Conversation of the Hereafter
“They say that a child shall lead us... -- I remember sitting at the kitchen table when my son was just learning to talk and he was said something about others that I couldn’t see or hear... When he was around 3 and riding in his kiddy seat in the back of my second Jeep, he mentioned something about when he was big, but I wasn’t his father. A year later he told me things about our pets, then gone; my parents who had past away, and heaven where they reside as a way station before they come back to us...”
“And now?”
“He’s 11.”
“Does he remember any of this?”
“Doubt it.”
“But you won’t ask, will you?”
“Nope. Don’t think I want to know... -- I remember when I was a kid, maybe 6 or 7, having a dream that was like a memory of adults walking away from a burning city. -- But it could have been a reaction to a newsreel or movie...”
We becomes me
In the vortex of a relationship with Suzie we pause in the remembrance of whether or not we did see and jointly remember a particular film. Otherwise we might be different people from nearly parallel worlds. This causes considerable consternation and she retreats with some anxiety. I claim memory is unreliable, but she says that reality is unreliable. At times it's difficult to tell deja vu from a dream, or an interruption in the simulation.
Ethno-Religious affiliations
The Sergeant claimed to be Judean-American of Kenite extraction {hence his interest in metallurgy and weaponology}. But genetic investigation of his four grandparents revealed that on his paternal side he was a descendant of a Minoan from Crete in the Aegean. The remainder of his revealed genetic ancestry was Polish, some sort of ‘Eastern’ Celtic and a touch of Berber. The Sergeant shrugged; “that’s just 4 of a thousand ancestors...”