I’m at the restaurant, and the man sitting across from me was going to be my sister’s husband. A very tall man with a lazed smile and a demeanor my parents said was ‘super cool.’ She had told me before in confidence, that she considers dying too when he passes away in the far future. I thought, how special it is to have someone that makes you feel like that.
I also wondered when she thought it, and when it became true. I admit those questions are a bit arbitrary but I wonder if there would ever be an answer fitting for these types of questions.
Back to the point, I was a bit cautious this time around, I wanted to make an effort to approach it in my personal way. He came from a background, that was very foreign compared to my own. White, heavily religious, deeply American, lived in the states all his life. Much older than my sister. I wondered if he was also a person like I am. I had my reservations, he was pretty much some older white guy. But I liked to think, person first, stereotypes later.
I held back my judgments and got the stones churning. “What did you do in the military?”
“I was an armed guard for the chaplains…” and then something about using artillery, big guns and such. I’m not much of a military and war intellectual. Don’t have much conceptual knowledge in that area, maybe that’s why I fear it a bit.
We talked about the military for a bit, and he mentioned that he doesn’t think much about those days now. He said he did it out of tradition. Maybe everyone in the family told you to pursue this and you did, and even though, in the corner of your mind you knew you wanted something different, a kid is no fighter against a lineage. He previously mentioned that his father was a hunter, hunted deer a lot. He said he couldn’t do it, it wasn’t for him.
A piece of my heart sighed in relief, that my sister was marrying a gentle person. The last thing I wanted for her was to marry someone who thought violence was normal, or necessary. With everything that I thought I knew about him, he could’ve easily been a man just like that, a passed down tradition.
But somehow he made it out. This 6 feet tall, white ass dude, respected his own litte dog better than my dad knows how to.
Still, I sometimes thinks he carries that little white duster of a dog, like a rifle.
Old habits die hard. But souls are of something unique of its experiences.
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