Daniel Cano
 |
| Precious Possessions |
One day, it hit me. Everything I owned I
carried on my back, just like in Tim O’Brien classic Vietnam War novel, The
Things They Carried.
In his collection of stories, O’Brien
returns to the same theme, the things soldiers carry going into combat, personal
choices, like, “P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog
tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets
of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C
rations, and two or three canteens of water.”
Next came the objects the army required: 5
lb. steel helmets and helmet liners, mess kits and eating utensils, camouflage liners, plastic ponchos, fatigue
jackets and trousers, extra underwear and socks. Depending on a guy’s size, some
guys carried more than others, personal choices like foot powder, comic books,
extra C rations, and letters. Lastly, came the weapons, equipment, and
ammunition, maybe 60-80 lbs. total, unless you were the unlucky one who had to haul
the M-60 machine gun, a mortar, or radio.
I
don’t remember exactly where I was when the idea flashed in my mind, something
of an epiphany, maybe during an intense period in the Central Highlands. Most
likely, I was talking to a friend, in a moment of clarity, sitting down and
leaning back, my rucksack, a backrest, “Man, dig it, everything we own is on our
back. Ain’t that some deep shit?”
The things that that pass through the minds to nineteen-year-old-soldiers,
during extraordinary conditions, sometimes childish and naïve ideas, but other
times, unexpectedly, profound. Back at my parents’ home, I had little, no car,
no house, maybe just out-of-style clothes hanging in the closet.
The guys in the infantry were choosy about
what they carried. They had to lug whatever they carried through thick jungle,
up mountains, and across streams. They carried the minimum, less weight, less
stress. One time, a friend of mine confessed, “Sometimes we get so tired we started
tossing stuff, extra clothes, equipment, even ammunition. You know, always
playing the odds. I saw a guy slide part of a mortar into the bushes, and later
claimed he lost it.”
In the artillery, setting up at a
firebase, we had the luxury of carrying extra items on our backs, like extra fatigues,
socks, and underwear, for the guys who wore underwear. We might carry enough C
rations to get us through a day, since choppers flew into our firebase and
dropped off cases of the stuff to us.
During the monsoons when the rain muffled the sound, I'd pull out a portable record player
and a bunch of 45’s I hid between a folded towel. Noah always carried four 33 LP records, mainly jazz, the same four albums, Dave Brubeck, Jimmy Smith, Lou Rawls, and
Dionne Warwick. Our medic, Doc Conklin, carried a pound of marijuana, knowing
he’d have to share with his friends.
The longest we stayed at a firebase was
over a month. The place became something of a home, marked trails leading from
one gun section to another, from the Fire Direction Center to the officers’
hooch, and each gun section building a private latrine, a primo spot on the
side of the mountain, hidden by brush, and overlooking a wide valley. Sometimes,
the things we carried lasted us more than thirty-days.
I got to thinking about all this as I read
Monday’s La Bloga post, where Michael Sedano describes fleeing the Altadena
fire and taking what he needed most: “I grabbed my prescriptions, my laptop,
wallet, glasses, and shaving kit. My camera and long lens were already in the
car. The next morning my entire worldly possession were the clothes on my body
and the stuff I’d taken for a night’s stay in a motel.” He photographed all his
belongings in the back of his car.
There was a photo in the newspaper of a
man in Altadena standing in front of his burned-out house. The story said he
lost everything, even his beloved 1969 Corvette. Ouch! That had to have hurt.
Unlike most cultures, Americans live in a
“throw-away” society. We just toss out what’s old and buy new stuff. Our garages,
attics, and basements are filled with stuff, just like our trash dumps. We love
stuff. We even have personal relationships to our “things,” not just life’s
necessities but objects we consider valuable, grandma’s piano, or her old
Singer sewing machine, antique typewriters, family photos, paintings, books,
rugs, wardrobe, jewelry, documents, cars, boats, tools, and different types of
equipment for every occasion, in some cases, things we’ve collected over a lifetime.
