Letter 08 — August 2026
Re: The Pool Table
Dear Soldier,
Somewhere in the hours between training and lights out, you learned to play pool. This seems like a small thing. I have been thinking about it for years, and I think it is not small.
The pool table was on the base. It was available to soldiers during the limited free time that basic training provides, which is to say it was available in the gaps — the compressed periods between the scheduled demands that structure the training day. You did not have letters to read or phone calls to make in the way that other soldiers did. You had time, and the pool table was something to do with it.
But more than that: the pool table was a skill you could acquire entirely on your own. No relationship required. No prior knowledge required. No credential or background or history that would give you an advantage or a disadvantage. Just the geometry of angles and the physics of momentum and the particular discipline of a game that rewards patience and punishes impatience.
You were good at patience. You had been practicing it since June.
I think of the pool table as the first evidence of something you would demonstrate again and again in the years that followed: that in the absence of the things other people had, you found something else to develop. Not as consolation. As occupation. As the specific intelligence of someone who has learned to build something in whatever space is available.
From the man who still respects the geometry,
Gabriel
mydearsoldier.com