Route 29, Near New Baltimore

The ceremony for the pinning of the airborne wings took place right after the last jump in Airborne School.  It was a hot and humid southern Georgia day, and the jump master trainers were blaring Lionel Richie from there speakers in their trucks...he'd never forget "Easy like Sunday Morning" ever again.

Fort Benning's jump zones were massive flat areas of sand and grass, capable of allowing multiple flights of C-130 propellor transport jets to drop hundreds of paratroopers from the sky.  Near the gathering area where the trucks were parked a few visitors were watching their sons or uncles jump from the planes.

The last jump was a non-equipment jump...no pack, no rifle carrier, no heavy waddling out the side of the plane.  They called it a "hollywood jump"...just showing off with your primary chute and your reserve.

He remembered floating down...the last jump was from 2,000 feet so it took some time in the hot buoyant air and he could hear the jump masters on the ground using bullhorns to yell at the students one last time...."Feet and knees together morons"...helpful tips to avoid turned ankles or something worse.

He landed very casually, falling to his left and remembered staring back up at the sky, his back on the hot sand of this southern state.  The sound of the aircraft was diminishing, Lionel Ritchie's intonations were getting louder...but he was super proud that he had completed this phase and knew that he would proudly wear the silver parachute badge forever.  He rolled over and started packing up his chute.


It was too expensive to fly back from Georgia so he got a bus ticket to DC, figuring the relatively straight shot to I-95 north would give him some down time.  He had just spent the last three weeks learning how to jump from a plane...he didn't really need to go sit in one right away.

The bus was departing early in the morning to get to DC before nightfall...so one more night in barracks with no air conditioning but also no need to polish his boots again.  He was officially qualified, and he noticed the jealous looks at the students one to two weeks behind him.


He woke early, even before his alarm chirped as he had been waking up at the exact time for the last few weeks.  He was glad to be changing into jeans and a tee shirt versus the boots and fatigues of the last few weeks.  His hair was still cut short but he wouldn't need to shave it off again.  He thumbed through the paperwork on his desk, retrieved the bus ticket and walked outside to the street.  It was already warm, the streetlights yellow and the humidity already up.  He only had to wait 10 minutes before he heard the grinding gears of a slow moving Greyhound...the bright lights cutting through the morning.  It stopped with a release of the air brakes and he climbed on, his feet leaving the sand and grass of Georgia for a long time.

The freeway was relatively clear for the most part.  They passed up through Georgia into the portion of South Carolina that gives way to the On the Border venue.  He saw the giant sombrero from miles away and smiled as that place reminded him of trips to Florida.  They crossed into North Carolina and the land began to slowly give way to rolling hills.  All the trees and flowers were out...it was still a month away from Summer but it was still warm.

Outside of the Virginia snarl of traffic, the bus decided to head north on Route 29, bypassing the interstate traffic and cutting through the areas near Marshall and Warrenton, old Virginia towns with proper State houses and restaurants that served home-made pie.  Traffic was starting to build just south of where the roads would open up into multiple lanes, making it easier for people traveling to Dulles airport, his destination to fly him back to California.

He watched the cars alongside the bus, the windows were not opened due to the air conditioning and the light was darker due to the window protective panels.  The bus pulled alongside an Acura TSX, silver...there was a brunette in the car alone...she had her head back against the driver's seat, like she was resting.  She had sunglasses on so he couldn't see much of her but she had an amazing curvature of her cheek...it sculpted itself out and then down to her jaw.  She wasn't smiling but he could tell she was quite striking.

The bus pulled ahead and she retreated behind him.  He tried to turn and glance backwards but she was lost in the reflections of windshields and mirrors.

The bus stopped about a mile from there, slowly making its way north.  And here was the Acura girl again, and she had placed her sunglasses on her forehead...she was talking on the phone and talking with her hands, moving them up and down for emphasis.  She smiled once and it was a flash of white teeth and a broad grin.  She had dark eyes, they must've been brown and he saw her glance at the bus.  She couldn't see him against the blackened windows but he saw her clearly...the face framed by those cheeks and the dark hair against the lighter interior of the car.  It was like she was regarding...observing.  She brought her hand up to the phone and pushed the call dead and set the phone beside her.

She looked back up at the bus, lowered her sunglasses and laid her head back against the seat rest.