It reminds me of a scene from Carlos Fuentes’
book, the Old Gringo, when the Mexican peasant army rides through the home of a
rich family, destroying everything in its path, not giving a thought about
valuable items. To a rebel, it’s all junk the rich, or the want-to-be-rich
acquire, to give them status.
Out in the field in Vietnam,
what I couldn’t carry on my back, I left in my duffle bag back at our base
camp, a place we rarely visited. I had my civilian clothes, my summer khakis,
and shoes. I had no need for my winter dress uniform. I left that in my closet,
at home, my old room taken over by my younger siblings. That was it, the extent
of my worldly possessions.
It wasn’t complicated. Life was simple. It
didn’t take much to make it through each day. In the jungle, or on a
mountaintop, we wore the same fatigues and boots for days. When they got too rank,
we’d take them down to the creek, or fill a helmet with water from a tank, and
wash them. For meals, we’d open C rations, two cans, a main meal and desert. I
liked the pound cake. On lucky days, a chopper would fly out and deliver a hot
meal in metal canisters, usually spaghetti and vegetables.
Today, all these years later, when I look
into my closet, I see pants and shirts galore, some I haven’t worn in ten
years, some holdovers from before I retired, when I had to dress nicely, a
short period of shirts and ties. Necessities? I guess I tell myself they are,
but, probably, I’m down to wearing the same two pairs of pants and a handful of
shirts, and my favorite two jackets in winter, and, really don’t need the rest
of it, which takes up most of the closet.
What of my laptop, thumb drives, library,
photos, souvenirs from my travels, guitars, and amplifiers, files of papers,
journals, drafts of stories, manuscripts, even an original script to the movie
Apocalypse Now, my treasured possessions? The real question is how much do I
need them, or how much would I miss them if they were lost? To lose it all,
suddenly, like in an earthquake or fire, might be devastating, for a while. Of
course, it’s one thing to imagine it, and quite another to experience it.
I have lost prized possessions, twice my
favorite bass guitars and amplifiers, one time stolen out of my car and another
time out of my buddy’s house. I’ve lost special rings and religious medallions,
just up and misplaced them. I once had a car I loved, but I cracked the block
and ruined it when I didn’t notice how bad the radiator was leaking. I sold
what was left of it for a pittance and didn’t think twice about it. Truthfully,
I’m not an acquisitive person. I don’t need much to be happy, just enough to
survive.
Take a car, for instance, even if I could
afford a Mercedes, a BMW, or some high-end car, I would never buy one, mainly
because it ain’t me. I’ll take a mini-van, a Corolla or a Camry. I wanted to
buy a cool classic car, maybe a ’55 Chevy, but then, I thought, knowing me, I
wouldn’t take care of it and just end up worrying about it, like David Thoreau,
in his book Walden, where he lived, alone, in a one-room cabin to get away from
the rat race. A neighbor offered him a
rug, but Thoreau turned it down, thinking it would be more a nuisance than a
help.
I find comfort in a 1950, 1200
square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bath house in a part of town where the weather
rarely rises above 80-degrees in the summer and no lower than 40 in the winter.
I could have bought a four-bedroom, three-bath home, with a swimming pool, in a
part of L.A. where it cooks in summer and is frigid in winter, but I don’t want
to keep-up a house that size, nor do I want to deal with bad weather?
Sometimes, I think it was my time in the army
that made me feel this way about possessions. Yet, I have friends who were also
in the army but aren’t happy unless they own the best of everything, cars,
home, clothes, etc. etc. Maybe, my lack of respect for possessions goes back
further, to my parents, who were both frugal, working-class Mexicans, who
watched their immigrant parents struggle to make it in the U.S.
My dad didn’t give a hoot about acquiring
possessions. He was practical and comfortable in sneakers, jeans, a UCLA
sweatshirt, and a baseball cap. He drove a battered 1949 Chevy truck into the
1970s, not because it was a classic but because he needed it on the job. My
mother liked nice things, nice home, nice car, nice clothes, but nothing
extravagant. It’s like both my parents knew and were comfortable with their
stations in life, especially living within their means. My mother hated debt.
