Saddle Up Your Antelope

The death of a dream is only slightly less tragic than the death of a child. Yet dreams do die. They wither, fade and drop their petals to the ground sometimes for no apparent reason. Sometimes the seeds of our dreams follow those petals into the dust and are reborn. Yet other times those seeds mutate into nightmares that chase us down the slopes of sanity and into eternity.

This blog is dedicated to Marshall; a tall, all-American, Marlborough-man-type hunk and a most poignant prisoner of war who died alone in Viet Nam many, many years after he came home to embrace those who loved him. He’d been a munitions expert; dropped into battle to repair weapons and ‘troubleshoot’ under fire. But once on his way back to camp, he sat down alone on a stump in a strangely tranquil rice paddy. There he inexplicably slipped into a catatonic state and lost three days of his life.

He was never able to shake the confusion, fear, embarrassment and doubt that grew out of that beautiful, peaceful place to haunt his every moment. He came home to the anti-war movement and got spit on at the airport. But he had a wife and kids whom he loved. They needed him. He got a job and tried to put the war behind him.

Then they saw an anti-war movie that lit a match to the pyre of his homecoming. What if he flipped out again; if the rage and horror of war that still smoldered within him suddenly exploded at home on his family? Those doubts and fears became the goons that stalked him on the way to work each day. Then it happened again at work; he sat down and got ‘lost’ for three days, just like he did in that rice paddy back in ‘Nam.

He couldn’t take any chances. He kissed his kids goodbye and divorced the wife he loved. He struggled on alone embracing meaningless, endless work while craving the intimacy he feared until he finally took his own life with his own gun; the gun he’d built in ‘Nam; the same gun he’d unwrapped from a cloth in a fragrant Florida twilight and showed me so lovingly, so proudly.

Frank was a New Yorker and a ‘Nam vet. I had the audacity to ask him about it; he’d been to hell and I wanted to know how it was. I was young, sweet and innocent back then so he said, "Well, I’ll tell you what I learned there." He paused as if sighting a target then dropped his load; "Life is like a purple antelope on a field of cream cheese."

He looked into me for a second, evaluating, then asked, "Know what that means?" I lowered my eyes. He’d humiliated me so gently. I looked to him, an older man, for a taste of philosophy and he’d foisted a puzzle on me. Shrugging I confessed, "It doesn’t make much sense." He smiled and reassured me; "You’re smarter than most."

Then he told me a cute story about how he and a buddy decided that no trip to ‘Nam would be complete without a water buffalo ride. Eventually a water buffalo lumbered down the road driven by a tiny boy with an even tinier stick. One of them climbed onto the beast while the other tried to make it go. Pushing, shoving, shouting, slaps, kicks; nothing.

The boy stood at the side of the road watching, wearing little more than a smug, amused smile. They appealed to him through a formidable language barrier until he finally obliged. He stepped up to the huge animal, tiny stick in hand.

They wondered what on earth he could do with that thin twig that they couldn’t with all their brain and brawn. The boy rubbed the inside of the buffalo’s tail with his stick and to their delight, it immediately ambled forward.

When life doesn’t make sense, you can drive yourself nuts trying to understand or you can try to appreciate the wonder and whimsy of it all, even in a hell-hole. Even in ‘Nam. His name might not be on the wall in Washington, but if there’s a rice paddy made of cream cheese on the back roads of eternity I like to think Marshall is there riding a purple antelope. Today I am his memorial.