Hell on Wheels
I walked into the new, enormous location of my town's thrift store, and gravitated towards the Halloween Costume racks that in past years have offered me so much bounty. Oh, no, I thought. Oh, Hell no. There among the old prom dresses and cowboy suits was an Army jacket that clearly didn't belong there. Hell on Wheels, it said. I knew, at some level, that this garment was my work, and I also knew I was afraid of it. I walked out empty-handed.
Finding the Roots
The next day I found myself driving right by the store, and wondered if the jacket might still be there. It was. I tried it on and put it back. Then, a couple of women from the Old Dragons' Club meditation group that meets in my studio came up to me bearing found treasure. What are you up to? One of these friends is an ex-police officer, and both of them are deeply kind, so I showed them. You HAVE to get that, they said, and I knew they were right. I bought the jacket, plus a Navy Medic's coat that had meanwhile showed up on the same rack.
First I did some due diligence to find out as much as I could about its history. I talked with a friend who had served seven years in the Army, including two tours in Iraq. He helped me start decoding the rank and division markings. Some internet sleuthing completed the picture: this garment had belonged to someone who served in the First Armored Division and in Military Assistance Command during the Vietnam War. He had not spent very long in the Army, and it was likely that he had survived his service, as some of the patches on the jacket are only sewn on upon a soldier's return home.
First I did some due diligence to find out as much as I could about its history. I talked with a friend who had served seven years in the Army, including two tours in Iraq. He helped me start decoding the rank and division markings. Some internet sleuthing completed the picture: this garment had belonged to someone who served in the First Armored Division and in Military Assistance Command during the Vietnam War. He had not spent very long in the Army, and it was likely that he had survived his service, as some of the patches on the jacket are only sewn on upon a soldier's return home.
No Rank
Then I waited. The last thing I wanted was to engage in flippant appropriation, so I knew whatever I did, it needed to come from an authentic and grounded place. I brought the jacket with me, along with about forty pounds of red velvet, and other sundry bits of drag, to an Art/Dharma Retreat that I was helping to facilitate at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.
Once I had set up my working space – red bedding, red velvet-covered table, borrowed silver Tara with coconut-chocolate offerings piled in front of her, borrowed Art Nouveau lamp – I simply sat with the jacket. Noticing how rigid it felt in my hands, I was intuitively drawn to take apart the padding and lining, and then to strip off the stiff buttons and rank markings. I opened up the sleeves, so I could sew inside them. I went over every bit of the cloth, as a mother cat might go over her kittens' fur. A cigarette burn on the left sleeve. Loose tobacco in the left hip pocket. Decades after the end of the war in Vietnam, these embodied traces of a man I would never meet remained.
I remembered a Zen koan I'd encountered years before:
There is a true person of no rank constantly coming and going through the holes in your face. Who is she?
No rank. I started sewing stars into the wool-and-polyester gabardine of the jacket. The stitches were constellations, graveyards, casualty-tallies. They re-connected the garment with something less rigid and more universal. It came to feel enveloping and practical around my shoulders.
Once I had set up my working space – red bedding, red velvet-covered table, borrowed silver Tara with coconut-chocolate offerings piled in front of her, borrowed Art Nouveau lamp – I simply sat with the jacket. Noticing how rigid it felt in my hands, I was intuitively drawn to take apart the padding and lining, and then to strip off the stiff buttons and rank markings. I opened up the sleeves, so I could sew inside them. I went over every bit of the cloth, as a mother cat might go over her kittens' fur. A cigarette burn on the left sleeve. Loose tobacco in the left hip pocket. Decades after the end of the war in Vietnam, these embodied traces of a man I would never meet remained.
I remembered a Zen koan I'd encountered years before:
There is a true person of no rank constantly coming and going through the holes in your face. Who is she?
No rank. I started sewing stars into the wool-and-polyester gabardine of the jacket. The stitches were constellations, graveyards, casualty-tallies. They re-connected the garment with something less rigid and more universal. It came to feel enveloping and practical around my shoulders.
Red Négligée
In the version of The Little Red Shoes that Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells (in Women Who Run With the Wolves), the demonic ruby red slippers are actually a terrible substitute for a previous pair of handmade red shoes that the story's protagonist pieces together for herself from found scraps. She loves these dearly, and when the Rich Old Lady in the story destroys them in favor of Something Better, their loss severs the girl's connection to earth and self-knowing, leaving her vulnerable to excess and addiction. This is a story many of us need to hear over and over again: when something Better or Easier comes calling, sniff around carefully, because it might cost a lot more than it says it does.
Having recently evaded just such a professional trap, the idea of piecing together a red lining for the jacket arose spontaneously, and so I headed to the thrift store in search of scraps. A perfectly skanky red négligée leapt into my hands, reminding me of a story I had heard on The Moth Radio Hour about an Army orientation for family members of returning soldiers. According to the storyteller, whose brother was shortly to return from Afghanistan, the trainers' main advice to the assembled Army wives was, Look cute and give him sex whenever he wants it. Suffering was in the négligée, just as it was in the jacket, intertwined in rigid gender roles. I set about sewing stars into the cheap red satin, with the sense of bringing the two garments together into a new and more balanced whole.
Having recently evaded just such a professional trap, the idea of piecing together a red lining for the jacket arose spontaneously, and so I headed to the thrift store in search of scraps. A perfectly skanky red négligée leapt into my hands, reminding me of a story I had heard on The Moth Radio Hour about an Army orientation for family members of returning soldiers. According to the storyteller, whose brother was shortly to return from Afghanistan, the trainers' main advice to the assembled Army wives was, Look cute and give him sex whenever he wants it. Suffering was in the négligée, just as it was in the jacket, intertwined in rigid gender roles. I set about sewing stars into the cheap red satin, with the sense of bringing the two garments together into a new and more balanced whole.
Next Steps
I don't know yet where this project goes, but I sense I'll return to the Tell me about your war / Tell me about your healing interviews that I began a few months ago. Maybe 108 days of these? We'll see.