Walking Wounded

Thirteen years ago …

So, in answer to your question, Cardassian, I don't hate you. I hate what I became because of you.

Miles O'Brien to Glinn Daro

Star Trek: The Next Generation

“The Wounded”, fourth season

It is a word, you know, to find that I'm still capable of despising a person for what they've done to me or what I perceive they've done. I will not go see Joe to play a game of chess because he's a liar and a thief, I will not even be civil to David because he's a drunkard and a slouch, and I will not coddle Alice because she doesn't seem to pay attention enough to our guests or what she is doing.

It's easy to attribute this to being tired after working a long day, but that's what lazy people do. Like Lee at Gettysburg, like Samson at Gaza, I and I alone have failed and I and I alone must pay the penalty. When it comes right down to it, though, I have to ask: pay what, and with what?

Here's what I have to offer: my resistance, my resentment, my suspicion, my hostility – mine, all mine! I have to give it away not for someone to pick up, but to burn it away entirely. In this world I will have trouble, Jesus says, but I don't have to go looking for it, like Socrates or Confucius or even a young Simba. I don't need to give strength unto my foe with my fears and apprehensions. The people I care for now and work with now and even in the future need me strong in spirit, strong in body, strong in mind and soul. Even my enemies need to see when they have one eye open that the joy of the LORD is my strength. And I've got to call on that strength! AMEN.

10008.07

1338 hrs

DA

Thirteen years later, by the numbers:

12: The number of chicken legs I started cooking in a crock pot slathered – love that word! – in barbecue sauce for ten hours this morning. Should be done about seven forty-five tonight, and the meat just slides off the bone, everyone will love it!

21: THE DAYS UNTIL SCHOOL STARTS AGAIN! (Sarah and Jeffrey and Josceline at Longfellow, Brandon at Ramstad, Mathew and Breanna at Minot High; of the cousins belli, Trevor is too young for school and Patrick graduated in 2010,)

1294: The year of the papal reign of Celestine V, the subject of Jon W. Sweeney's book The Pope Who Quit (ISBN 9780385531894) who had founded a hermit order and was eighty-four when he got the job, broke a two-year deadlock in the College of Cardinals – that's the body that elects the new Pope after the death of the previous pope since the mid-eleventh century, with rare exceptions – with a letter, in five months didn't do much, and with the help of a cardinal who became the next pope, hammered out the conditions under which a pope could resign.

If we've paid attention to the news, this is not unusual – the previous pope, Benedict XVI, resigned the very day my daughter Sarah turned seven, February 28. But prior to this – 1294 I mean, not 2013 – the only way you got out of being the spiritual and temporal head of the Roman Catholic Church was to meet your Boss face-to-face! (To die.) The story of this pope, before and after he got the job – and met an unpleasant end at the hands of his successor; yeah, the late thirteenth century was pretty vicious and certain families practically bought church offices – is written so well by this author that I almost forgot what I was reading. He even gets a mention in Dante's Divine Comedy, as being just outside the gates of hell (The Inferno in Dante-speak) for his “great refusal”.

1976: America's bicentennial. Also the year of Match Game episodes Martha and I are currently watching after the kids are in bed! We record them off the Game Show Network, and I think we get more of a laugh from the outfits some people wear than the shows themselves (think very bright). It's good to laugh, lately I have been so terrible at it ...

2000: The year that written journal entry of mine is from (read the date at the end, 10008.07, as “1” for the twenty-first century, “00” as the last two digits of the year, “08” as the month of August, and “07” as the day – got the idea from a Star Trek encyclopedia and I've used it since I got a Star Trek journal at the beginning of 1994); I hate to admit I'm that nasty a person, or am capable of being so. But I don't want to be a one-dimensional fundamentalist jackass either, someone who is impossible to relate to!

5618: The Borg species designation of humans (you and me, baby). I'm just amazed it took them THAT long to find us!

Resistance is futile … but welcome.

David