This Either Happened in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1988 Or It Happened Some Other Time and Place, Probably
This Either Happened in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1988 Or It Happened Some Other Time and Place, Probably
The Pilgrim’s Crusade
November 26, 2018
Ice, Glorious War
Kurt Vonnegut is alive and has come over for dinner.
We sit at the dining room table enjoying rice and vegetables while a football game spills over from the radio in the kitchen.
We talk about football, cigarettes, Sal Mineo and other things when Kurt takes a sip of his diet Coke and asks me what it is I really want to know.
"Glaciers and war," I say.
Vonnegut has his arms folded and giggles a bit.
"I wrote about that in Slaughterhouse-Five," he says. "It's a quote from a film executive that writing an anti-war book is about as good as writing an anti-glacier book. Meaning, of course that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too."
Kurt Vonnegut laughs.
"So what do you think now?" I ask him.
"Let's take the dog for a walk, " he says.
We each drink a diet Coke as we walk along with my little black dog, Dash, down the street. It’s a chilly fall evening. There's a little bit of snow. It's nice.
Dash is sniffing the base of a tree when Vonnegut looks to the frozen sky.
"Maybe wars will outlive the glaciers. I've read the reports. I wish everyone would."
I tell him I agree and then I ask him another question.
"How many times, during the war, did you think you were going to die?"
Vonnegut is petting Dash and Dash sniffs at him and licks the writer’s hands.
And we do this over and over and over again, pages on a paperback flipping through the mind of a soul that cannot be beaten. --TK
Monday, November 26, 2018