Pool_1

>> Moonlight <<

( the past, 1965 ) Ask not - yeah right. It's a fact. Boys mature two years later than girls. You can't miss it. You have eyes? Just look. Listen carefully as well. It isn't just physical change. Spiritual and emotional pockets of mind open up in that reworking of flesh awash in a tide of role playing hormones released by nature's clock. It's like going home and finding odd furniture in rooms that were not before known to exist there. Confusion precedes adaptation and familiarity, the unease of which is egged on by apprehension yet checked by curiosity. Girls went through all of this stuff two years before, nurtured, tended to, and guided carefully by the women. But boys are not like them, sweet young things when the turn comes. At eighteen years, they are still erupting with change and uncertainty in large mean unfamiliar bodies. So? So, that's when we toss them into war. Would we send sixteen year old girls? Forget the muscle. The mind, what about the mind? What happens at that age when you screw down on brains of mush unsettled for the squeeze? Don't know? Well, friend, make a list. Jot down some possibilities. Any of them good? Hmmm. Is this too vague? OK. It typically runs something like this: Just past twenty three hundred hours, the still air offended with it's heat. Already there were four young men dead and seven severely wounded. No help was imminent. At home... home... God, not here, home... home, thoughts strayed back to an unseen night landscape painted in sound by katydids, crickets, fences creaking in the wind and the far off yapping of rural dogs carrying for miles. Night sounds are many and assuring on the farm - at home. So many tonalities all accommodating each other's presence. Night music. At home, night is a lullaby. Sleep is easy - and safe.