Good Friday Boots
Good Fridays showed themselves for many years, when I was a child, dressed for the occasion: gray and mournful, not in a full, spring-promising rain but in a sad gray drizzle, cold, and mirroring our hearts as we thought of Christ’s passing, His life seeping away, for each of us as we were told, and He enduring it, the son of God.
It’s been many years since I have thought on that. One year it was unaccountably and gloriously sunny and we went out to play. Another year, the year I heard about Tiger Cages in Vietnam, I thought that as torture victims went, the brother of James got off lightly. But echoes sprang back upon me unexpectedly today as I walked the rows and columns of the empty soldiers’ boots at the Civic Center Plaza. Eyes Wide Open, a traveling education project of the American Friends Service Committee, was here for Easter weekend.
Approaching from between the library and the Asian Art Museum the display looks small and pitiful, another sigh exhaled by wearied peace people. Come upon them though, one thousand five hundred and twenty-five pairs of boots today, and rising, one for every American dead child dressed in a uniform and sent to Iraq, and their wordless power grows. There are tumbled down boots and boots tall and shiny, boots with photos attached and boots with an American flag stuck between the laces, boots with a small bear filing the space of the missing ankle, boots toppled over, boots with whole family histories. Every boot arranged in rank and file in order of the States. Every boot with a soldier’s name, a company and battalion.
Boots hold a special place in our lives, sturdy protectors between the tender soles of our feet and the rough, stone-jagged earth we spend our lives on. Boots are meant to protect us, to allow us to plant ourselves tight on the ground, to take on mightily tasks. Boots are not meant to let us down.
In my own family boots did. A brother died at age fifteen, slipping on a wet log and into the icy snow melt river he meant to cross, just about this time of year. His younger brother, the youngest in the family, could not comprehend it. But he had new boots on, he said. Everytime we thought of yellow boots we wept, for years. How could good, new boots let him down?
That is what I wondered walking slowly among these 1,525 boots, watching others dropping to a knee to pray, standing to gaze, holding a camera for a remembering shot.
Along the right side, tied to the trees are placard after placard with photos, drawings and silhouettes of the men and women who once wore such boots.
Out of the corner of the eye are other shoes. Not boots. At first they are just peripheral things, slightly distracting from the weight of the black boots in the center. Then, as the periphery will do, suddenly something catches my attention. It is a pair of shoes the size of my thumb perhaps. Tied together and neatly lined up next to a pair of sneakers, behind some run-down sensible heels. Like someone has hurled them at my unprotected belly I understand. A child that size, with feet the size of my thumb, is dead, in this war. And the woman in front and the brother to the side. And all the other shoes-not-boots join the gathering visual chorus of mourning. Down the other line of trees, facing the pictures of soldiers, are images of Iraqi dead. Not photos but images, representing. Many with names, ages, date of death. For some a single image represents a whole family. Dead. Over 10,000 surely. Over 100,000 by some estimates. The shoes for these no longer walking feet would cover city blocks.
The California soldier dead have their shoes arranged on the steps of City Hall. Eleven steps high and 16 boots wide with a few front and center to make up 171 the largest contribution of any state. People thread their way between them, some in a hurry, others not. A camera crew arrives. Back across the street a Muslim minister is addressing the crowd, following a Jew, to be followed by a Quaker. It is cold and the boots are holding their own, doing a final duty, reminding, those of us still walking by.
Will Kirkland
March 25, 2005
[cross posted to www.ruthgroup.org]