From Wit’s End

‘Twas indeed a good Memorial day, remembering struggles of the past and how they had been overcome. Perhaps it’s hard to explain, but it only took five hours of driving last night to go 12-13 years back into the past. Of course i’m talking about our trip to Fort Benning, GA on Memorial Day weekend. It can be difficult for all three of us brothers to agree on anything (though over the years we have learned how to get along most of the time), but we all whole-heartedly agreed that our trip to the Ft. Benning/Columbus, GA area was eminently worth it. I must have taken 80 pictures (only a few of them shown here) with my digital camera, and Tom took almost 60 pictures with a mechanical camera.

Sunday night, before we found the hotel, we drove around Ft. Benning in the dark, through some of the old neighborhood (and we also got lost a couple of times), and the gloom merely enhanced the dream-like quality that was already thick all around us. And on Monday, even the heat of the sun and the smell of the Georgia red clay just brought the memories back in whelming waves. Flashbacks weren’t in it. It was almost a “Back to the Future” type feeling. To walk the streets, the playgrounds, the schoolyards, 12 years older and 12 years wiser. The world of Benji, Tommy, and Dave was kind of small back then, but it was still our whole world. Stretching from Dexter Elementary School to Faith Middle school, from Aaron Allen’s house to Dietrich Stogner’s house, from the “Mini-mall” to the Youth Center to the Officer’s Club Pool, from the creek to the woods to the so-called “Grand Canyon”, it all seems smaller now than it seemed then. And yet it all remains larger than life in our memory and in our experience, because it was the ground upon which these poor pilgrims learned a little bit more and grew a little bit taller and struggled with love and pain, friendship and social studies, puberty and mathematics, sickness and baseball. And somehow, what seemed like “a great gulf transfixed” between “Benji” and “Ben” was in reality just a matter of crossing a particular street,
jumping across a given creek, or running across a certain field. Wow. It was worth every golden minute, to be sure.

And i also had the opportunity to redeem past hurts as well.  I got to stand where my younger self had stood and give him the future memories of the next 13 years, and i was able to tell him that it all turned out okay after all, even though it was hard and painful at the time.  Does it sound too mystical to say that he heard my words and received my memories and took comfort in them?  Perhaps, but in some strange way it’s true.

Also, on a darkly humorous note, we found the Putt-Putt Mini-Golf course that we used to go to all the time as kids, or rather, what was left of it.  Tom and I were snapping pictures of that glorious ruination with great aplomb, while Dave was utterly appalled by it.  "How could you take pictures of this??" he cried, shocked.  Here are some examples of that great contrast, for your perusal:

Putt-Putt, Columbus, GA, 1988	Putt-Putt, Columbus, GA, 2001

And if all that isn’t weird enough….