Strange how a person can significantly influence your life—and then that person is gone.
For a buddy in the reserves, training in a mountain monsoon rainforest with members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment, his mentor was a paratrooper who guided him through the worst. He told me they even had to sleep on sloping ground, each fellow with his sleeping bag braced against a tree. Turned out it was a deliberate experiment in seeing how effective soldiers can be when miserable, but they didn’t know that at the time.
For me, safely indoors in a community college during my teens, my mentor was an older lady in her twenties, Jackie. Not that she had any influence on my actual studies, but college is a time to quest for “the meaning of life,” to use an umbrella term. Jackie told me, “The truth shall set you free, but first it shall make you miserable.” She knew about men being mistaken about women: “Hey guys, we’re over here!” Raised Catholic, she was involved in things like women’s liberation, and sexual liberation too, as in becoming brave enough to pose nude for an art class. Her body was plain to the surrounding callow youths, but her mind left me energized every time we met. If only, I thought, Jackie could enter a science fiction time-stasis-pod, and pop out a few years later, when we would both be the same age. From her, I remain a feminist to this very day.
At one point I lent Jackie a self help book, a New York Times best seller by a capitalist self-made millionaire. The book thrilled me. But Jackie and another older bearded college man both read it and scorned it for being about, “How to be a bastard.”
What, did we even read the same book? Are “leftists” prose-blind, or life-blind or something? When I moved to another time zone I missed her. I realize now that if I had moved back a few years later, and if I had known Jackie again, then I would not have liked her. We would have already grown apart.
Today, as it happens, I mingle with both the right and left. I regard myself as part of the common sense majority who frustrate card-carrying political party members: I reserve the right to change my vote from election to election.
And my army buddy? Part of the appeal of the young reservists—at any given time most are privates and corporals—is the fast personal growth. After some seasons he met the trooper again… I was there. I remember him being stunned, amazed at how stupid the man was.
It’s as my spectacles have changed filters: That trooper and Jackie are gone.
