Friday
The second half of this spring break isn’t off to such a very good start. I was really looking forward to making the trip to Georgia (because I’ve never been here before), I’m thrilled to be here with Soldier Son for his graduation from Army training (because I’m proud of him), but I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach almost since my feet hit the ground because I bonked the front end of my rental car on a car-lot fence before I even got off the airport property. This sucks.
On top of that, I had put SS’s laptop computer in my carry-on luggage specifically so I could be very careful about the way it was handled, forgetting that both of the planes I took (from College Station to Houston and Houston to Atlanta) were too small for my carry on to go on board. Consequently, when I opened SS's computer to see if it’s still working after about 4 months of disuse, I discovered that the screen is cracked for about 3 inches on the right-hand side. It’s still easily usable, but I feel sucky about that, too.
I don’t know how bad the damage to the car really is, and I hope we’ll find an auto parts store tomorrow that can at least help alleviate it some, but I don’t feel good about it. I know all the lines about how shit happens and I know that it’s only money and I’m doing fine in that department, but I still feel as if I ought to have SNAFU tattooed across my forehead right now. I hate this.
Graduation this morning was actually pretty cool. I remember going to Number One Son’s graduation from Navy boot camp years ago and wishing that somehow he would have been a winner at something, just because he needed the chance to feel good about himself. He turned out to feel good enough about having finished the course, and that was okay with me.
When I went to SS’s graduation from Army Reserves boot camp about 6 years ago, I was proud of him for finishing, especially because I knew his reason for joining up had been to serve not only the US military but also the Iraqis whose country was in dire need of our help after the war we started.
This morning, he had sort of coincidentally been assigned to the “hoo-ah” squad, a group of soldiers who ran out onto the drill field in full battle dress gear to show off the weaponry the modern infantry is using. I had sort of accidentally managed a seat that was about as close as I could have gotten to his position on the field, and I thought when I saw him that he looked a whole lot like RoboCop to me—maybe more than any of the other soldiers in his squad. I was tickled to see my little boy looking like such an important man.
During the later parts of the ceremony, I was amused to hear the announcements of the outstanding soldiers and the statistics about this group: they ranged in age from 17 to 43 (SS is 27), about a fourth of them are retraining after previous assignments (SS is one of those), and more of them qualified as expert marksmen and fast runners than in any previous group (SS barely missed qualification as a sharpshooter, which put him at the top of the lowest group of shooters, and he barely passed the required run; as I told him at lunch, I considered him the anchor that made all those other guys look good). Still all those other guys were bunched up out on the drill field, and SS had been on the front line with only a few other guys at the start of the show—and I couldn’t have been prouder of him!
After the ceremony, I needed to pick him up to take him back to the hotel, and I was impressed by how quickly and easily we were able to get out of the parking lot and back to the post to drop off three buddies who hadn’t moved their stuff out of the barracks yet. We found our way back to our hotel and a steakhouse where we had some pretty good steak (for him) and chicken (for me). The small loaf of bread they brought us was to die for. I’ll need a month to work off the calories.
We both were pretty shot by the time lunch was over, so we piled into bed at the room and took much-needed naps. SS was all set for a movie when we got up, so I made my third trek to Alice in Wonderland (I had taken NOS the weekend it came to town at home). Good thing the kids taught me to like Johnny Depp; I liked it all three times.
I confessed to SS on the way home from the movie (before we even discovered the broken computer) that I have been feeling really sick about the car and even more miserable about the fact that I feel abandoned somehow (because I struggle with what I feel about any kind of supreme being), and he reminded me that if I’m feeling that way, it may be that I haven’t taken proper care of my own faith. He’s probably right.
But it’s late tonight somewhere—and I’m still not sure whose time I’m on—so I’ll shut this down tonight and see how it goes tomorrow.
Saturday
The second day of spring break was ever so much better than the first. I’m still unhappy about the rental car, but I have come to terms with the fact that it’s only money, and I’ll figure out a way to deal with that.
Besides, I convinced SS to take me to a car parts store, where I bought a bug-scratcher sponge and the store manager lent me a bottle of cleanser, a couple of screwdrivers, and a pair of pliers. SS fiddled with the loose screws and managed to pop the little one out, but we determined that yes, I’m probably going to have to pay for paint on the bumper, but the remaining screw is holding the thing on well enough. Not at good deal, but only money.
We’re pretty good at spending money, too. Our stop by the auto parts store was really on the way to look for a ginormous bag for SS to pack for his tour of duty in Germany, and we made two or three stops (including a somewhat accidental trip to the post because SS wasn’t paying close enough attention to my Garmin) before we found one he could buy with a coupon that made it about 20 bucks less than the next one.
