70 Pot

Thanks to Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and to Ruth's nagging I had assumed responsibility for our dirty dishes, our laundry, our grocery shopping, recording our checks, mowing the lawn and, my favorite, shoveling snow. My cheerfully doing what many still considered women's work, the dishes and the laundry, amazed my wife's sisters and mother, but the pride I began to take in it Ruth demolished by reminding me that no one had ever praised her for doing those chores. Even more important, in the twenty-five years since my tour of heaven, not only had I not saved the world I had so far as I knew not saved one soul. I had become neither famous nor rich nor outside of one little Iowa town of two thousand people even notorious.

Bob who?

I knew now that in that same spring when I had celebrated the end of the war and the return home of the last American soldier from Vietnam and had spent one full year staggering from wonder to awe to joy and back again Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had murdered two million persons in Cambodia. The record of Haing Ngor—A Cambodian Odyssey—sobered me. While I had imagined the imminent coming of the peaceful and harmonious world commune, the prisoner Ngor stared at the dead fetuses cut from the abdomens of pregnant women and hanged by their necks. This was the reality of communism on the other side of the world.

Ngor:

[The guards] brought a new prisoner down the line of mango trees, a pregnant woman.... She begged them to spare her life.... They tied her wrists around a tree not far away from me, then tied her ankles and left. Later a new interrogator...walked down the row of trees holding a long, sharp knife.... He cut the clothes off her body, slit her stomach, and took the baby out. I turned away but there was no escaping the sound of her agony, the screams that slowly subsided into whimpers and after far too long lapsed into the merciful silence of death. The killer walked calmly past me holding the fetus by its neck. When he got to the prison, just within my range of vision, he tied a string around the fetus and hung it from the eaves with others, which were dried and black and shrunken.  Each tree in the orchard had its prisoner, and each prisoner had a different means of punishment or death.

When I read such things I do not want to live.

I do not.

Then I remember the children.

Go on.