National holidays—especially Memorial Day and Veterans Day—have always been special to me, probably at least partly because I grew up on the back porch of Texas A&M University when it was still the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, essentially all male, with compulsory corps training that led to military commissions, and partly because I was born on Veterans Day, which has always forced me to remember our vets on my birthday, if for no other reason than that my birthday cards never arrived exactly on the right day. For a brief spate in the 70s, Veterans Day was made a Monday holiday and Susan Rene probably hurt herself making sure my cards arrived exactly on time; but within a couple of years, we were back to business as usual.
Yesterday I got a sort of startling reminder that this Memorial Day remembers soldiers who have fallen but also honors those who are alive, including my own Soldier Son. SS is in Germany right now at an Army base called Baumholder, which has long been a training center for soldiers deploying to war zones; SS will go to Afghanistan in November.
The real reminder came crashing in on me as I was traveling back from Lubbock, where I had attended a 2-week continuing education seminar at Texas Tech University to help me be a better tech writing teacher. I was bounding down the highway toward home and Number One Son, who is in the throes of wanting to change jobs again, when I pulled over for a pit stop in a little town called Rising Star. I popped in to a convenience store, used the restroom, and refilled my soft drink (total cost: 86 cents) when I noticed cards to support the USO for a dollar. I handed the clerk a 5 and told her to drop a dollar into her USO fund, and she asked me to fill out a card to add to the collection on her wall. I told her I had a son in Germany training for Afghanistan, and she said, "You can put your name or his on the card." So I spelled out his name and followed it with "Germany."
That's really the first time I've written down where he is since I learned his deployment date, and I felt odd writing my son's name on a USO card. I took that odd feeling with me out to the car, backed out of the lot, and looked down the highway that ran through the heart of the little old town, where I saw alternating US and Texas flags flying at even intervals a few hundred feet apart. I was so touched I almost took a picture looking back from the other side, but my rear-view mirror suggested the flags wouldn't have shown up very well. In retrospect, I wish I had shot it anyway. As I pulled out of town, my Barry Manilow CD started up "American Bandstand," and I felt for a moment as if I were driving through a Norman Rockwell painting with sound.
SS has already completed 6 years in the Army Reserves that included a tour of duty in Iraq shortly after that war began. I was proud of him for signing up then, proud of him for serving, and confident that he would come back home at the end of his tour. I knew the consequences of war zones, though, and I had faith that if he came home in a box, his spirit and soul would be in the safe hands of my mom and dad, whose spirits have long since flown. Whenever I heard of horrors of that war, I held my breath until he contacted me, every time to tell me he was not only alive but also far away from the worst of the action. He told stories of everyday dangers that soldiers take as part of the job and relate lightly, but the fact was that he was alive, and I was grateful to see him home again and not to have him called for a second tour.
He came home from that war less changed than I really expected. His job as a truck driver meant he saw less than the infantry of the fighting, but it put him in a place to determine that he was coming home to go to college, he was going to go to A&M, and he was going to wear the Aggie ring and senior boots with pride. He did all that, and then decided that today's economy, the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his previous experience were pointing him back toward a career in the military.
I'm still proud of him—hugely so—but I feel so much differently this time. I found myself horribly torn in college between my ingrained belief in our soldiers, learned from knowing a number of young men who studied at A&M before going off to fight in Vietnam, and my belief that war is not the answer; instead, it's mostly a distraction that forces one side in the argument to capitulate to the other's demands, usually at the cost of too many lives. SS recognizes how I feel; in fact, he told me from the beginning that his desire to go to Iraq was to help clean up the mess America's misdirected attacks had already made, and as a driver, that was really the job he did.
In Afghanistan, he knows he will be in the thick of action, but he's going in at a time when the battle is being fought more appropriately in terms of peacemaking than of warmongering, and he believes that, unlike Iraq, this was a war we were invited to join, not one we started ourselves out of hubris. In short, he's going there because he believes our country needs men like him to serve, and he believes a military lifestyle suits his personality and needs. He knows—and I know—that this time, or next time, or the next, he could come home in a box, but he goes on believing that he will not, and that his contribution will be part of something that, for now, has to be done.
