Brant Blower

The Unknown Soldier

To be honest, I hardly knew the man. He was a divorcee living in Bridgeport, and I a film student in San Francisco. There are two pictures of him hanging in my parent’s hallway, one wearing an army uniform and another jamming with some rock band as a teenager. I heard very little about him until the eve of my graduation, when my parents announced his death. His belongings were poured over without much fuss. I, being the only child, was awarded the box of leftover items –a weathered black notebook, guitar picks, a key, and a some Italian currency. The notebook’s pages were filled with carefully scripted writing. After determining that the sixty thousand Lire was all but worthless, I filed the box in the back of my closet where it stayed for the next couple of months.