One of my favorite films, though not a movie that was well-reviewed at the time, was A Separate Peace, based upon the John Knowles novel, which I read after seeing the film in the spring or summer of 1973. I was working as a security guard, my first assignment in a guard shack late at night for a trucking company, before I headed off to Air Force OTS in August. I listened to Lakers basketball games on the radio in the shack at night. During the day, I would drive to malls and catch inexpensive matinees before heading off to work, especially after I got the swing shift at a German-owned manufacturing company in Santa Fe Springs called AccuGlide. I had my new Camaro after the Chevy strike was settled in 1973.
One day, on my way to work at this second assignment, I saw something on the painted center line of the busy street where Accuglide was located. When I got closer, I realized that it was a tiny little kitten just sitting there in the middle of the road. How it got there and where it had come from, I didn't even have time to think about. I quickly slowed enough as I got nearer, came to a full stop, opened the car door instantly, and scooped up the little guy. Just a short distance ahead, I pulled into the parking lot of Accuglide and parked. I went inside and told a sympathetic secretary what had happened. The only recourse I had was to call the local Humane Society and have them pick up the little guy and hope they found him a good home. I was leaving for the Air Force in a few weeks, and my mother would not have taken in a kitten under any circumstances. How he had managed not to get run over already was almost a miracle because he appeared to be very young and hardly capable of even getting to where I had found and rescued him.
I suspect that the following poem refers to my feelings about what was happening to Dan Stratford at the Academy because this poem and the next, which I will post tomorrow, appear just before "Plus Oultre", the poem I posted a few weeks ago, the one dedicated to Dan Stratford in NO SECOND SAIL.
Discipline
Where there is no right,
but at least true to some
balancing inner sense,
we seek always to be fair.
At odds we lose civility,
condemning again at the fateful tree--
stretched out and parted over the river.
Where fear for our decency disturbs the limb,
our desires drop furiously downward
like justice from our gods.
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