I am proud of him, and I fly my flag in his personal honor on this Memorial Day.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Most of all, thanks for being you
When I went to my newspaper reunion a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to hear my former managing editor—more recently editor of the El Paso Times—say that he still had a letter I had written him when he stepped into the position of editor of the University Star, and that he keeps it close at hand and reads often. For my money, if he's read it once a year for the 40 years since we graduated from college, that still qualifies as "often."
In our exchange of emails after the festivities, he asked for my fax number so he could fax the letter to me. Fax machines may not always be optimal for sending old documents; when the letter came through on my end, the type from the old Remington I'd written it on had faded enough to make the copy I got almost unreadable. A couple of passes through a modern photocopier helped it some, so I was able to make out most of it with a bit of squinting and ferreting out what almost seemed to be code.
As soon as I was able to read some of it, I showed it to one of my friends at work who clearly didn't understand the significance to me, not of what the letter said but of the fact that Don still has it—and isn't horrified to say he still reads it. I have to give it to my friend: she was right to hoot at first about the opening few sappy lines; in fact, after I figured out what it said, I wondered how crazy Don must have been to have suffered through them to read the rest of the text!
In fact, my first response on hearing that he had the letter had been to blurt out, "How presumptuous did I have to have been to have sent him anything like that in the first place?" The current students who were listening to the story assured me that writing it was "cool," especially since it clearly had meant enough to Don for him to tell them about it. I guess he must have still liked me when he got it; he survived the opening lines of syrup!
Farther into the letter, I thought I did all right. Essentially, the message was that the Star was a lot like a thoroughbred that needs both a strong hand to tame it and a soft touch to reassure it; I suspect that image came largely from the horses statue that was the focal point of our campus, because my personal knowledge of horse care—or, for that matter, of pet care back then—was small.
I think I saw a lot of influence of The Prophet in the letter, which isn't surprising since The Prophet continues to be among my favorite philosophical works, probably as much for its simplicity as for its wisdom. Maybe that influence was what touched Don; maybe some of Kahlil Gibron's thoughts were really what touched him most.
Last weekend, when I was dumping pictures off the camera I had taken with me to the reunion, I picked the best pictures of the five of us—Don, Ann, Peggy, Jane, and me—and forwarded them to everybody in that group. Don surprised me again by telling me he had also put his hands on my "thirty letter, " the traditional final message from an outgoing editor to the staff. I suppose that at one time I was in possession of Jane's thirty letter, but as much as I loved Jane as editor, I don't have a clue what might have happened to her letter.
And knowing that Don had mine was not only touching but also a little scary: what in the heck had I done with that? I know I wasn't very happy about leaving my post; I had hoped to have another semester at it, but I learned that campaigning to hold a spot that I thought I had managed pretty well just doesn't hold up well against a contender who has identified weaknesses and has bright new ideas to put forth. "Bitter" isn't quite the right word for the way I felt, although I did feel as if I could continue to do a better job than the contender would do, but "hurt" is not too far off the mark. So what did I put in the letter that had touched Don enough that he kept it?
Don's message telling me he had found the letter asked for my address so he could mail this one, and I watched the box carefully until it arrived today. Inside the envelope I found a hand-written note from Don, saying that he had sent me my original and kept a copy for himself. How amazed I am that he still wants to have a copy!
This letter is also typed out on the old Remington, this time on Star letterhead; after all, I was still the editor then. And I was pretty proud of myself when I read this one. I don't think it has nearly the heart of the other, but I was pleased to see that I had managed to point out some special contribution from each of the staff who had been special to me and to thank them for what they had done.
The second page was mostly the words to a song that was popular at the summer camp where my brother and I had worked for a couple of summers. It was purportedly written by another of the camp counselors, and since I can't find a shred of evidence of its existence anywhere else, I pretty much assume that's true. The essence of it is in the chorus:
I can't carry a tune in a bucket and I don't think I know anybody any more except my brother who might even remember hearing it, but that song has stayed with me through friendships coming and going for many years. I think I love it as much today as I did then.