Our next stop—which also turned out to be pretty circuitous because of his resistance to Garmin—was a Best Buy, where he priced netbooks to replace his laptop. I felt bad about that, too, until he told me the broken computer actually gave him a pretty good excuse to buy the netbook, so he was really pretty cheerful about it. Besides, Uncle Sam had been dutifully depositing green in his checking account, so he was in fine shape for buying a new machine, and I was willing to spring for the remote disc player/burner that would allow him to play movies on it. The one he found is called “red,” but I’d more likely call it “copper” or a coppery maroon, which is pretty much his favorite color since he’s a graduate of Texas A&M.
After making the first loop through Best Buy, we stuffed ourselves with hamburgers at a Chili’s that was close to the theater, so off we went to see Repo Men, which was nothing if not weird. (We were both pretty sure we would have preferred to see Diary of a Wimpy Kid or one of a couple of other flicks, but March is clearly not the best month for movies, at least not in Georgia.)
The movie and stops in a couple of other stores gave SS time to decide that Best Buy really was the best buy for the new machine, so we cycled back through to make his purchase.
Back at the hotel, I unwrapped all the new toys and got them parked in his cute little computer case while SS sorted his gear into the bag to send to Germany. He managed to stuff the bag to its gills but to leave room in his carry-on for a change of clothes to wear for his last day on pass, his netbook, and a couple of other items. We fired up the netbooks and settled in for the evening; I might as well finish my consulting jobs so I can pay for the car damage.
In many ways, he’s a child after my own heart: a netbook, a net connection, computer games, and television, and we’re pretty much in business.
Sunday
The first thing in my email this morning was a set of pictures from a high school friend of Texas on the first day of spring—Irving, Texas, with snow on the ground! I had heard from a friend in Lubbock that she had gone from shorts to sweats in a day and was piling on more clothes to keep warm, and I had texted NOS last night to bring in the plants at home against the near-freezing weather the weatherman expected there.
Georgia doesn’t seem to be seeing the freeze (although the weather here has been close to the same as the weather at home during most of SS’s training), but by the time the housekeeper rattled our door this morning, rain was pouring off the roof so she couldn’t hear me tell her we were fine. SS and I were burrowed under the covers, netbooks in our laps, where we stayed for most of the day. He ventured out around noon to scratch up lunch at the local Taco Bell, but that was about the extent of our activity until late afternoon; neither of us had even bothered with a bath yet.
Around 4 o’clock, SS informed me that if I had plans for a shower, I needed to get with it if I wanted to go get supper with him because he would be leaving at 5. I shut down my netbook and jumped in the tub, wishing I had more time to luxuriate in uberhot hotel water and still be ready for whatever it was he had planned. He took longer than I did in the shower, but then we went two towns over to eat supper and watch the Aggies play their March Madness round. We lost it by a point or two in the last two minutes of overtime; I don’t think the score had ever reached more than a six-point split for the whole game, which means it was a tense one, even if SS and I were the only two people in the restaurant watching it.
SS is nothing if not philosophical; he noted that we had played a great game, and if we had held our lead for that other two minutes, (a) he would have had to find a way to watch the next game from his new duty station in Germany and (b) we’d have gotten creamed by Duke in the finals, anyway. I’m just fine with the idea that Purdue could go ahead and win it all; that will say we lost to only the very best.
Knowing we had a big Monday ahead of us, we piled back into the hotel room and dug out the netbooks. SS determined that he had to download a huge software file to make his DVD driver work, and eventually he gave up and set it to install over night. By the time we plugged in netbooks and cell phones and lamps and whatever other toys he had going, I was glad I had put extension cords on the shopping list.
I still had nightmares about the rental car; my mental calculator said it needed about $50 worth of repair (it was bruised but not broken), but I could easily see the car agency increasing that by an order of magnitude. As SS said, it was only money, and if I couldn’t part with a couple of hundred bucks to take care of a stupid accident, I might need to rethink my spending. I considered calling my insurance company to see what they might do for me, but then I realized that if I had done the same thing to my own wheels, they would smile and let me pay the first $500 myself, anyway, so I might as well let it go.
Still, SS still seemed to me to have too much stuff in his gear bags and too little not yet packed, so if I let go of worrying about the rental car, I was in fine shape to worry about how his stuff would survive the trip to Germany. It was a long night, even with the wake-up call coming at 4:30.
Monday
So here I am, back on a plane, this time headed west again, back to central time and my own bed and dogs and NOS to fuss over me.
I got up when the alarm went off at 4:30 and got SS up a few minutes later. I shut down his netbook while he dressed and threw gear into his bags, and somehow we crunched everything in. He made a wrong turn on the way from our hotel in Columbus to Fort Benning, but that gave him a chance to stop off for a Dr. Pepper before his trip; since I’m not sure he’ll even find Dr. Pepper in Germany, that was probably just as well. We arrived at the barracks before probably anybody else, and I got a few pictures of him in his Army gear. (When I was his age, those were fatigues; when his aunt was in the Army, she called them BDUs; I have no idea what the camouflage get-up is called today.)
