2001-07-27 - 8:27 pm
A moment in time: Realizations

I went into my brother's room today, to put clean laundry on his bed. On the way out, his World War II vintage Japanese cavalry sword caught my eye. It stands propped up in a corner by the door, where anyone coming or going must notice. It's long, maybe three feet of blade, but I can't measure distances with my eyes well enough to know how accurate that might be.

I do know that when I picked it up and put my thumb on the clip to release the sheath, then pulled it out, one hand on the hilt and the other on the sheath-end, my arms were spread as far as they would go when the tip of the sword was free. I hefted it in my hand, curiously, and propped the sheath back in its corner. It seemed a little heavy for me, but not much, and fairly balanced. Like it belonged in my hand. (Nevermind that I don't know what that means, never having used a sword for anything in my life).

I moved the sword through the air in lazy arcs. I kept my wrist straight and unbending as I moved, shifting it with elbow and shoulder, more out of habit than anything else. I wonder about that now -- the last few years, with all my typing, and frequent attacks of pain along the tendons, I habitually avoid doing things that might strain it. Even rafting, I always ask to sit on the left side, for the driving arm gripping the top of the paddle bends at shoulder and elbow, not wrist, while the downside wrist is constantly flexing. I can't remember anymore whether the bow arm is supposed to bend at the wrist while playing the violin -- the propping arm doesn't, I can remember that much, and the faintly surprised praise of the violin master when I learned left-hand technique so very easily. I wonder now, if I wanted to take up violin again, would I need to switch arms, or wear ugly braces?

I brought the blade up level, in front of my face, and I could smell the machine oil used in its last sharpening so very long ago. Someone must have taken care of this blade, someone dead now more than half a century. I doubt my grandfather ever touched it, save for brief rounds of showing, since he bought it from a fellow American soldier on that long-ago battlefield. He was a medic, there to patch up the living and identify the dead, and never got the chance to kill or scavenge for himself. I am proud of him, all the same, for his years spent teaching were as courageous as the charging of those on the front line.

I breathed in the scent again, then smiled a half-smile and picked up the sheath. Sheathed the sword. Stood it back in its corner.

And for some reason I can't begin to fathom, the habitual weight in my chest was gone. I smiled. Took a deep breath. Saw a world of possibilities.

Then the weight oozed back in. Reality, bills and work and schooling and day-to-day drudgery, winning out over the vague hopes of home-grown mythology. Why do I phrase it like that, I wonder? Should I take up fencing? Unearth my violin, and find another teacher? Enroll in grad school, cracking open my much-loved, long-avoided history books again?

But I am poor. And I work with computers for a living. It wouldn't be ... practical.

This is how a dreamer dies, I think; how a cynic is born. Worn down, by the mechanics of living.