Marking Time

The snow had been falling all around us. It was cold, very much a day like today. The year was 1968 and often I think back to that soulful, wintery day. Looking now, out the window of my study, staring into the snow beyond, I struggle with those two weary banes of every thinking person. Those spectres, nostalgia and melencholia.

Where am I now? What have I accomplished? Have I done enough?

These are the usual questions one asks of oneself when the "blue-study" strikes. Whenever I feel I am getting no where; whenever I feel that I am only "marking time" in Life; searching out nothing in the adventurous veins of all possible human existences; forsaking only my friends for the time being; it is thoughts such as these, tepid memories, that always come back to haunt my consciousness.

That winter day, so long ago, I had been sitting on an ice covered boulder. My backpack was beneath me in a vain attempt to maintain some semblence of body heat, at least at a reasonable temperature. I remember wondering then, how 15 years ago, on what was the day of my birth, I could possibly have foreseen this event.

"Indeed," I wondered, "had I foreseen it, would I have taken steps to avoid it?"

I thought not. It had been my determination to find adventure, wherever it may lay. Life, at the time, was such a bore to me. I was tired of my bookworm tendencies. I wanted to Experience, to drink first hand of the Cup of Knowledge. Up in the clearing be hind me, near the trees, I could hear the grunts of several of my fellow Civil Air Patrol Cadets, straining themselves to their limits.

Gently, an evergreen tree swayed before my eyes in the winter breeze.

Images of a book I had recently read kept flashing before my mind's eye. It was a story from South America. You know it. Everyone's heard of it by now. A team of soccer players from a Catholic school had been traveling from their home country of Brazil to their opponent's homeland of Argentina. In route they had crashed into the Andes Mountians. To survive (also the name of the book on their experiences), they had been forced to eat the frozen corpses of their recently deceased team mates, raw, in order t o get the highest caloric value possible from their flesh. Those with relatives on board that flight had vowed not to eat a family member until none of them were any long living on that mountain.

Back in the warmth of my writing den, back in my comformtable middle-aged present, I slowly, so as not to disturb the whispy trails of these bittersweet, mnemonic connections, drank from my treasured "Dad" coffee cup.

Back in time, back on that lonely mountain, I can still feel my teenaged stomach, churning, but beginning to settlie down from the shock, my vertigo uneasily lessening, relucantly relinquishing its control.

From behind me, I heard a hollow, "Thump!" It filled the air around me. I jumped at the sound and suddenly, the vibrations dying quickly in the all-absorbing, cotton-like qualities of the trees and snowcover. Slowly, I turned around. Not really wanting to see anything. Wishing that I was back at home, buried in a book of astounding adventurous detail. Focusing intently, I could finally make out the form of someone lying on the ground, newly placed in the snow near the plane, amidst a circle of green unifo rmed figures.

Very gently, I maneuvered my hand under my many layers of clothing until I could feel my stomach beneath my thermal underwear, and my stomach and hand could feel feel each other. The intense nausea I had been experiencing, was finally easing up. I despera tely tried to avoid looking at the spot off to my left where earlier I had been violently regurgitating my hastily eaten breakfast.

Was it only a few hours before that it had been my desire to be the one to end this mission. To become the Hero in the limelight. The saviour to find the missing plane, the lost pilot, and his eight year old daughter. Her frozen eyes, permeated with tiny frozen bubbles like that of the ice cubes in my freezer, produced a vision before me that could not be avoided.