Old boots

A lot of ordinary things really aren't. Know how I know? Combat boots.

In a piece of fiction I once described something as "ordinary as an old boot." I thought of that recently when a picture of me showed up briefly on a National Guard website. It was a black-and-white snapshot taken at Grafenwohr, (West, at the time) Germany during one of my several REFORGERs, and what caught my eye was the combat boots I had on. They were the old style, the pair issued to me in 1980 in Basic Training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Back then, the uniform was olive drab, not camouflage, and the boots were black.

What surprised me was that I instantly remembered every detail of those old boots. They were still black the day I threw them away, but only through a soldier's discipline. The leather was soft, but badly scuffed and cut. Most of the paint was worn off the eyelets, so they showed brass instead of black. The soles were faded to gray and worn smooth. Just an old pair of boots -- there have to be thousands just like them in attics across this country.

I remember clearly the first day I wore those boots. Our drill sergeant used a garden hose to fill them with water; his theory was that by marching them dry we would break them in in one day. As things turned out, I would march them dry frequently that summer, as we trained in the rain and in rivers and squelched down mud-puddled trails.

Dig around the tongues of those boots and you might find grass seeds from Korea, bug parts from Panama, pastry frosting from Belgium and dust from maybe 30 states. I wore them for about 15 years, in rotation with a couple of newer pairs. Me and those boots did most of the things soldiers can do. A lot of them I'm proud of, but some things, not so much. Some I still can't talk about; some I just won't.

I wish I still had those boots. They were a floppy, beat-up, sweat-stained scrapbook full of memories. That cut on the left toe? Busting brush with a machete is harder than it looks. The chip out of the boot heel? The rope was shorter than the cliff. The missing corners on both tongues? Field-expedient rifle-cleaning patches. The dark smear along the side of the sole? Don't ask.  

Those boots, in my memory anyway, capture the essence of my career. A lot of it was just training, but some of it wasn't. A few times I was aware of being involved in something significant, but most of the time it was just more duty in another obscure corner of useless geography. Some of the ops did what we planned them for, some didn't. At any one point, it didn't seem like much, but put it all together 25 years later and it spans Grenada and the Cold War and Panama and Somalia and both Gulf Wars. It's kind of impressive, even though I shouldn't be the one saying so.

I think our lives are like that; I'm not sure there's such a thing as an ordinary life. The locations might be just plain vanilla and the days might seem pretty mundane, but live enough of them and look what happens. Look at all those students taught or cars fixed or books read, look at what the kids grew up to be, look at the things you know and the places you've been and the wonders you've seen and the lives you've changed.

My grandpa was a farmer, retired for most of my memory. He was about as ordinary a man as you'd find, which means not very. He was a locally-renowned baseball pitcher who snuck off the farm to play on Sundays, a young hellion who drove way too fast. He was famous for his strength -- they said he could grab a bull by the horns and back it up. He plowed his fields with horses, and then tractors; he told of the day it rained frogs and fish; he remembered the first car ever bought in the county. Grandpa loved God, and he loved singing hymns. Even at the very end when he couldn't see or stand or even hold his head up, he still sang. I only realized when it was too late that he was one of the most fascinating people I knew.

It makes me think I should spend more time appreciating my life and less time wishing it was different. It makes me wish I had the trust of King David, who thanked God in Psalm 16 by writing, "The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance." It makes me hope my kids will be smarter about it than I was.

The odds of that seem pretty good.