| ...since the beginning of time it seemed. How many suns had
risen and set since the first time they met on the green grass of his lawn?
How many nightfalls sent one of them running home from the other’s house,
before the streetlights came on? They had chased girls and dreams, and the
enemies of their imaginations while playing at games of war. Then one day
in the summer of ’67 both their numbers came up, and war wasn’t a game anymore.
It dawned on him once, truly dawned on him for the first time as he was learning
to clean and care for his rifle. There would be killing. Guns were for killing.
There would be shooting and killing and dying and perhaps worse things than
death. The two young men went off to war, as they had done all other things, together. He thought that it would be alright, hard things, bitter days come to all men, but at least they would be there to see each other through. Stationed in the same place, a part of the same platoon they would be brother’s in arms, and one day when they touched down on U.S. soil again, they would buy homes right next to each other and have cookouts with their families, and their kids would grow up yelling to each other over white picket fences and be best friends too, just as their fathers were. But life has a funny way of writing its own script, independent of the dreams and desires of men. Just his eyes, only his eyes… that’s all he saw when he tried to remember that moment and then he would drink and drink and try to forget. Sometimes the mind is merciful that way. He only saw his best friend’s eyes, and the tear that rolled down his cheek, because the rest was too horrible to comprehend, and it hurt too much to see himself on his knees in the foliage, cradling the body of his best friend for all his life, cradling the shell of a man he’d played beside through all the sunlit summers of his youth and feeling his soul tearing softly free, slipping gently into whatever place is reserved for soldiers when they die. They sent his body home, and they had him cremated. Sometimes there is small comfort in simple things. They spread his ashes over the ocean because he loved to surf whenever he was on vacation, any time he could get near the water he would surf the waves and watch the girls walk by, heavenly bodies ablaze in the sun’s golden light, and he would say, “heaven must be like this. Killer waves coming every other minute, and beautiful women as far as the eye can see.” So that’s why he comes here. It’s the anniversary of his friend’s death. He comes not to remember the day his best friend died, but all the days he lived. All the summers they passed lying down in the back of their friend's pickup truck, sailing over dirt roads, listening to Van Morrison and Hendrix, and singing along, loudly and badly as stars streaked past overhead on their way to drink with pretty girls in empty parking lots and feel the closeness, the warmth of a woman’s touch on a hot summer’s night in ’65. It all comes flooding back to him here, the good times… he can smell days gone by in the air, taste memories that he’d almost forgotten on the saltwater breeze. And for a moment he forgets that his old friend is gone. He expects him to sit down right there beside him on the sand and offer him a beer and give a low whistle as a fine young thing walks by. That’s why he comes here once a year, to honor, to remember, and to forget. What year was that, '65? Sometimes in dreams it is like old days again. |
