Cru Jones Society

 

 

We don’t often talk about books on this website. So you may be surprised to learn we do read things other than what we find on the internet. Now mostly I only read Dr. Seuss books, but I occasionally find other things, like cereal boxes. All jokes aside, I do read real things. I recently re-read my favorite short story, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, and I was amazed at the way I found the story related to the way I was feeling in my life.

The story follows a small group of soldiers in Vietnam. The characters are helped defined by the physical things they carried. One guy carries extra M&M’s, one guy some pot, one guy carries an extra bar of soap. All things they felt they needed to survive in this unfamiliar and unfriendly environment. I am in no way saying I could even begin to imagine and relate to what these brave men needed or what they did in order to survive and cope with active military duty.

The things I carry are not designed to help me cope or take out Charlie. I carry a wallet with a driver’s license, debit card, and a Qdoba frequent diner’s card. I have chap-stick, a phone, and a set of keys which contain bottle openers to aid in my consumption of beers. The things I carry are minimal, but I depend on them.

“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hours of light pretending.”

While these letters were physical things Lieutenant Cross carried, they represented so much more. They were the hope he carried, the desire, the unrelenting love. The letters represented a history and memories that will always remain.

While we may not have letters or other physical reminders we carry with us, we all have those memories of a friend. At will we can recall the good times we had with them. The times we relive a thousand times in our heads. Nothing can take those away from us. But as time goes on, these memories can become the heaviest things we carry.

“He sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept. It went on for a long while. In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would.”

This is the point when the history and the memories become too heavy. This is the part of the story that has struck a chord with me recently. I came to a conclusion a close friend of mine wasn’t that good of a friend after all. I gave her every opportunity to prove I meant something to her, anything to her.

Nothing.

So I have cut her out of my life, but now I struggle daily, as I am flooded with these fantastic memories I wonder if I made the right choice. But then I read on in the story.

“Oh yeah, man, you can’t change what can’t be changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is.”

She’s not going to change. I’m not going to change. I shouldn’t have to. I have to carry the decision I made and so I am left carrying the memories.

There it fucking well is.

While carrying the memories and the sadness of loss is hard, it is still a lot easier than trying to carry an unwanted friendship, or the burden of trying to be the better person. The people in our lives who we hold near and dear will always require us to carry something. But it is up to us to decide the weight we will carry for them.

“He was realistic about it. There was the new hardness in his stomach. He loved her but he hated her.”

I hate her but I love her. So I am left without knowing which is harder to carry: the knowledge that she doesn’t care, or the knowledge that I never said “good bye.”

“It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.”

One last thing I carry is an appreciation of our readers. The readers who can allow me to break from the comedy in order to help ease some of the weight I carry. Thank you. I will be back tomorrow with jokes, and jokes, and jokes.

See ya in the trenches…

lee.s.hart@crujonessociety.com