And thinking about it now, seeing how those letters have come back to me from Don, I see even more how much Don and Jane and Peggy and Ann contributed to what came of me.
And all this time, I really didn't know that I had ever mattered very much to anybody. Maybe somewhere I really did do something good.
In our exchange of emails after the festivities, he asked for my fax number so he could fax the letter to me. Fax machines may not always be optimal for sending old documents; when the letter came through on my end, the type from the old Remington I'd written it on had faded enough to make the copy I got almost unreadable. A couple of passes through a modern photocopier helped it some, so I was able to make out most of it with a bit of squinting and ferreting out what almost seemed to be code.
As soon as I was able to read some of it, I showed it to one of my friends at work who clearly didn't understand the significance to me, not of what the letter said but of the fact that Don still has it—and isn't horrified to say he still reads it. I have to give it to my friend: she was right to hoot at first about the opening few sappy lines; in fact, after I figured out what it said, I wondered how crazy Don must have been to have suffered through them to read the rest of the text!
In fact, my first response on hearing that he had the letter had been to blurt out, "How presumptuous did I have to have been to have sent him anything like that in the first place?" The current students who were listening to the story assured me that writing it was "cool," especially since it clearly had meant enough to Don for him to tell them about it. I guess he must have still liked me when he got it; he survived the opening lines of syrup!
Farther into the letter, I thought I did all right. Essentially, the message was that the Star was a lot like a thoroughbred that needs both a strong hand to tame it and a soft touch to reassure it; I suspect that image came largely from the horses statue that was the focal point of our campus, because my personal knowledge of horse care—or, for that matter, of pet care back then—was small.
I think I saw a lot of influence of The Prophet in the letter, which isn't surprising since The Prophet continues to be among my favorite philosophical works, probably as much for its simplicity as for its wisdom. Maybe that influence was what touched Don; maybe some of Kahlil Gibron's thoughts were really what touched him most.
Last weekend, when I was dumping pictures off the camera I had taken with me to the reunion, I picked the best pictures of the five of us—Don, Ann, Peggy, Jane, and me—and forwarded them to everybody in that group. Don surprised me again by telling me he had also put his hands on my "thirty letter, " the traditional final message from an outgoing editor to the staff. I suppose that at one time I was in possession of Jane's thirty letter, but as much as I loved Jane as editor, I don't have a clue what might have happened to her letter.
And knowing that Don had mine was not only touching but also a little scary: what in the heck had I done with that? I know I wasn't very happy about leaving my post; I had hoped to have another semester at it, but I learned that campaigning to hold a spot that I thought I had managed pretty well just doesn't hold up well against a contender who has identified weaknesses and has bright new ideas to put forth. "Bitter" isn't quite the right word for the way I felt, although I did feel as if I could continue to do a better job than the contender would do, but "hurt" is not too far off the mark. So what did I put in the letter that had touched Don enough that he kept it?
Don's message telling me he had found the letter asked for my address so he could mail this one, and I watched the box carefully until it arrived today. Inside the envelope I found a hand-written note from Don, saying that he had sent me my original and kept a copy for himself. How amazed I am that he still wants to have a copy!
This letter is also typed out on the old Remington, this time on Star letterhead; after all, I was still the editor then. And I was pretty proud of myself when I read this one. I don't think it has nearly the heart of the other, but I was pleased to see that I had managed to point out some special contribution from each of the staff who had been special to me and to thank them for what they had done.
The second page was mostly the words to a song that was popular at the summer camp where my brother and I had worked for a couple of summers. It was purportedly written by another of the camp counselors, and since I can't find a shred of evidence of its existence anywhere else, I pretty much assume that's true. The essence of it is in the chorus:
Thank you for what you've made of me
and thank you for all the good things I see.
Thank you for what you say and do,
but most of all, thank you for being you!
I can't carry a tune in a bucket and I don't think I know anybody any more except my brother who might even remember hearing it, but that song has stayed with me through friendships coming and going for many years. I think I love it as much today as I did then.
And thinking about it now, seeing how those letters have come back to me from Don, I see even more how much Don and Jane and Peggy and Ann contributed to what came of me.
