Saint Walter

If Only We All Had a Bayonet Up Our Ass... Memorial Day

Walter died when he was 84. He should have died many times in WW II as a young man, but he survived. At least physically.

I met Walter about 25 years ago when we became Orthodox and he and his wife became a part of our mission parish. Walter had a three legged stool he kept in the trunk of his car because he had no use for platitudinal theology and seminary words. During the homily he would go out in the parking lot, open his trunk, sit on the stool and smoke. I'd often join him, not to smoke, but to chat because I had more respect for Walter than our priest. And he was infinitely more interesting than anything I'd heard our priest say. Walter had virtually a clairvoyant instinct for when the homily was over.

Walter was cradle Russian Orthodox and a WWII veteran. I knew that because one day at coffee hour we were sitting at a table and one of our teen-aged young men was slumped in a chair and yawning loudly. It was a small room, mind you, no private conversations could happen there.

Walter said, "What's wrong with you??"

The kid says, "I'm tired...I was up late last night."

Walter says, "TIRED? What the hell do you have to be tired about? When I was your age I spent all night in a trench in France with a Nazi and a bayonet up my ass! That'll make you tired!"

Quintessential Walter as I got to know him. He came off crusty and crude. Most people humored him. But I talked to him over the years. He told me, "The Army fucked me up, you know. I was always the smallest guy in a fight but I always won."

He had fought from Normandy to the fall of Berlin. He told me he puked when they liberated three death camps along the way. He told me there were things he did in the war he dared not confess to a priest because they'd send him to hell. When Berlin fell he got sent back Stateside for R and R. He stayed at a base for 4 weeks then was sent to the South Seas and fought in the islands to the fall of Japan.

He couldn't talk about the things he'd seen and done because he'd choke up and tears would start welling in his eyes and he'd just say, "Fuck it..."

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The doctor gave him six months, he made it almost three. I visited him a couple weeks before he died. His wife had died and he lived in a trailer park in a single wide with his little "rat dog" that sat on his lap. I knocked, the door was open he said, come on in.

I walked in. He was in his easy-chair, his dog on his lap, hooked up to his green oxygen tank next to the chair.

I said, "Walter, how are you?"

He looked at me and said, "Don't ask me how I am, you know how the hell I am...I'm dyin'..., that's how I am. Everyone asks me that, what the hell am I supposed to say?"

Then he half smirks. He loves to do that to people.

We talk for a while. I change the oxygen bottle for him. He has my wife go in his back yard and pick some oranges from his tree so we can take them home. He gives me a half a gallon of antifreeze that he had left over out in his shed. I told him I'd come by and see him again. We left and I never got back to see him while he was alive.

Somehow recording radio shows, work, kid's concerts, wedding showers and basketball playoffs were more important than Walter while he was living. We made it to his funeral though. I know he'd probably say, "What are you doing here? I'm dead...go watch the fuckin' basketball game, its a hell of a lot more fun than a funeral!"

On this Memorial Day I'll toast his memory with orange juice with a shot of Russian vodka.

Thank you for your service Walter, and for your friendship with this zealous, clueless kid, and eventually the inspiration for my Orthographs' "Curmudgeophan the Recluse". You were my introduction to the deconstruction of my convert delusions of a Renaissance Festival, romanticized, imitative, rule-bound Orthodoxy and how it is lived in the most inhuman brutality a soul can endure.

Memory eternal and a blessed Memorial Day, Walter.