Five Men to the Military and One to the Gardens

Tuesday. February 28, 2006

[6:38am] Collette awoke to find a red spot on her forehead the exact shape of the British Isles, Ireland included (although a little far north). That’s what stress did for one, even at 21. But she rather wondered if it wasn’t stress, but rather a bar of bad soap.

Craig, the fish, had died. Mom had found him, lying there amongst the rocks of his little happy world. His body was rescued by Rose and transported in a wine glass to be mummified by Carrie, who had already mummified her first Beta, Caligula. Rose wrote his funeral announcement while learning of the Narrangansett Indians in history.

Collette was quite intrigued over the film which Carrie had shown them the previous day, on the search for the Ark of the Covenant. Along the way, the guide of the film encountered a number of monks on a small mesa-island in the middle of a lake in Ethiopia. Amidst the graves of two said-to-be Levitical priests, was a small treasure room, primitively locked. And from its confines were brought forth artifacts said to have been taken from Solomon’s temple, including a perfectly rounded copper basin to collect sacrificial blood, a now-twisted stand for the basin, and most importantly – the copper skeleton of a breastplate of the Levi priest. Truly incredible findings. Even to see them on film was awing.

Meanwhile there were ad-libs for Joe, Rose, Frances, and Linnea over lunch of hot dogs and beans while Carrie copied a disc of Moss’ & Cushan’s professional weddings pictures for the English family. A disc of the pictures had arrived in the mail the previous day for Collette, and many of them were very good and unique, including takes with the Sydney Opera House in the background and another of the wedding party just coming over a grassy hill against blue skies and wispy whites.

And Rose dressed for choir with a new shirt of small black and yellow stripes and an elaborately appliquéd black “S” on the left shoulder.

“You look… what’s the word?… Collegiate.” Collette told her.

“Hey…” Rose apparently took the comment as an insult.

“A bumble bee perhaps,” Collette added.

“Yeah, it was quite a cowinkidink it had an “S” on the front when I bought it,” Carrie said, who had found the shirt in the first place.

Another thought managed to cross Collette’s mind that week. Whatever happened to all the hapless souls in cowboy/Indian movies, spy films, and cartoons, so dispensably killed off? Their souls seemed to be of little matter in the construct of the film, as though they were only temporarily knocked out and not mortally silenced. Perhaps it didn’t matter. The silver screen had brought many odd ways of viewing the world into the minds of the past century. And Collette was not always entirely sure she enjoyed the invention.

Collette wondered if Isaiah 66:19 spoke of the New World:

“And from them I will send survivors to the nations… to the coastlands afar off, that have not heard my fame or seen my glory.”

Surely it more likely meant particularly the Orient, but it was an interesting thought all the same. Perhaps it just included all lands aside from the Middle East.

Collette spent a part of the afternoon on the front porch discussing raptors, grenades, launchers, fire bombs, etc. with Frances, who amazingly seemed to know more about the Army and weaponry than any military encyclopedia she could hope to find. Frances and a number of his pals seemed to anticipate joining the U.S. military upon reaching the age. Frances and Chester both favored the Army (Frances in particular, aside from general combat, hoped to design tanks). Creole was apparently setting his sights on the Air Force. (And both Chew brothers had just been accepted into the Air Force Academy, dually). Izzy was considering engineering design as a figment of the Army. Mephibosheth from Scouts was also looking towards the Army. And Adam, Adam just wanted to be a gardener. He always had. Even when he was a young one with his sandy-blonde curls (which Mr. English did not like and soon tamed away), Collette remembered his hands were always in the soil. She remembered one afternoon when he had taken her by the hand and proudly shown her his first garden – pansies and tulips, she thought. And over the years, the gardens changed in shape and size, types of vegetables and blossoms. But it was always the flowers that he seemed to love. And nearly every year he showed her more of his handiwork in his patch of ground, granted for the spring. Adam, tending his own little Eden.

Collette thought back to the summer of 16. What an eventful five months it had been. May brought Edred’s funeral, the fourteen year-old choir member who had been taken unexpectedly from them, two days after their first choir concert. The end of June through the first part of July sent her and Diana to Budapest, Hungary, for a two-week mission trip, perhaps one of the most impacting times of her life. And following the trauma of that bitter morning in September, she found herself falling in love… Not the typical scenario for a 16 year-old girl, perhaps. Or perhaps it was too ordinary. Nonetheless, it was a summer that changed her dearly.

She also decided that if she had the choice of living somewhere still remotely connected to civilization, other than the United States, she would likely settle on a chalet in Switzerland for its beauty and apparently peaceful existence and the gingerbread bears and oranges during Christmas. Although the remotest regions of Norway and even Iceland had always been more appealing to her.

“As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.” – Ecclesiastes 11:5