And all this time, I really didn't know that I had ever mattered very much to anybody. Maybe somewhere I really did do something good.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Worst. Date. Ever.
On Friday night I ate dinner with two of the dearest people I have ever known, the lady who preceded me as editor of our university newspaper and the gentleman who served as my managing editor. On Saturday, I found myself at a table with Jane again, but this time the gentleman on her other side was the one who had preceded her as editor.
We had plenty of catching up to do, since none of us had seen the others since we left the campus in the early 1970s. Both David and Jane were surprised to hear that I had gone to San Marcos to train to be a journalism teacher; Jane listened to me tell the story (I could have stayed at Houston Baptist, majored in English and sociology, and gone directly to the Houston Post with a guaranteed position, which was unheard of in those days), looked almost through me, and said, "Yeah, you've always had the patience for it."
David remembered Jane's impulsive marriage during Christmas of their sophomore year that broke up while she was editor her senior year. Jane traced her somewhat haphazard history since then, which has taken her in hops across the States and to schools including seminary and social work so that she is now a counselor for military veterans. She never remarried, but she adopted a son 25 years ago that she loves dearly. I told her several times over the weekend that I wished she had come to the last reunion, but she assured me she just wasn't ready; the circumstances of her leaving had been too much for her to be ready to face coming back. I think she was pleased when I reminded her that leaving when she did opened the door for me and a lot of others who might not have had the chance to serve if she had not moved on.
David had come into the editorship in the middle of my first year on the hill. The editors before him had gotten the boot from an administration that didn't like their politics. I was surprised to find that the only story that had ever gotten out about that group had been that they published stories about the anti-Vietnam war moratoriums that were taking place on other campuses; at a school where the author of that war was an alumnus (and a former editor of the Star), anything opposing the war was considered poor taste. I hadn't known the editors well, but I had assumed the real reason for their dismissal had had something to do with other issues; a little pot in the news office wouldn't have surprised me at all.
David had been the shoo-in to replace them, and he did the job the administration wanted admirably under the circumstances that his predecessors had been run out on a stick. He fit the administration model much better than they; in fact, after graduation he taught at the local private Baptist school. His career followed the fortuitous path that handed him a newspaper editorship: he went to graduate school, enrolled in ROTC, and wound up training with three branches of the military in preparation for a position in intelligence, he taught for a while at Loyola University, earned a doctorate at Central Florida, and he's teaching eight online sections of English now for a community college in Florida that feeds into one of the major universities, where his second wife is in administration somewhere.
David's daughter graduates this month from someplace like Auburn with a doctorate in veterinary medicine; his son just decided after 16 years of working his way up the ranks of Radio Shack and watching the movie Office Space that he could do more with his life, so he's started a new career in something like web design.
I really should have remembered more about the son because he was at the banquet with his dad. But maybe that's why I didn't remember him: David took about a half second to recognize me when he walked up to the table, hugged me warmly, and turned to introduce me—recalling exactly the worst. date. ever.
During the last few weeks of my semester as editor, David had invited me out to dinner at one of the nicer restaurants in town. I was thrilled; I was much less impressed by my own term as editor (I had been editor of the Houston Baptist newspaper when I was a freshman, and I was just in journalism school to learn how to be a journalism teacher) than I was by his. Besides, he was cute, intelligent, eligible, and altogether impressive. And I was a mole; I probably hadn't had six "real" dates the whole time I was in college—either school.
I don't remember much about what happened leading up to dinner, but after we ate our salads and got our entrees (I recall that it was steaks; David told his son it was hamburger), David said something that made me laugh. And choke. And need a whack on the back (in days before Heimlich became the solution of note). And gag up a fine wad of meat dead into the middle of my plate.
David was ever the gentleman. He got the check, took me back to his apartment, and offered me lemonade to wash the taste out of my mouth. The rest of that evening became a blur: how could I have been such a rube as to toss my cookies on a date?
"And she was so embarrassed she never would go out with me," David told his son Saturday.
"Uh—or you never invited me!" I teased.
"Well, I—" he back-paddled.