He looked up at the small city name as the bus continued pushing up north.  New Baltimore it said.

He wondered where she was going...he turned to face front again and started thinking about the flight West.

Deluge

It invades like a cat quietly entering into a morning room, the way the quiet is invaded in a funeral home when you hear the sound of the casket closing.

The soft purr of rain, the mad clap of thunder.

When the windows are humid and the Gainesville train is blurred out like white noise in the storm.

Rain is a great reminder, mostly of sadness but it can also be mundane and boring...empty of colors except some contrasts of gray and grayer.  It has a scent, particularly in summer when it has a lawn-scent, a musky full-leaf tree smell, and the puddles in potholes match the color of the sky.

Rain spoils the work of hair dryers, it clings to clothes, turns us colder.  The Susquehanna browns with it, brimming the sides of the riverwalks and spilling into the lower streets.

The Ferry near Carsley churns whitewash against the tide, the brackish waters slapping at the sides of the vessel.

Rain causes traffic, blurs red lights and cars ahead.

Songs like Patty Griffin's "You are Not Alone" are best played in the quiet of the rain...sad songs must have that sense of the window streaks that stain and remind and stream down the glass.

Rain blurs my mind, blunts the senses...blinds me to the distance.

Rain reminds me of a lot of things...and despite the saddening qualities of the storm, I remain in a deluge of memories of when were together in one.

Finer with Age

His handwriting was terrible...that was abundantly clear...and he normally never wrote her anything in pen but rather used his phone or his laptop.  But in the letter he wanted it to be authentic...to be real and clear and as close to perfect as possible.

He wanted to let her know he had found a bunch of unfinished notes and finally finished them off...snippets of stories and randomness...dating back many years...and they deserved to be finished and put out there...


He also wanted her to know that she was fine.  Not in the sense of how she felt...rather, like china...or an exceptional bourbon.

Nobody used the word fine any more except to use it as a neutral word for being okay...words like refined were an  attempt to redefine the word.

Fine...it was rare...fine art, fine wine...why not fine humans...fine women?  He tried to convey his pitiful thoughts as he scribed...not sure of the end results but at least he wanted to stop comparing her to all the others and have her realize she was uniquely herself.

She was fine.  Supremely fine.

And the only thing better than fine was finer...and that she was growing finer to him...maybe she had started in one place but as the years played out it was conspicuous that she was that rarity...of fine becoming finer.

And he hoped the note made her feel so.

The End of Some Things

He sat in the truck, engine idling enough to keep a steady steam of gray to mix in the cool air, no radio to dull the slight rumble of the Ford, the streets fairly deserted except for a lone pair of headlights now and again.  He was at the intersection of Pace Park Rd and Main Street, where the only Christmas tree lot still blinked with a scattering of lights...a few desolate trees remaining even though it was two days after the holiday. He had asked the man what would happen to them.

Those? the man had said, pointing a gloved hand to the edge where the trees lay silent...I will pack them up for recycling I guess.

He then asked if he could still buy them.  He got a weird look but he also got a fair price.  So they trundled the four trees into the back of the truck.  And he sat there in the truck, not cold because the heat was on and he now looked at the empty Christmas tree lot and felt that by being empty it was a much prettier picture.

And he remembered...from a time ago, when they had been talking about Christmas...and holidays...they were in the middle of a summer heat, with no hint of snow.  No hint of the ice that would form between them either, no distant dark stain on the horizon, portending danger.  Not even a whiff of a breeze.

What kind of tree do you usually put up? He asked casually, and though he hadn't mentioned what type of tree he knew she knew what he meant.  It had sort of matured in that way between them where context wasn't a necessity.  They could hold multiple threads of a conversation and weave in and out intermittently.  It was one of the unique things that he always imagined about them...these tiny tendrils that they could pick up and leave, left dangling they could be picked up somewhere later in time.

I never really get the one I want.  Honestly, if I could I'd do like three or four.

3 or 4 trees?  Kinda defeats the purpose.

Really?  I think it scales it even that much greater...I could have a tree with all my childhood ornaments, a retro tree.  And then I could have another with my grown up ornaments.  And a tree just with lights, because at night you don't really see the ornaments...and then another one just for presents.

3 or 4...okay.  That's a lot of needles to deal with.

