A Box of Chocolates and, “You Might Have to Fight”
He probably passed the chocolates out later that night like he said he would. The ironic part was to whom he had told me he would give them. This year, like most, I’d been given several boxes of chocolate candies. “Whitman’s Samplers”, “Russel Stover’s Pecan Delights”, all loaded down with caramel filled, raspberry cream, cherry cordial, pure dark and milk chocolates probably weighing half sugar and half fat. I’m not a sweetooth, and I certainly can’t (or shouldn’t) eat all of these gluttonous gifts every Christmas, so the only rational thing to do was find someone who would and should.
I cruised around downtown Santa Rosa on my bike knowing that it would be all too easy to find someone hungry and cold, for whom fat and sugar of this sort would almost be a dietary blessing. There he was, an unshaven, red eyed, downtrodden man sitting in the alcove of a securely locked office building across from a grand old Episcopalian church. At first I rode past him, but we made eye contact and said hello. I knew that he was approachable but would probably still take my gift as some act more abetting my own conscience than his well being and hunger. Well that’s probably more inline with the spirit of Christmas, and the charity of wealth. So be it.
I turned back and rode up to the stairway where he sat viewing the empty street. “Do you like chocolate?” I asked raising the box in the air before him. He looked confused but before I repeated myself he responded that it wasn’t his favorite but he would be happy to accept my gift. I handed it to him and he thanked me in kind.
“ I suppose I’ll hand them out at the Armory tonight.” He said. The Armory had recently been refurbished and opened up as a homeless shelter for Santa Rosa. Part of the National Guard facility still operated as a training ground and administrative branch for the US Military, but the city had succeeded in securing part of it as a dormitory for the homeless. It is one of those places of the earth where sadness and insecurity have been poured into permanent foundations. A place of war, now a place of condolences to our miserable, a place of industrial ration, in all a strange strip of land in the city of roses.
“ I’ll share them with the troops” he said with a sad tone as though he had not a drop of self pity or a reason to complain for himself and his kind. “You know more of them are shipping out?” he asked me. I was confused and thrown off guard by his concern for the soldiers, those being sent off to Iraq. He spoke as though they were victims of a national dysfunction, and as though he, in spite of his broken down self, was concerned for the safety of his nation’s soldiers, and in a peculiar way careless of his own fate which had probably been secured in a very similar way on the battlefields of Vietnam decades ago.
He was going to share the chocolates not with his fellow homeless brothers and sisters in Santa Rosa, but with the soldiers to whom he expressed the greatest of condolence and pity. Perhaps he envisioned them as the cruel recipients of a syndrome akin to his postwar American life; Resent, spit on off the bus, frustration, inability, brokenness, and finally a life without a living.
He then said to me, “You know, you might have to fight one day…” I said no but he was not interested in my convictions. He saw the bigger picture of men and women in the grip of forces greater than themselves. He saw a nation at war, and no individual was to escape these streets be they Baghdad, Iraq or Santa Rosa, California.
He probably thought me a coward for saying I wouldn’t fight. He may have thought himself a martyr for finding his own ruin in war. He certainly thought the most of the soldiers with whom he had so much empathy and understanding. And with them he would share these Christmas chocolates.