So at least I'm pretty sure my long-term memory isn't too far gone after all: I was pretty sure that if I were anywhere in David's radar, it was as the date who gagged at dinner.
Which it was.
Worst. Date. Ever.
We had plenty of catching up to do, since none of us had seen the others since we left the campus in the early 1970s. Both David and Jane were surprised to hear that I had gone to San Marcos to train to be a journalism teacher; Jane listened to me tell the story (I could have stayed at Houston Baptist, majored in English and sociology, and gone directly to the Houston Post with a guaranteed position, which was unheard of in those days), looked almost through me, and said, "Yeah, you've always had the patience for it."
David remembered Jane's impulsive marriage during Christmas of their sophomore year that broke up while she was editor her senior year. Jane traced her somewhat haphazard history since then, which has taken her in hops across the States and to schools including seminary and social work so that she is now a counselor for military veterans. She never remarried, but she adopted a son 25 years ago that she loves dearly. I told her several times over the weekend that I wished she had come to the last reunion, but she assured me she just wasn't ready; the circumstances of her leaving had been too much for her to be ready to face coming back. I think she was pleased when I reminded her that leaving when she did opened the door for me and a lot of others who might not have had the chance to serve if she had not moved on.
David had come into the editorship in the middle of my first year on the hill. The editors before him had gotten the boot from an administration that didn't like their politics. I was surprised to find that the only story that had ever gotten out about that group had been that they published stories about the anti-Vietnam war moratoriums that were taking place on other campuses; at a school where the author of that war was an alumnus (and a former editor of the Star), anything opposing the war was considered poor taste. I hadn't known the editors well, but I had assumed the real reason for their dismissal had had something to do with other issues; a little pot in the news office wouldn't have surprised me at all.
David had been the shoo-in to replace them, and he did the job the administration wanted admirably under the circumstances that his predecessors had been run out on a stick. He fit the administration model much better than they; in fact, after graduation he taught at the local private Baptist school. His career followed the fortuitous path that handed him a newspaper editorship: he went to graduate school, enrolled in ROTC, and wound up training with three branches of the military in preparation for a position in intelligence, he taught for a while at Loyola University, earned a doctorate at Central Florida, and he's teaching eight online sections of English now for a community college in Florida that feeds into one of the major universities, where his second wife is in administration somewhere.
David's daughter graduates this month from someplace like Auburn with a doctorate in veterinary medicine; his son just decided after 16 years of working his way up the ranks of Radio Shack and watching the movie Office Space that he could do more with his life, so he's started a new career in something like web design.
I really should have remembered more about the son because he was at the banquet with his dad. But maybe that's why I didn't remember him: David took about a half second to recognize me when he walked up to the table, hugged me warmly, and turned to introduce me—recalling exactly the worst. date. ever.
During the last few weeks of my semester as editor, David had invited me out to dinner at one of the nicer restaurants in town. I was thrilled; I was much less impressed by my own term as editor (I had been editor of the Houston Baptist newspaper when I was a freshman, and I was just in journalism school to learn how to be a journalism teacher) than I was by his. Besides, he was cute, intelligent, eligible, and altogether impressive. And I was a mole; I probably hadn't had six "real" dates the whole time I was in college—either school.
I don't remember much about what happened leading up to dinner, but after we ate our salads and got our entrees (I recall that it was steaks; David told his son it was hamburger), David said something that made me laugh. And choke. And need a whack on the back (in days before Heimlich became the solution of note). And gag up a fine wad of meat dead into the middle of my plate.
David was ever the gentleman. He got the check, took me back to his apartment, and offered me lemonade to wash the taste out of my mouth. The rest of that evening became a blur: how could I have been such a rube as to toss my cookies on a date?
"And she was so embarrassed she never would go out with me," David told his son Saturday.
"Uh—or you never invited me!" I teased.
"Well, I—" he back-paddled.
So at least I'm pretty sure my long-term memory isn't too far gone after all: I was pretty sure that if I were anywhere in David's radar, it was as the date who gagged at dinner.
Which it was.
Worst. Date. Ever.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)