I like to vacuum.

Well there you go.

And so here he was, four trees in the bed of his truck.  But no tinsel, no lights, no ornaments either from childhood or adulthood.  

He started driving, wondering if she might even still be up.

Returns

The colors of the city, particularly in the waning light, were soap gray, and the cobblestones matched these hues, darkening though in places where the doorways were set back and in shadow.

Lights were just starting to come on, yellow bulbs from restaurants, clearer white ones on streetlamps.  It was that time of the evening when it feels like surrender...the afternoon just slowly evaporates and in its ashes come the familiar darkening parts of the day.  Not yet night.  Not still day.  In between.  Each day, more or less at the same time, it returns to this familiar.  It is unstopping.  It just does.

He felt this way when she was absent...an almost undeniable shape, an almost impossible way to stop it.  His mind, so bright and shining during the day, walked through his thoughts and started turning off light bulbs by hand...feeling the heat from them as he burned himself out.

It might be summer soon, or winter...he couldn't tell...if she was near he was warm.

The streets were dark and didn't seem to have much distance to them.  He felt like he could see the end of the road.  Could almost just make it out.

A 3rd Night

Johnson played harmonica.  He was from the south, he had been in the Army a total of 53 days and he was usually very quiet.  But at dusk, as the caravan of buses headed out towards the airbase, he played low soulful riffs on a scratched up piece of metal.  I found it comforting, the heat from the North Carolina wind milling in from windows halfway down, the sun chasing and orange in the glow.  It relaxed me in ways I didn't know, mostly because I was looking for a distraction.  Anything to think about besides the jump.

I tried thinking of her, conjuring a face, a stare.  But as soon as I started thinking of the dark eyes I returned to the black door of an airplane, beckoning me forward.  Like stepping into her gaze I trudged dutifully towards it, and then hurtled myself out into the slipstream of the breeze.  At one thousand feet it was a pirouette of sky then ground then sky then parachute then ground.  Colors blended and the wind was white noise.  I was surrounded by thousands of jumpers, dark black in the air, and just as I thought about the fall I put my ankles tightly together and pounded hard down into the sand.

I never had felt so alive.  And tapping my thigh pocket I felt the hard metal cylinder of quarters.  I wanted to remember how my heart was still exploding in my chest, my hair wet with sweat and my face dripping colors from the camoflauge paint.  I packed up my chute and dropped it into my carrier bag...rolling just briefly over to watch the blinking lights of a slew of C-130s wink red lights above me, mixing with stars and a sky with scant clouds.

I hurried back with the other soldiers to the landing zone rally point.  We waited for buses to take us back to barracks, none of us talking, each remembering the thirty seconds we were in the air.

And then we stood in lines of 9 or 10, shuffling our feet and looking at watches as we waited for the phone booths to become vacant.  Husbands calling wives, boyfriends calling girlfriends, calling parents, mouthing I love you in a glass encased stall blinking with fluorescent light.  A moth coming in now and again.

Finally I had the booth, and pulled the roll of quarters out.  I dialed her number, listening to the stirring sound of circuits traveling miles towards her.  A robot voice informed me of the amount of the call and I fed four quarters in before I heard the whir of a dialed call.

Then, in those days of phone booths, it was just two people connecting.  There were no machines...no tapes of recordings.  It was luck at times...catching somebody available with the phone not being used.

I let it ring 12 times.  When I hung up the receiver the four quarters clanged loudly in the coin return.



The barracks were simple, constructed with maximizing sleeping for exceptionally tired soldiers with spare amenities.  Mostly littered with bunk beds, there was a glaring absence of privacy.  At night, men stirred with noises and sleep talking...with no air conditioning it was enough to lie in bed and listen to the sounds of trucks driving by and the occasional sound of the fire guard walking by.

I counted the holes in the ceiling, wondering where she was.  It was not a concern.

Rather it was just an erosion that started a tiny bit of worry...when your heart is beating enough to almost hear in the dark, and adrenaline is still a syrupy trail throughout your body and one is trying to relax enough and go to sleep...just calming, just quieting...if he had spoken to her he might have had that release...she was safe...he was safe...and he could fall asleep.

Instead he thought about the night jump and tried to keep her from insisting that his mind return back to worrying about her.

