Had the opportunity and pleasure of attending the New York Airshow at Stewart International Airport yesterday, family in tow. We had a great afternoon, and let’s face it, folks. An airshow isn’t an airshow unless you’ve been out in the sun for four hours. There is little shade on an airport runway unless you are one of the lucky folks who’s family member is a serviceman and can sit beneath the wing of a C-17. If you forgot your sunscreen and plenty of water, then you’ve forgotten what it means to spend a long time outdoors. But I digress…
Being in the company of those Marines and Airmen brought so many things back to me, the foremost was deep thanks for what they do, day in and day out, unseen, unknown, and forgotten when our government runs out of cash. The little wanna-be Marine in me wanted to thank each and every one of them personally for their service. My grateful words will be largely unseen here, but it’s all I have at the moment.
Something else it brought back to me was what would my life look like today if I joined the Corps back when I was young, unmarried and pre-child? Would I have lived a life fulfilled? The life I dreamt of the first time I saw a squad of Warthogs fly overhead, then dreamed about marching in formation beneath their screaming engines? Would I have been happy becoming the lean, mean, killing machine I wanted to be, back in those days? Would I have kept on writing? Would my creativity have survived and still meant something to me after my tour was done? There is no way for me to know what would have been, and that goes for every aspect of my life, which I’m not going to examine in detail here. That’s not what this place is for. All I know is what is “now.” Here and now. What I choose to create or what I choose to procrastinate and run away from every day. The choice is mine, each and every hour, all those hours between daily life, chores, the mundane, the “day job”, the mid-life. What will I choose to create, and what will I choose to throw away, forsake, ignore, run away from?
If the answer does not manifest more writing (and not the blog stuff and the email stuff, I mean actual conjuring of a story or poem that wasn’t there a minute ago), then I either have to change the answer or live with the consequence. And no whining! There’s no place for whiners in the Corps, or in the world of art.