Anyway, I walked up to the glass entrance with a white plastic bag and two trickle-chargers I had purchased at the motorcycle show to accommodate the constantly discharged batteries on the classic muscle pick-up truck (six years to antique plates!) and the Harley that sleeps in the garage.
 
I guess I fit the profile for a baby shower guest, though the doorman probably did not know I was actually carrying “Baby’s First 12-Volt Charger” and not a receiving blanket or breast pump kit.
 
The venue was appropriate. My friend is a celebrity. You can find several articles about her on the net, some praising her application of anthropology to warfighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
We met, in fact, when I was involved in a guerilla war against the Bush White House regarding their information operations strategy in the Muslim world in 2002. She went on to a very high profile career integrating the concept that there is a human terrain to be dealt with in military operations that must be recognized as equally important as the topographic lay of the land.
 
I have only a bogus Harvard certificate, not a real one like hers (she also went to Yale), in addition to a heritage of an early life spent on a Sausalito barge with her Flower-Power parents. I have not been profiled anywhere, with the possible exception of my ex’s attorney’s office. She has been in the New Yorker and Wall Street Journal.
 
Despite some fairly dramatic differences in background, we have a similar philosophical orientation. We met because of a shared belief in the fact that the government was seriously deficient in understanding what we were getting into after 9/11.
 
It was my position that you should have some knowledge of the people you deal with overseas, on the general principle that that you won’t have to kill so many of them.
 
My friend took that premise a lot further. She made significant contributions to the Counter-insurgent doctrine of the Army, and has cast quite a long shadow through the corridors of the Command and Staff College out at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.
 
The shower was in one of the Kennedy-Warren’s elegant private rooms on the first floor. I was dressed more for Harley-Davidson than for the elegant salon, all wood-paneled and sedate. The crowd was mostly female, and mostly dressed to the tone of the room, heels and hose, but I have been so disoriented of late that I did not feel out of place. I first saw my friend’s childhood friend and glamorous New York author, beret and blonde, and was made immediately welcome regardless of how I looked.
 
I shrugged off my leather bomber jacket and threw my brown snap-brim down behind a delicate brocade-covered chair and poured a tall mimosa as my friend saw I was there. We embraced over her imposing belly and I started with the questions, which came in spurts over gifts and chatter among the guests.
 
Our New Yorker made an eloquent toast, announcing she was the father of the child, to general merriment, and that this baby was likely to emerge with a Rambo headscarf and gnaw off his own umbilical cord. I was knocked out, as always. She is a complete work of art.
 
There were a thousand questions bubbling in my mind. How had she found herself suddenly single? Did she know, flying with the Special Ops guys that she was in the family way? Of course. Where was she living now? Near Fort Leavenworth. She had moved herself out there after getting back from Theater, well along in the pregnancy.
 
Jesus.

An attractive lady with a wiry frame and alert eyes was taking detailed notes on the origin of the boxes filled with blankets, crib sheets, ear-and-nose siphons and milk storage devices.
 
I am a veteran of human gestation in two iterations, so I appreciate the value of these things to a new mother even if they are unsettling to the male psyche.
 
I had a chance to talk to the note-taker later. She is a compulsive athlete, figure skating and riding, which accounted for her physique. It might also have something to do with the last eight years in the theater of operations, living out of a bag, dealing with good and bad guys and listening to explosions in the night.
 
I eventually made it home and managed to get things sorted out before heading for bed. I took a full tab of the arthritis medicine to see if I could sleep right through the night. As it turned out, I must have been really tired, or maybe the jolt of how tough and unexpected life can really be did the trick.
 
I slept right through, and the hamster-wheel really has not got running yet this morning.
 
Dr. King confronted his fate with dignity. There are people all over who are confronting real challenge the same way. So, this MLK Day, I am going to thank my lucky stars.
 
Things could certainly be a lot more challenging, you know?
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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