Satellites over Lake Anna

They were standing on the dock looking at the fading evening in the west, and you could taste the evening and the wind like a color with sugar on it.  She had heard the laughter coming from behind her, where the others were drinking and waiting...the food already cleaned up and the noise of somebody stacking the dishes after rinsing them.

She remembered when he used to talk about the nights in Arizona...doing field exercises as a young Army officer and staying out way past the lights of the small city...sometimes when it was cloudless and perfectly still you could see the satellites...tiny unblinking white specks streaming across the sky like a falling star that never quits.

She had used the word adore earlier in the day...had allowed it to emit like a secret.  It was partly due to a song, partly due to a moment...but it was out there now...it had been given and proffered.

And he had blinked at little...not that she could see him...just that he was happily surprised.

Sure, there had been words before...but in this new space, like the bright clean air above her, there were delicacies...carefulness.  But also openness...and unlike the stars above that might have a chance to fail and fall, they stayed constant...like a streaking satellite sailing high above Lake Anna.

Beds in NYC

There is a point when the brain needs to start shutting down portions...turning off the lights in unused rooms, closing drapes and locking doors that are seldom used.

The interesting thing about her was when his brain started to slowly collapse like ice cubes left in a glass it was an image of her that was revealed.  It wasn't a decline...rather it was a bit of little inspiration.

A decade before he had found himself in a tub, a phone to his ear, the water echoing with his slight movements...she had been coy, a few words revealed.  He was in a posh hotel with a ceramic tub and she was far away.

Since then he had hoped to erase the record of that conversation...to be able to speak to her unfiltered.  Unregulated.

She had unlocked herself, the skeleton key on an iron chain around her neck loosened...she had unwound the tightest ribbon from her hair, letting it fall and cascade in its glory...she had allowed him in, pushed the key into his hand and whispered something about protecting her.

He saw the windows of the room and the massive city beyond them...way south she was there.  He wished she had come with him, but he also knew why she hadn't.

But sometimes there is a big difference between absence and loneliness...tonight she was absent...but she might have just been right alongside of him.

Drive to the Atlantic

His head was against the steering wheel, his hands gripping it on either side and he listened to the radio until the song had finished.  For him it was like some signal, some reminder and he just wanted to let it play out until he pulled the lever out of Park and started the drive.

With his eyes closed he remembered how she looked when she turned from him the last time.  In between now and then they had held some conversations, snippets he would call them.  Lovely sentences and sometimes a laugh.  But then he had wanted to see her, the way you unleash a craving and when it awoke inside of him he knew that he would have to make the drive.

But that craving had come after he had stowed away a martini or two, and he knew that there was no way he was going to be able to make the drive...so he went out to the car, climbed in and tilted the seat back so he could sleep.  It was a summer night and with the windows down the breeze came in and he closed his eyes and waited.

In a dream and falling he stirred and woke up with a jolt.  Blinking he rubbed his eyes and took a few breaths...he felt okay, but wasn't sure.  He started the car and the radio came on and so did the song...and he laid his head against the steering wheel as it played.

It ended and he started the drive.

The interstate was barren, devoid of all cars and mostly just long-haul truckers high on speed and Red-Bulls so he made amazing time.  He wasn't sure what her reaction would be...an illicit invasion and he wasn't even sure how to find her...maybe a text...maybe an email.  No call.

He just knew she was at the ocean.

He hit the Bay Bridge at dawn, when the east was melting away the prior night's blues...he crossed with the full orange and yellows in front of him and pitch black behind him.  A seagull hung beside him, high in the air until it spiraled off.  The windows were still down and the scent of the sea came roiling through...salty, humid...fresh in the morning.

Another reminder song came on, and he turned up the volume, slightly singing along as the day started climbing higher in the sky.  He wondered if she was still sleeping, sprawled out across the bed, her hair slightly covering her face.  He wondered if she might be awake, padding across the floor in her sleepwear, tussled and yawning and listening for the first drips of coffee.  Maybe she was awake and drinking a cup on the porch, looking at the same exact colors as he saw.  He decided he preferred that last image and pretended they were staring exactly at the same sun at the same time.

The song ended and commercials played...he sped up as he descended down the slope of the bridge, angling faster and moving straight east to a place where he knew she would be and he couldn't get there fast enough.