POW

From as far back as I can remember, my brother was obsessed with wars. As a kid, he had a full array of G.I. Joes, and those little green army soldiers littered our house and backyard. He read about wars…histories, guns, memoirs, fiction.

So maybe that’s why, when I first read the only journal he kept in the hospital, and I saw a reference to a POW coming to visit, I just mentally compartmentalized it into “war stuff he likes.”

But, as I’ve worked on this blog, and thought about what research I might look into to explain how Ted managed to thrive, despite his confinement in a sterile room, and thought about categories of people and memoirs that speak to confinement and growth…that POW reference started to resonate in a different way.

When I work on a book project, I collect movies and books that relate to it, thematically, no matter how tenuous the link.

I just spent about half an hour on Amazon, going down the rabbit hole in search of books by and about POWs.

Even on cursory glance, it’s clear why these guys may have interested Ted. They were confined and had their liberty taken away, they were tortured (Ted wasn’t tortured, per se, but I imagine he experienced a lot of the medical intervention he was on the receiving end of that way), they couldn’t have the food they wanted (all Ted’s food had to be sterilized almost beyond recognition), they didn’t know when or if they would get out, their lives were at stake.

I’ve thought about other people and relevant experiences to explore….Anne Frank, and people who are incarcerated, for example…and thought about going down those rabbit holes, as well.

This is just part of my process. And I was reminded of this, that it was time to start it, because I brought my older son, Henry, to school this morning in Brooklyn. We pass Spike Lee’s production company, 40 Acres and a Mule, on our route.

I watched a movie of Lee’s called 4 Little Girls, about four little girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, when I was researching my sibling loss book, The Empty Room. The movie is a documentary and it includes interviews with some of the siblings those little girls left behind.

Sometimes this kind of research just helps me method act into a mindset, to think my way through something that puzzles me. Sometimes something more tangible comes out of it. We’ll see. I’m curious to see what emerges.