Good Times

In November, a reporter broke the story of the My Lai massacre, which had happened back in March of '68. Two platoons of U.S. soldiers had walked into a cluster of villages in the Quang Ngai province one morning, expecting to encounter Vietcong. Instead, they encountered families cooking breakfast, husbands and wives and elderly and children. None of them armed or even very worried, at first. Then one of the soldiers opened fire, another tossed a villager into a well and dropped in a grenade, and the rest of the soldiers joined in shooting, lobbing grenades, rounding up and executing person after person for sport. Mothers and babies, grandparents. They marched groups of villagers into ditches and shot them en masse. They raped young women in front of their families, then shot them all. Over the course of two hours, the two American platoons tortured and murdered anywhere from 350 to 500 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians. That story on everyone's breakfast table (the photos, by chance, taken by a young war photographer from Cleveland) cut through any lasting, reasonable perception that the war was under control.

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This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren't living in the past; the past is living in us. 

--Buckeye, Patrick Ryan

And yet we live as well, doggedly, necessarily, in the present moment, and moment by moment, moving through, pressing on. We live continually in the worst of times, because those are the times that are upon us, those are the times that disappoint us once again, that break our hearts, that seem a crisis perhaps insurmountable. And we are too old for this. The whole world is playing with fire. 

And then we remember that it always has been. 

Buckeye, by Patrick Ryan, reminds me of the many unpleasant fires we have all walked through, and come out on the other side, only to find a new fire burning there. Or perhaps it is the same fire burning eternally and for all generations. It is a long novel, but an easy read, in terms of flow, hearkening back to an older style of American narrative, reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser. It is a story, and no more than a story really. It is a reminder of the '40s and the '50s and the '60s and the '70s--those years that created all of us old fogies of the present time. There is no other story lurking beneath the surface, no mystery to interpret. But it is the years themselves that interpret us. We move along through love, relationship, betrayal, repentance, forgiveness, regret, loss, grief; we all live and know and experience the same things in various shades. It is built into life, and this life is played out on the stage of a world constantly at war, relentlessly ruthless, inclined toward evil. It has always been so. We merely forget, and call these years the good old days.