Small Town News
A short walk down a long path
Email
Print
Tweet
CopyKYLE CITY LIMITS
Don't for one moment think that just because our nation's capitol is so far north of us, the weather is some how more temperate than our hellish Texas summers. Aucontraire But D.C. does have Kyle beat in spades as far as national monuments and Smithsonians go so I found myself one morning last week, sporting bad hotel coffee and a tattered site map tucked in my hip pocket beckoning me to places I had only read about in history books.
It was my aim to awaken my daughters to the wonders and realities of their past. I was just along for the ride. We grinned, mugging for the camera, at the Washington and Lincoln monuments as the girls surmised that evidently neither one of those presidents had middle names, gesturing to books and brochures with Barack Hussein Obama printed pointedly on the covers.
I had been anticipating the Vietnam War Memorial with a peculiar mix of curiosity and dread. Almost 40 years ago now, I wore one of those clunky metal POW/MIA bracelets, with Capt. James E. Ray carved starkly into the silver above the date he had been captured. When the Vietnamese released him, I slipped that tether off my wrist for the first time in over two years and laid it in my jewelry box. I wondered what ever happened to that bracelet and wished I would have sent it to him with a thank you note. It was the least I could have done.
We sauntered down the simple rock path and began encountering the names, white-etched about knee high, three deep at first and then twenty deep and, as the wall began to surge beside us, hundreds deep. Then began the avalanche of stark names, as common as mine, cascading down and the dark granite became a shroud, a white and black elegy and I fell back, small and shadowy. I swallowed my very heart.
I was told to anticipate the power of this wall. Warned about the sheer number and over whelming magnitude of names. Kind folks foretold that I would never be the same. And they were right. I mourned the monumental loss of life. My psyche shattered at the thought of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, friends and lovers falling to their knees in grief, distraught with the reality that the life they once shared with the soldier they had kissed goodbye, would never return and they would be left, in perpetuity, to rue their absence. It was a devastation that I could never have anticipated.
And then, something caught my eye in the slate of those reflected names mirrored in front of me. Through the prism of tears I wept for strangers, I saw the silhouette of my youngest, Allison, looking like the sun itself, wide-eyed and innocent peering into the vastness, shifting from foot to foot, uncomfortable with her mother's grief, yet well aware of the gravity of bereavement before her.
And Emma, shoulders back, eyes steely yet pooled in tears belying a reckoning far beyond her years. Her heart ensconced with the new love she left at home and the incomprehensible thought of him being taken from her. She was stoic. And quaking. It devastated them both on vastly different levels.
And it riveted it me back to reality. My arms reached out and encircled them, breathing in their very essence. I mourned the death of every soldier that sacrificed for our liberty. I celebrated every soldier, to this day, who leave their families, relinquish their comforts, and are willing to put their lives on the line to afford me this opportunity to stand in the sunshine, holding my sweet daughters, as I drink stale hotel coffee and wander freely.
Copyright 2010 The Free Press, Buda, Texas. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from SmallTownPapers, Inc.
© 2010 The Free Press Buda, Texas. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.
More from The Free Press