You Hit me, I Hit you

I put my coffee cup, a little brown cup I bought at a second hand store in 1980, upside down on my wood stove. The cup says “Mitch” on the bottom, crude cursive scratched into wet clay and baked into a permanent signature. I think Mitch, whoever he is, probably made it, God knows when, in one of those beginning pottery classes at a community college. Chances are it was the only cup he ever made. It came out nice and round, the handle looks good, but it’s splotchy. Ugly really. I think something went wrong when Mitch fired it in the kiln. I can almost see the disappointment on Mitch's face when he took it out. It found its way to a junk store. I bought it. That was thirty five years ago.

I bought that cup, a similarly flawed bowl, and a spoon at the beginning of a camping trip after my girlfriend moved out. We were at loggerheads, in a protracted discussion (or was it a negotiation?) about marriage. The house felt empty. I decided I needed some time by myself for serious thinking. I packed in a hurry throwing a pup tent, sleeping bag, lantern, a small pot and frying pan in my Toyota. I had a Frisbee to use as a plate. But as I drove along, taking inventory of what I had, I realized I’d forgotten three essentials. A cup, a bowl, and a spoon. I got them all for under $5.

That brown cup lasted through our break up, eventual reconciliation, became part of our marriage, and has now found its way to the shack. I use it nearly every day. Because there is no one to talk to out here, I’ve taken to calling the cup Mitch by name. Out loud. Sometimes I bid Mitch good morning. I know it’s odd. Like Tom Hanks and his friend Wilson the volley ball in “Cast Away.”

Very early on one of those bitterly cold winter mornings not so long ago I put Mitch on the stove because he was beastly cold and needed a warm up. I had a thermos of hot coffee. But putting hot coffee in an ice cold cup defeats the purpose. That’s why Mitch was on the stove.

It’s a small wood burner, a ten and a half inch hollow cube of cast iron on stubby legs. It sits on a steel table beside me that doubles as a holder for the pine I use for kindling and the oak chunks I burn for warmth. I waited till I heard the oak chunks roaring in the little stove before I put Mitch on the top surface, inches from a glowing chunk of red hot oak underneath. I put the cup rim side down on the hot stove top, but was careful to hang the handle off the side so I wouldn’t burn my fingers when I picked it up. Upside down because I figured the heat would stay trapped in the cup and warm up faster. I returned to my writing.

After a time I picked up Mitch, the little brown cup, put him on a coaster on my writing desk, and filled him with hot espresso. I make a thermos of espresso every morning in a stovetop Bialetti in the house, fill a stainless steel thermos, bring it to the shack and drink it in the course of a morning. Hot cup, steaming hot espresso, below zero outside. Perfect.

I brought the cup to my lips and before I felt the searing pain of overheated glazed ceramic on my lower lip I heard it sizzle. Just a little ssssst, and felt the skin on my lower lip contract. The image of a piece of bacon flashed into my head. And then the pain came. I managed to get the cup back on my desk without dropping it, and in a classic example of scape goating exclaimed, rather loudly:

“Mitch, you son of a bitch.”

I’d kept Mitch on the stove way too long. It wasn’t serious. It was a short arc of white on my bottom lip that would later turn red, then brown, then scab over and slough off. It healed quickly with the aid of Bag Balm. Nothing heals more quickly than sores in your mouth. It wasn’t the burn itself that took me back. It was first the enormity of my own stupidity, and secondly my immediate reaction to blame someone or something else. Just when you think you’re a pretty calm and reasoned fellow, you prove yourself otherwise.

When my kids were little I involved them in Saturday morning leaf raking. I gave them both adult size rakes, the bamboo kind, even though my daughter was six and my son four. They were eager to help. We lived on the West side then in a rented house on a corner and were raking the leaves to the berm. It was all going swimmingly until the kids got near each other. I was away from them some distance but looked up to check their progress and saw the whole incident unfold. They were back to back and without knowing it, too close together. Because they were small trying to manage full size rakes they had both choked down on the handle, with a most of the wooden stick waggling behind them. My son’s rake hit his sister squarely in the back of the head on one of his mightier stabs at the leaves. Before I could yell:

“He didn’t mean to!”

she turned, gripped her rake like a baseball bat, and cracked her brother a good one in the back of his head. Pure reflex. It was ‘You hit me, I hit you’ demonstrated perfectly at a young age. Action, reaction. Call it what you will. It comes naturally to us humans. We have to first know that about ourselves, and then guard against it.

I try to do that, I swear, not give in to knee jerk reaction, but it’s very hard.

That was what I was doing when I finished an article in the New York Times Sunday Review called “How We Learned to Kill” by Timothy Kudo. Timothy Kudo is a 27 year old Marine captain and graduate student at New York University who was deployed to Iraq in 2009 and to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011. It is best to read the whole article rather than rely on the excerpts and comments I will make about it. You can do so by copying and pasting this in your browser: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/opinion/sunday/how-we-learned-to-kill.html?_r=0 (Sorry, I can't make the link feature work.)

Here’s what I reacted to both immediately and emotionally. If I was my young daughter at the moment these words sunk in I would have hit him with a rake.

We live in a dangerous world where killing and torture exist and where the persecution of the weak by the powerful is closer to the norm than the civil society where we get our Starbucks. Ensuring our own safety and the defense of a peaceful world may require training boys and girls to kill, creating technology that allows us to destroy anyone on the planet instantly, dehumanizing large segments of the global population and then claiming there is a moral sanctity in killing. To fathom this system and accept its use for the greater good is to understand that we still live in a state of nature.

I don’t accept that. It makes me want to scream. But it’s a nice almost spring day. We’re already at 37 degrees and on our way to the fifties. I’m letting the fire in my stove go out It’s not a day for screaming. I’ll do that next time. Enjoy this day.