Bataan Park, Bremerton

One of my favorite movies as a kid was the Robert Taylor war film Bataan. It had a bevy of up and coming Hollywood actors (Desi Arnez), a small raft of quality character actors (Lloyd Nolan) and a fairly tight and action packed script. The story took place in the opening days of America's Pacific war, the focus on a ragtag outfit of sailors, pilots and soldiers all doing their best to stay alive and one step ahead of the Japanese onslaught on the Bataan Pennisula in the Philippines. The dialogue did it's jinogoistic best to let the audience know that the US was good and Japanese were bad, but you had to hand it to those bad guys: they sure knew how to fight. And the record shows that in those dark early days, we were up against the ropes. This movie holds no punches and leaves you, in the final moments, in death cloud of machine gun smoke. I'm sure that the audience that was watching this film during the early days of the war felt the terror and the desperation that Taylor's character felt in that eerie, steamy jungle. Good stuff, highly recommended.

I had a chance to see Corrigedor and some of the historical sites of the Batann Death March back in the early days of my military career, but I was too busy checking out the brothels and the bars of Manila, instead. I have to admit that I was taken by that city, and found no others in my travels that thrilled me so much outside of Hong Kong. I felt less hustled there, more in tune with the people, more bold and safe in that crazy, hopped up kind of way than that I ever did in that sin city Olongopo. Manila was "cool" in a way that only big historical cities can be. I wandered the old ruins of the early fortress city, ate in out of the way cafes, hung out in bars where there were no Americans, only locals and students and such, and felt very much at home. A third world LA, without all the hype.

I remember a student I met there, Loni was her name. She insisted that would she show me the city in ways that I never would if I only hung out in the bars and movie houses. She was a nursing student at one of the local colleges. I know that I was honored and puzzled by her gesture, and that we saw things that I would have never thought to see on my own..museums and public gardens and open markets and such. It was all so grand, and sweet and all so very open. It took a while for me, a wild and crazy and sometime callow young man, to see the goodness of that much maligned town through the eyes of that very nice, very sweet young woman, but once I did it was total and complete magic. We wrote for several years after that, but she ended up meeting another man, a fellow student I think, and went on to live what I can only hope was a happy life.

So that all came to mind today when I went up the hill from the Sylvan Way library and looked out over the Olympic range from a bench at Bataan Park. Melissa and I would sit and eat lunch there, take a quick break there between shifts and her disappearing acts to handle all the duties and dates and obligations that she had to do whenever she wasn't working for us at the library. I remember her sharing a nice pork roast with me one afternoon, all wrapped in a warm tortilla, showing me that yes, she could cook. We had that in common, cooking. I suppose of all the things we kicked around that was the easiest thing for us to connect with. We certainly did a lot of that at that park. Connecting.

I don't think there was a season that we didn't sit and appreciate there. We saw the rose garden go from bud to full bloom , dealt with the rain by sitting off to the side of the road in her car, listening to Rascal Flatts and wondering if we would ever be allowed to love each other out loud. I know that we talked about life and family and Rubix Cubes and all machinations and plots that only two people in love could possible come up with. We talked hard of work, of shifting collections, of book clubs and our notoriously low book club membership. We gave a hard look at post cards and poetry and state park brochures, we spent long moments analyzing escape plans and plans that failed and those that were doomed to failure from the start. It was a place that we took the odds that life gave us into our hands and used those odds to fight off the relentless hordes of reality that fought us, and, in the end, undertook our own desperate march to the end of the line.

One of our last moments together was sitting in her car, facing that park, wondering why of all days we would get a rainy day to talk. I was still giving it my saleman's pitch, still trying to work the combination on that lock that was our friendship. The game was long over but I didn't care. Like Robert Taylor's sargeant, I was already resting in the grave of that relationship, and knew it, too, but loaded up my rhetoric and went out with both guns blazing.

Nobody can say that we didn't try.

It was all good. The roses, the poetry, the tall, tall trees, the view of the Olympics, the burritos, the long embraces, all of it. It took a long time but I was finally able to see that. No bitterness, just hard fought loyalty. All the way to the end of the line. Yes, it was good. Every last bit of it.

Your WHMB