bullet and the new life after. Neither doctors nor patient can see the second path, so the wounds it leaves often go unnoticed and untreated. Both can lead to long-term festering.
That gentle German orderly tried his best to alert us to the bullet’s second path, but we were too naive to comprehend. We tried, for several years in fact, to celebrate John’s new birthday as if we understood its importance. A year to the day after the shooting, we invited a few close friends to share a “new birthday” dinner with us, to celebrate the fact that John was alive. That I chose not to make Auntie’s chocolate cake for the occasion is proof that I still hadn’t digested the import of Werner’s message. I made a pie that night for dessert, pumpkin, I think. I even stuck a single, lighted birthday candle in the middle of it, but all of us at the table felt awkward and off-stride. No one felt comfortable “celebrating” John’s new birthday, because accepting a new birthday meant accepting a new person. Accepting the new John meant the old John was gone, a concept none of us was ready to acknowledge.
In the nearly twenty years that have passed since that phony birthday party, one thought continues to haunt: If a single bullet travels up and down the generations, how do we ever begin to measure the havoc of war?
S hortly after Werner’s birthday speech, old friends from Rome who had moved to a dune-filled stretch of white beach on Key Biscayne called to urge us to take a total break once John was released from the Munich hospital and had completed his rehabilitation at a Connecticut clinic. They invited us to spend a week with them in the Florida sunshine, where both of us could escape the medical world, which had become our daily grind. It was our first taste of the role that friends, sunshine, food, talk, and laughter would later play in John’s recovery, though we hadn’t yet the ghost of an idea about how far off that recovery actually was.
It took little time to be seduced by Don and Marybelle Schanche’s idea of sunshine, sea air, stone crabs, and Key lime pie. The mere idea of it was the carrot that kept us going during the rest of John’s hospital care. I can still feel that welcoming blast of Florida’s enveloping heat and humidity as we stepped off the plane in Miami, pure bliss after months in the gray, damp cold of a northern European winter.
An hour later we were inside our friends’ light-filled apartment, and the only thing between their terrace and the bright, shining sea was an enormous, heated swimming pool surrounded by sea grape, grass, and the occasional lizard tumbling out of a palm tree. The sun beat down, heating our bones, unknotting our muscles, even beginning to dispel our panic.
Their apartment was filled with reminders of our shared time in Italy, from the gaily painted Italian pottery they had collected over the years to the framed sketches of Rome hanging on the walls, to the lazy evening meals that Marybelle served us, just as she had served us in Rome. Perhaps as much as anything that reminded me of Rome was the fierce, bright sunlight of early spring in Key Biscayne, which had the power to banish from my memory the weak winter light of northern Europe.
I remember sitting close to John and drinking in the intensity of that sunlight while sipping a glass of cold, very cold, white wine, not unlike the bottles we used to share on our sunny, plant-filled terraces in Rome. Don had a booming, infectious laugh; Marybelle, a higher, full-throated chortle, like the exultant pealing of a high-toned bell. Between the sunshine, the wine, and their laughter, I felt as if I had somehow gotten out of hell and peeked into heaven. One night Don put the John Cleese classic A Fish Called Wanda on the video player and the four of us laughed until we wept. For the first time since I had been beaten, more than four months earlier, the tension, anger, sadness, and fear that I had buried
That gentle German orderly tried his best to alert us to the bullet’s second path, but we were too naive to comprehend. We tried, for several years in fact, to celebrate John’s new birthday as if we understood its importance. A year to the day after the shooting, we invited a few close friends to share a “new birthday” dinner with us, to celebrate the fact that John was alive. That I chose not to make Auntie’s chocolate cake for the occasion is proof that I still hadn’t digested the import of Werner’s message. I made a pie that night for dessert, pumpkin, I think. I even stuck a single, lighted birthday candle in the middle of it, but all of us at the table felt awkward and off-stride. No one felt comfortable “celebrating” John’s new birthday, because accepting a new birthday meant accepting a new person. Accepting the new John meant the old John was gone, a concept none of us was ready to acknowledge.
In the nearly twenty years that have passed since that phony birthday party, one thought continues to haunt: If a single bullet travels up and down the generations, how do we ever begin to measure the havoc of war?
S hortly after Werner’s birthday speech, old friends from Rome who had moved to a dune-filled stretch of white beach on Key Biscayne called to urge us to take a total break once John was released from the Munich hospital and had completed his rehabilitation at a Connecticut clinic. They invited us to spend a week with them in the Florida sunshine, where both of us could escape the medical world, which had become our daily grind. It was our first taste of the role that friends, sunshine, food, talk, and laughter would later play in John’s recovery, though we hadn’t yet the ghost of an idea about how far off that recovery actually was.
It took little time to be seduced by Don and Marybelle Schanche’s idea of sunshine, sea air, stone crabs, and Key lime pie. The mere idea of it was the carrot that kept us going during the rest of John’s hospital care. I can still feel that welcoming blast of Florida’s enveloping heat and humidity as we stepped off the plane in Miami, pure bliss after months in the gray, damp cold of a northern European winter.
An hour later we were inside our friends’ light-filled apartment, and the only thing between their terrace and the bright, shining sea was an enormous, heated swimming pool surrounded by sea grape, grass, and the occasional lizard tumbling out of a palm tree. The sun beat down, heating our bones, unknotting our muscles, even beginning to dispel our panic.
Their apartment was filled with reminders of our shared time in Italy, from the gaily painted Italian pottery they had collected over the years to the framed sketches of Rome hanging on the walls, to the lazy evening meals that Marybelle served us, just as she had served us in Rome. Perhaps as much as anything that reminded me of Rome was the fierce, bright sunlight of early spring in Key Biscayne, which had the power to banish from my memory the weak winter light of northern Europe.
I remember sitting close to John and drinking in the intensity of that sunlight while sipping a glass of cold, very cold, white wine, not unlike the bottles we used to share on our sunny, plant-filled terraces in Rome. Don had a booming, infectious laugh; Marybelle, a higher, full-throated chortle, like the exultant pealing of a high-toned bell. Between the sunshine, the wine, and their laughter, I felt as if I had somehow gotten out of hell and peeked into heaven. One night Don put the John Cleese classic A Fish Called Wanda on the video player and the four of us laughed until we wept. For the first time since I had been beaten, more than four months earlier, the tension, anger, sadness, and fear that I had buried
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