I drove back to the hotel, called for a wake-up call at 9:30, peeled off the outer layer of clothes, and crawled back into bed. This time I had two additional concerns nettling me: getting up and finishing a job in time to email it out before I got kicked out of the hotel room, and getting out of the hotel in time to get to the airport before my plane left. (I’m hugely anal about getting to airports. In L.A., I typically miscalculate on the wrong side so I wind up racing for the door before the plane takes off; in other places, I don’t dare do any sight-seeing at all lest I miss that flight.)
Turning the t.v. on to cartoons at least distracted me enough to doze for a bit before SS called me around 7, when I was too groggy to find the phone still in the pocket of my jeans. It had stopped ringing by the time I found it, so I dialed back in case he had come up with some emergency I needed to handle before his bus left. My call went to voice mail, so I determined that this wasn’t a crisis and crawled back under the covers.
I woke up on my own a little after 8, tried to call SS again, and decided to fire up the computer for a bit instead of fighting for sleep. I was well into finishing the job when the 9:30 wake-up call came in, and I finished it completely about the time housekeeping asked to come in and clean my room. When she saw I was still in it, she excused herself, and I started packing stuff out for the airport.
SS had left a duffel bag full of odd uniform parts—mostly, he had explained, from his reserves duty—that we had agreed might as well go to GoodWill. I packed it up and headed for the front desk to check out and get directions, when the hostess told me my Discover card had been rejected. I knew I had reached my personal caution point (Discover had emailed me to tell me my balance was high enough for this month), but that left me lots and lots of credit on the card. Not to worry, she told me; it probably had something to do with the 2-cent difference between the amount estimated the day I checked in and the amount billed today. She even rejected the 2 cents in cash.
After I dropped the old uniforms, I took off up the road toward the airport and stopped along the way for a Coke and a couple of gallons of gas, just to be sure I didn’t run dry on the way. I stuck the Discover card into the pump, only to be told to check with the management on it. I stomped inside the somewhat ratty Shell station, where the managers told me the problem was more likely with their pump than my card, then stomped back out to get my gas. While I shopped for Coke (what? A Shell station without a fountain machine? What is this place?), I called Discover to see what was up. Sure enough, the problem had been the 2 cents (apparently the hostess had tried to charge me 2 cents instead of crediting the previous amount and setting up a new charge for the new total) and the pump; the Discover card was fine.
Five bucks got me plenty of gas to get to the rental car place, even with a sort of erratic detour on the way into the airport (Gracie Garmin is good but not perfect, and when she has to sit on the seat or my lap instead of her handing little mounting post, she’s a little hard to follow), and as I wound my way into the return area, a cheerful worker named Kim hopped up to the car and asked me how I was doing. I told her I had scratched up her car, and she popped around to take a look. When she finished, she told me to give her the keys, collect my stuff, and catch up with her at the checkout booth.
“We can take care of this now, or you can work it out with collections,” she said brightly.
“How much is it?” I asked, hopeful that her tone meant I wasn’t driving myself to the poorhouse
“$85.”
$85? Is that all? I had worried all weekend about not having paid for insurance when in fact the total damage had come to 3 dollars less than if I had? I wanted to hug her—and suddenly everything that had been miserable about this trip all went away.
SS managed to call me at a couple of inopportune times as I was getting situated—while I was juggling stuff at the rental agency, when I was crossing a busy driveway going into the terminal, while I was piling my stuff into tubs for security—but when I finally got to a place where I could connect with him, I invited him to make his way to my concourse (because he had less stuff to carry and his plane was leaving later) for lunch. He didn’t tell me he had already feasted at the McDonald’s (another one of those last-things-till-who-knows-when) as he ordered bite-sized burgers at the Chili’s 2 Go, but I enjoyed a few more minutes to sit and visit with him, to catch him up on the positive outcome with the car, and to take a couple of pictures before we both had to go.
Neither of us could choke down more than a single burger, so I closed them back up in their box to head for Texas and turned to collect my goods. He commented that he thought he needed to get back down to his boarding area, and by the time I turned around to hug him one last time, he had disappeared like smoke. But that’s my soldier.
So here I am on a plane home. All in all, it’s been a crazy, wonderful couple of weeks, and life at home is looking pretty ordinary by comparison. I have a big lump in my throat over having the phone lines cut between here and Europe (although I know he’ll find ways to call when he can), and I have a love/hate relationship with the notion that the daughter in Los Angeles might finagle a move back to Texas.
But I’m so proud right now of all three of them that I think I could just about pop.
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