leaned his back against the wall and slid down it until he was sitting next to the old man on the warm ground. His legs straightened and splayed before him on the concrete like a formless scarecrow. He said, Before someone can even be considered for sainthood they have to be nominated by a local congregation, so I’m going to need to get some support from the church. And then, farther down the line, the higher-ups will review my writings, among other things. I’m hoping they can publish it in the weekly bulletin and I can start to build a reputation.
A reputation?
Or a baseline, or a portfolio, or something. You know?
I don’t.
Silvio shrugged and then reached down to brush off a fly that had landed on his outstretched and hairy shin. The old man continued,
Sil, I told you. This isn’t what I was talking about. This saint stuff. It’s crazy.
And I appreciate that you feel that way. But you need to understand that it’s even crazier if I don’t have your help. You’ve been here for a long time and if you vouch for me it could really help out.
I don’t even know what I’m vouching for.
Just think of me like Saint Francis de Sales, only better.
Silvio. I don’t know.
Silvio looked at him for another moment and offered a short smile before reaching his arm up awkwardly to give the old man’s shoulder a soft squeeze. He rose to his feet and began walking up the hot pavement when the old man spoke again from behind him.
I’ll see what I can do.
Silvio turned back toward the church with a grin and said, I appreciate it. I really do.
Silvio turned again to walk away, but threw his hands up and faced the old man. He said, But just so you know, I was kidding about that Saint Francis stuff. I’m not a great writer or anything like that.
It’s okay.
I just wanted to be upfront with you.
I got it, Sil.
The old man offered a curt nod of his head as Silvio began to walk away again down the lonely sidewalk that, in two-point-one miles, would land him on his front doorstep.
Make lemonade, the old man called after him.
Silvio stopped. What?
I said make lemonade.
What on earth is that supposed to mean?
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
Where did that come from?
It’s a saying.
Well why are you telling it to me?
I’m telling you to deal with what you got.
By making lemonade?
By making something bad into something good.
What’s wrong with the lemons?
There’s nothing wrong with the lemons.
You just said they were bad.
The lemons are fine. It’s just that the lemonade is better.
Silvio raised a skeptical eyebrow. Just because you don’t like lemons doesn’t make that a saying.
——————————————————————
My parents believed in small government, low tax rates, and an America that touted its diversity a hell of a lot more than it embodied it. They were proud Christians for one hour every Sunday, and I tried to be one too. But I didn’t care much for the masses. Their numbing repetition of ritual never did it for me. It’s a damn wonder why I ever got into the military with that kind of attitude, but that’s exactly what I did. I figure you can look back on a lot of things in life that didn’t turn out the way you wanted and not make much sense of them, even with all of that hindsight. I guess now I see that if only one or two decisions fit into that category, then that can be your whole life. Ask any non-habitual offender who is in prison. They’ll tell ya. One or two decisions that don’t jive with anything else you have ever done, and that can define every moment of your existence. Scary stuff.
Anyway, the people at the church were all friendly and they sucked on their smiles and I don’t have much else to say about them. There was one Sunday, when I was a freshman in high school, and a boy from the congregation a few years older than me had just graduated and enlisted to be a marine. There were rumors in the school that he was gay, and he was teased for it, but he had never come out and nobody really knew. Anyway, the guy up front had just finished a short sermon on the irreligiousness of homosexuality when he had the soon-to-be marine stand and be the target of a large group prayer. While the rest of the congregation craned their bodies and bowed their necks to better pray for him, I couldn’t help but wonder at if he was possibly gay, or not. I wondered what it was worth to pray for someone who is already doomed, because it seems like the waste of a perfectly good prayer. And here’s the real justification behind the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell—not the wasted prayers, but the guilt. It’s hard enough, if people are willing to face it, to live with the guilt of knowing that others are out there fighting and dying for their country while the average person, at most, contributes only a small wealth of taxes (and even those they complain about). And to complicate this guilt with the possibility that some soldiers are, by the civilian’s measure, reprehensible beings, is too much for most people, as reprehensible as they are. Because they don’t want to know about the lives of soldiers. They have standards for what type of person is good enough to die for them. Imagine that. But it’s not that complicated in my mind. Not at all. If someone is willing to die for me then I’m just going to shut the fuck up about everything else. And if there’s people who want to raise the standards in regards to who is qualified to die on their behalf, then it’s my belief they should be the ones out there in the desert, sniffing out IED’s so that the dogs and the rest of the decent folk can get on with being decent.
My friend Jude was like that. He was as decent as they came and willing to die for a lot of people who weren’t worth it. But I’m biased in regards to Jude, who appeared on base without knowing a soul and actually wanting to go to war. By then, nobody in the unit had a mindset to make new friends, and Jude was met mostly by the unit as an outsider. But I tried not to be like that. I think it helped that I didn’t know that Beatles song about his name. Some guys in the unit liked to serenade him with that song but I didn’t figure out for a while what the hell was going on. Had these guys lost it or what? I thought they might be an on-base glee club that I didn’t know about, but they weren’t. They thought I was lying about not knowing the song, or that I was crazy. I wasn’t either of those. And I don’t know what the big deal is, because I still haven’t ever heard the song they were singing.
Jude was the all-American type—tall, handsome, smart, and athletic. He was especially athletic. His limbs were long and tight, and even the most mundane task, such as brushing his teeth, was accompanied by the bulging and rippling of his forearm. He bounded through physical training exercises with ease, and even though I marveled at his and ability, from afar, for several weeks, it was he who first spoke to me. It was after hours, I was in my bunk, and he began a conversation about the book I was reading. It was a generic conversation about a generic fantasy paperback, and it didn’t take much to figure out that he just needed to talk to somebody about anything. I didn’t have much to say about myself, and so we talked about the book. I figured that the fantasy wouldn’t interest him greatly, but that didn’t stop me from filling him in on the important details of this particular installment (the fourth in the series), and about the significant bloodlines and mythic items that were the key players for the author. He listened intently and asked good questions, and while at first I thought he was just being polite, I began to sense his genuine interest. As our conversation moved forward, he claimed he hadn’t read fantasy before. In school, he had occupied virtually allof his extracurricular hours with athletics, and when he was forced to read outside of his English syllabus, he gravitated toward paperback Westerns, because, in his words,