They're still drifting back in, battered and worn, two decades after they went missing. The little green army men, played with last by my middle son Johnny in huge battlefields ranging across the back yard and beyond, before the long, bitter divorce and the long, tragic estrangement.
I found a wasted, kneeling sharpshooter in March, washed to the surface by a heavy rain. Sitting on my iron chair in the back yard, I lazily looked across the lawn and noticed a small splash of greenish blue color at odds with the verdant hue of the lawn. The maimed soldier, missing his right leg at the knee and a hand, was recovered and brought home again, washed off carefully and placed in Johnny's box in the basement, my last remembrance of the sweet lad (now an apparently hate-filled man in his thirties).
Last week I found his battle mate, a grenadier, where he was making his last stand out beyond the back gate in the area we used for a garden, buried under a compost heap for twenty years which I am currently digging up. It's bittersweet to welcome these long-lost troopers home, because their commander and his progeny are forever gone.
Over the weekend I came across debris from the desperate battle, an olive-green side panel of a little green army men tank consisting of sprockets and a partial tank tread, blown apart during the battle and degraded further by the forces of time and space during the long years following the fracas. This detritus was also recovered and brought home, too far gone to be useful even to be cannibalized for spare parts but turned into a memorial to long-past battles that forever reside in the memories and psyches of the participants. Some affected persons never fully heal, like the mother who won't even tell the other parent if the three children are well, have wives or children or are even alive, the children who nourish hatred in their stony hearts for the father and his entire family, or the father who has no progeny as he ages into his seventies and wonders what was the point of marriage and fatherhood or even life; all those years changing diapers, watching perambulating youngsters, coaching even soccer, working decades to bring money home to the family; mostly pointless apparently.
