American Adjacent

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm eighty

Regarding belief, Pádraig Ó Tuama writes in his current post on Poetry Unbound, “Mostly, I feel like I’m in the room next door. Familiar. A neighbour. I call in … often. But distinct. I am not alone as a neighbour of God, near the household, but not of it. I think there are billions of us abutters.” I find myself referring to this idea of being an abutter more and more often. Most everywhere I am, I am near the household, but not of it.

For example, Frank and I went to an event in honor of veterans at a community center one town to the west. We thought we were going to hear our teenage grandson play the trumpet in a trio that had been engaged to play patriotic music for the occasion. It was his first paying gig. We are both Vietnam era Americans and he, in fact, served there in 1963-64. We shuffled into this building filled with our contemporaries in a sort of daze, not really understanding where we were. A blonde woman at a table in the hallway asked Frank which branch of the service he had been in. Army, he said, and she wrote his name on a list and gave him a name tag to wear and a medallion the size of a silver dollar. The Thank You for Your Service side of the medallion depicted soldiers with flags raised. The other side featured a really scary fierce looking screeching eagle draped in the flag. It said Veterans. Proud of You.

Photo by Fraizer Dunleavy on Unsplash

We were already stunned before we even got into the banquet room. Inside were some 150 men and women seated at round tables, vets of both genders, wives and husbands. They were all at least in their 70s and 80s, white-haired, several with walkers. I imagined they remembered the same ballplayers, the same movie stars, the same dance music as we do. But some of the men were wearing American flag vests and some of the women were decked out in red, white and blue flair square dance skirts so they were deeply Other. We were lost, scanning the crowd for a possible place to sit down. We decided on a table where a single man seemed to be looking for company. Veterans cut to the chase. What did you do in the service? Were you in Nam? When were you there? Don, his name was, and he’d been in the 173rd Airborne. This guy jumped out of planes over the jungle in 1965 while I was in a French class with Angela Davis reading Molière. This was five years before I went to Sweden with my first husband, a draft resister. Am I still an abutter or what?

Somehow, I’m in Hopkins, Minnesota listening to a trio that included my 16 year old grandson and two adult men, one on accordion and the other on bass, playing an armed forces medley of the songs representing each of the services. When they played “Anchors Away,” the navy vets stood up. When they played “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” Frank stood with the other folks who had been in the army even though it makes him deeply uncomfortable. It wasn’t long after returning from Vietnam that he realized that his politics had taken a left turn. He started thinking more about the death over there and less about the glory. In that room in Hopkins, he belonged but he didn’t belong.

An Iraq War vet gave a long speech. Then came the Quilts of Valor. A group of women had gathered to make quilts to give to local veterans. This November, they handed out twenty-three of them, each one a unique red white and blue design of stars and stripes. A woman representing the group called the vets by name and invited each of them to come up and stand while the quilt was draped over their shoulders. They looked proud, but also awkward trying to wear the very long tallis-like garment. We were both so relieved that they didn’t call Frank’s name.

And then it was almost time for lunch. Everyone was asked to stand for a moment of silence and my grandson stepped forward and played Taps. Another one of his grandfathers, who’d been in Korea, had a military funeral so my boy knew the tune. His trumpet made the mournful music of loss and the door of the household cracked open a little wider for us.

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