A Slow Salute 2006

He may have been there at his desk steeling himself for the next one, or standing in his office looking south across the airfield towards the national cemetery wondering in which little town he would be spending some weekend this month. Another weekend sleeping on a hotel bed and then an afternoon spent standing, soldierly at attention, next to someone's family and friends, as that plaintive lullaby is played for another soldier, home forever. And when the music stops the right hand is brought down slowly from the forehead.

I hope that someone was with him, when he called his son's mother. She would then have to hold close that dark knowledge, until the notification officer and the chaplain got to her daughter-in-laws house. The immediate family must be told in person by a military officer, a duty no one volunteers for, and none decline.

Till then this soldiers mother would be alone with all the what ifs, the whys, the maybes, recalling last phone calls, and searching to find and reread his letters, written in haste and mailed without stamps.

Reliving that last embrace, and the first, his small head against her breast, restless chubby legs and skin so soft you don't want to stop touching it. 

First words and then steps, an Easter suit, and an oversize baseball uniform, scuffed knees and black eyes, and one day looking out the kitchen window as a boy starts across the yard and becomes a man by the time he steps up on the porch. 

They both would spend the next hours in cars driven by friends, that is what small towns are about, there is always someone that will drop everything, to do what they can. 

Riding along the interstate, then onto a state highway to a county road, into a town, then down a street to a house with a flagpole in the yard and toys on the steps. 

The  home of their son, his wife and their grandchildren. A house where they spent many holiday weekends, eating and drinking on the deck or in the yard. A house they would go from down to the river or over to the Legion hall on Friday nights for fried fish and corny Polka music.

A house where they drank beer from damp silver kegs, and ate grilled bratwurst, oven warm Bundt cake and Jell-O with tiny marshmallows. Watching screeching kids wet from water balloons and sticky with sprayed soda pop dodging in and out among the lawn furniture.

Now thinking back to crisp autumn mornings, drinking strong black coffee from thermos bottles and a shared "bump" from a dented flask, fathers and sons, cousins and brothers. 

Riding in old pickup trucks and fishing boats that forever smell of gun oil and rubber boots, cordite and dead bait.

Mornings watching the sun come up from tree stands and duck blinds. Evenings sitting on logs around campfires gazing through bare trees at the moon, a big china dinner plate with stars scattered like diamonds on a black velvet tablecloth.

Walking back through fresh fallen leaves and back and back and back through graduations and childhood accidents, two wheel bikes, electric train sets, the first trike, birthdays and magic Christmas's and before that, when it began, a long night in a hospital waiting room that seems like only yesterday, not the three decades it almost was.