk and play at the same time. Everyone knows me and my theories, and is interested without being incited, so we didn’t dwell on the Battle of Baghdad or the war. (I figure that if they’re not interested now, they’ll find-out everything well-enough when we mobilize and begin the draft.) I lit a cigar as they lit cigs and we talked about Zen. Jim strummed Let It Be, the way it oughta sound – as I wondered why that damn guitar never sounds right when I play it…
The symposium was somewhere between Zen and Tae Kwon Do when Mrs. May arrived, and I rose to join her. Boys will always be boys, of course. Someone asked for a martial arts demonstration before I left. I looked around and saw that by now there were too many people on the terrace for any dynamic display, so instead I took a last drag off my cigar, making its cherry glow orange, then neatly ground it out on a knuckle as I said goodbye. A couple of boys I didn’t know asked if I’d ever tried to do that with a cigarette, which they believed would burn hotter. I hadn’t, and wondered if a cigarette would indeed burn hotter than a cigar, so I took the nearest cig from the nearest boy and snuffed it out with another knuckle…
In case you’re wondering, the answer is no,
a cigarette does not burn as hot as a cigar, but I smiled silently and walked
away without telling them. If they want
to know badly enough they can read my book – or try my experiment.
Mrs. May and I sat and
enjoyed the best weather that’s blown in this fall. The sky was clear and the wind mildly northern, and I played the Beatles until we’d whiled away
the morning. She read the Chronicle, but
I was having too nice a time to bother. [LOL -- Ed] She’s thinking of buying a new house, being
under the delusion that it would be nice to live with white folks again, but
I’m holding out for the hood, where there’s only one white mail box (mine) and
one white male (me) for a mile in any direction. Mrs. May insists that there are other white
folks here and there, but they must be too scared to be sociable, ‘cause I
never see ‘em.
We drove through a couple of respectable neighborhoods to look at houses
on the way home. The sight of it turned
my stomach so bad that I was happy to get back to the terra cognita of northeast
Imagine how complete my happiness was when Mrs. May (just now) brought in the mail with a package from you… Ever paranoid, I paid a local bum five dollars to open it across the street from the house. (Not really, Chase, but you’d believe it if I said so, wouldn’t you?) Actually, I was so confident that it was no (ticking) Trojan horse that I brought it into my walls, trusting as Priam, to discover its surprise – and was blown away.
Blown away, that is, by With Napoleon in Russia, from General Caulaincourt’s memoirs. I have already begun its foreword, and am only writing you this quickly because I expect to be soon too absorbed reading to write at all. It is a perfect gift, Herr Untermeyer, and it will have a place of honor in my humble library beside my volume of T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, my black belt certificate, a piece of artwork from the Middle East (given me by Mike the Moslem) and my goat skull, Yorick, whom I stole from a witch’s cave in Sanderson, Texas (you may remember that story from my bicycle ride to Mexico a few years back).
I intend to take General Caulaincourt along with me when I am out and about the town and forests. I shall sit on the ground like a thorough cynic, martial artist and April Fool, reading it from beneath my cowboy hat and behind my shades as the sun travels its slow circle overhead, its arc declining southward day by day as we near the winter solstice. Perhaps in his memoir I shall find a reminder of where we Americans are on our own arc of rise, ascent, decline and fall.
While I was a seventeen-year-old trooper in the First Cavalry, I always enjoyed staying in my quarters those nights when I wasn’t on maneuvers, and was quite the barracks rat. I had the place to myself (although I shared it with two hundred men) simply because I went to bed at six in the evening while the other soldiers were carousing, and woke to study at midnight – while they were sleeping off their evening revelries. This discovery that I could take what no one else wanted (in this case the early morning hours) and make it paradise was quite liberating.
In the three years of my
enlistment I studied extensively, and my favorite teachers were Will and Ariel
Durant, who wrote The Story of
Civilization in twelve volumes and ten thousand pages. It took me a year and a half to read it all,
but I was too enchanted to be in a hurry.
Napoleon was the final historic figure they covered, and as far as I was
concerned, they had saved the best for last.
Like many a would-be warrior, I became part of the Emperor cult. (The same thing happened to Prince Andrew in War and Peace.) I adopted the Emperor’s cause (whatever it
was) above that nation of British shopkeepers who were (as I then saw it)
damned lucky that the Germans had come in time to save them at
Tolstoy, whom I rate above
any English novelist (or English historian for that matter), takes an
interesting, contrary, view of Napoleon.
He speculates that the man we call such a great leader was as
insignificant and swept up in the forces of history as any private under his
command.
Chaplain Chase, I confess I’m confused on the subject, but ever since my Napoleon ran into my Tolstoy, I’ve needed the straight-up story from someone. I’m hoping that Caulaincourt is my man, because he was, like your humble captain, a general staff officer who knew how to look around him. Thank you for giving me the chance to meet this new friend. I will read him with all the more interest now because of my fear that we may yet recoil from our great expedition as the Emperor did from his. I believe I will find that Caulaincourt’s With Napoleon in Russia timely again, a good sign for any book aspiring to be a timeless classic.
Vive l’Empereur! (and I’m smiling again),
Captain May
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