This book describes experiences growing up in the 1950s rural south. Through personal conflict and ambiguous identity, it is the life of one forced at an early age into an incompatible role that leads to joining the United States Marine Corps, later returning from the jungles of Vietnam promoted to Sergeant and a decorated man of war.
I remember as a child being told, "Little boys are made of snips, snails, and puppy dog tails." Through challenges of early conflict, this author now shares the greater vision. It is not as we are made by the world, but what this world truly made of.
There is a special satisfaction of completion in writing an autobiography unlike any other genre. In one sense, it represents the opportunity to set the record straight, a first-person narrative perspective on time and events experienced through a generation. Also, it is to be exposed, like striping away one's clothing piece by piece and making bare the pretense of self-importance. To tell one's own story is as much embarrassing, as it is cathartic, a confessional made public for all to judge. Sometimes the hero of a challenge--sometimes the villain--but always made humble by trials and elations based on conditions altogether human within context.
Times when heaven brought down to earth through hunger of diminished appetite; and times fulfilled by heavenly blessing. Often an experience humbling when confronted by human weakness, human compassion, and the measure of divine grace. Herein lies the corundum of mortal existence: remove indoctrination of socialization, definitions of gender, context of cultural values, then what is left?
Are we only the sum of our experiences during this short sojourn? Are we merely the handful of earth and thimble of water that makes our biological whole in a fleetingly vast recyclable ocean recorded through a calculated number of lunar cycles? It is the chameleon visage of this familiar moonscape witnessed above, both lovely and frighteningly mysterious, which most haunts the living through constant passage.
Mountains and valleys of changing contour, faces I remember, some present, some gone, captured in imaginings of light and shadow subliminal, all Reflections in a Paper Moon.