She saw debt as a form of slavery. If she couldn’t buy it, she’d do without.
Credit cards? Forget about it. She put it on the lay-away plan for a lot of
years. When she did get a credit card, she paid it off each month.
Maybe it was in Catholic school, where I
spent ten years, taught by Irish nuns and brothers, most who grew up in
poverty. They wore the same uniform every day. We wore the same uniform every
day. They taught us about poverty around the world. We learned about sacrifice,
and all the other Catholic things most of you out there, probably, know about.
We heard Bible stories each day. My guess is they wanted to make all of us
priests and nuns. Not much chance in that, but their stories took hold, the parables
of Jesus tossing the moneychangers out of the temple, how everyone looked
down on the tax collectors, how Jesus turned down all the world’s riches, if he
bowed down to Satan.
We read the stories of the saints,
Francis, Teresa, John of the Cross, Jude, the Apostles, laborers, like our
parents, to seek answers in the spiritual and not the material world. Was that
the basis for my lack of interest in possessions? Oh, I know the other
argument. The rich pound that nonsense into the poor to keep them poor. Maybe
so.
I always had a soft spot for John
Steinbeck’s novel Tortilla Flat. Though it was heavily critiqued in the 1970s
by Chicano literary critics for its portrayal of Mexicans as drunk, lazy, and subservient,
I saw it differently. Though, I don’t deny the portrayal, as a child of the
laboring class, I also found something romantically refreshing about a non-conformist,
anti-establishment Chicano community who rebelled against the powerful and their
material possessions, a very 1960s youth philosophy. Something rich in the
lyrics, “When you ain’t got nothing/ You got nothing to lose.”
Our artists sang about this land being our
land/from California to the New York Island. Like Kerouac, we hit the road,
dropping out, and seeking new ways of reflection, mind expansion, and
understanding. Alan Watts taught us to look to the East, and to other worlds,
even if the East was communist, and we were in a cold war, all people had
something of value to share with one another.
Many of us lived the lyrics, “You, you
who are on the road/ Must have a code/ That you can live by,” or “Freedom’s
just another word for nothing left to lose.” For us, my generation, the "words of the prophets are written on the subway walls," except here in L.A. maybe written on the freeway overpass. I started college, dropped out,
worked, explored, and confused my parents by not buying a house and settling
down. My Mexican relatives didn’t get it. An older aunt asked, “You think you
are a gypsy?”
How could I explain the times were
changing? Though, I think my dad, who fought his own demons, understood, if not
intellectually then psychically. When life wrapped him up too tightly, he
sought freedom in his own way.
I, like many at the time, hit the road.
For those of us who experienced war, maybe it was our way of forgetting, or
reliving the adrenalin rush. We felt betrayed by our elders who governed us. We
needed something different, so we cashed in our chips and started, “Truckin’,
like the doo-dah man.” We itched to find out, “What a long, strange trip it’s
been.”
With a college fellowship, I took my young
family, sold everything, all our possessions, and, on a budget as fragile as a
butterfly’s wings, headed out for Spain, on the heels of Don Quijote, looking
for answers, the whimsical dreamer. Later, I travelled up the California coast,
into Oregon, and across Mexico, in a van, wanting to live like a turtle,
carrying whatever I owned on my back.
Even when I settled down, my mind wouldn’t
rest. I wanted an answer and realized, that yes, just like the troubadour sang,
the answer is still, “blowing in the wind.” Maybe Tolstoy got it right in his short story, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" At the end, his main character, who gets a bit greedy, dies, and ends up needing just six feet of land, enough to bury him.
It’s really no use for someone like
me, or maybe you, too, to ever find the philosopher’s stone. I’d probably just end
up losing it anyway – and move on down the road.
