27 May 2003

It had rained for four days. It rained on me in Washington and the stationary front hung like a great balloon tethered over the East Coast and it poured down on us in New York and Massachusetts and all the points between.

Yesterday was Memorial Day yesterday all over America, but I went to Arlington because it is just over the hill. I normally don't cry there, because I don't find it to be a sad place despite everything that brings us there eventually. I have my exceptions, and I have written about them before. I do not wander over by the monument to the Pan Am dead who paid the first debt to this terror war over Lockerbee, Scotland. I have my limits and need to be prepared for things like that.

It had been a hell of a weekend that brought us to Arlington in the drizzle. My college room-mate was getting married up in Massachusetts and I needed to be there. A friend was flying in from out west to do the drive with me. But it was going to be a hell of a drive because we were both so wrapped up in what we were doing that we forgot there was a Holiday at the end of May and this was it. So, one thing lead to another and we were driving four hundred miles from Virginia on the most crowded highway in America, I-95. I often have remarked that I will drive I-95 willingly like I will go to Disneyland- when the Superbowl is on and all the idiots are otherwise occupied. This trip we were going with the idiots. The terror warnings that pushed us to Orange Alert were in effect and that in turn pushed more people away from flying and onto the roads. Our plan had her flying to Washington, the first of three targets mentioned by al Qaida. Then we were driving from Washington through the middle of New York City toward Boston, the other two cities mentioned by name. We joked and called our trip The Comprehensive Terror Target Tour and the laughing wasn't without a certain edge to it.

It was nine hours of unending sheets of rain on the waterlogged and jammed tollways that took care of that. Do you know how much it costs to drive north? We stopped counting after around forty bucks. The Smart Pass lanes loomed empty and accusing at five big plazas, all the traffic jammed into the lanes where you paid cash. Jeeze.

I'd have to tell you in a way that seems like it was, because it was only last Friday, for goodness sake, and seems like an eon ago. a blur of a weekend. We drove Baltimore-Philly-New York-Stamford-Hartford-New Haven- Springfield into rural Massachusetts and at midnight arrived at a remote Lesbian-friendly (they were friendly, too) encampment. There was no one around to explain anything in the dark, and a nice couple from Detroit who were also there for the wedding told us where to bunk. We had brought our own pillows and sleeping bag, the room had a tin-roof and plywood walls and the plumbing was communal. We could not sleep late, since the morning ablutions required putting on clothes and we goofed around Route Nine until it was time for the afternoon wedding. The rain came and went.

When we were dressed I opened the door to the room and discovered the rain had driven the peace-pipe ceremony for the immediate ceremony into the central covered hall and we popped into the middle of it and that was pretty much the way the rest of the afternoon went. The wedding of my friend to his beloved was performed by a trinity of Shaman, Minister and a man who said he was the Last of the Mohicans performed a private ceremony clad in buckskins. The bride is the daughter of a London literary figure from Ceylon of some renown. She wore a Sari. My friend wore a blue suit and red sneakers and his hair cascaded over his shoulders All my old pals were there, all of us coming to terms with the onset of age and gout. The party went on way late. The night featured a very nice rock band, plenty of alcohol, Indian delicacies, dancing, a talent contest with a Lesbian cabaret revue and shouted reminiscences. Sleep, when it came, featured rain pounding on the tin roof and the snuggest damn sleeping bag in all New England.

Next morning we were up early and dreading the prospect of the drive south. We sloshed down to the car with our pillows and bags and pointed the Chrysler south. We stopped for coffee at the coolest diner we had ever seen in Florence, Mass, built in 1941. The coffee was hot and the eggs delicious and the wood rich and contoured and Sandy the waitress said things like she would "Felt like she was walking on skunks" to try to get everyone their breakfast. My friend and I had an epiphany there over the whole-wheat toast.

Then down I-91 to Springfield, an old mill town where a slightly less-old buddy and his lovely bride have selected as the place their roaming days end. They completed three decades overseas and three careers and apparently did very well. He is rebuilding a 1920s estate on a bluff over the Connecticut River. We entered the place via a long circular driveway the lead to the long white manor house. We oohed and aahed as we entered. The floors were rich wood and the paneling dark rich wood and the views extraordinary. In back the formal gardens are lost in the encroaching underbrush. The original owner used to have grand dinner parties and have a rail car pull up on the tracks far below and take the party down to see the Show on Broadway. Water had been allowed to seep behind the ornamental stone and undermined it. The blocks of granite are cascading down from the heroic walls and cover one of the sweeping stone staircases. It is breathtaking and the grounds look like the ruins of ancient Rome.

We could not stay, regretfully. It will be fascinating to watch as they bring the place back to life and order. They say it is a five year plan, and I will grant them that at least. And then we were hurtling down the I-95 corridor, through cities like Darien and Cos Cob and The City and the Jersey Pine Barrens and through the tunnel into the Charm City and finally the last forty miles to the DC Beltway where the rain was so heavy that the car began to hydroplane and the Maryland drivers almost slowed down.

We took the northern route around the Beltway and since we were so close we stopped to look at the Northern boundary stone that leans in a little circle at the northern point of the District. We found the first of forty mile-marker stones, NW 9, a mile to the southwest in the Rock Creek Park, and I pointed out the next three that sit in people's yards. NW 5 is still a mystery. We got lost in dense vegetation and bamboo so thick I thought the Vietnamese must be all around us trying to find it. That will have to wait for another day. If finding the sites of all forty stones were easy, I imagine more people would have done it. We eventually arrived home after winding down the hills through Georgetown and across the graceful Key Bridge into Arlington. I think we watched the Sopranos on HBO- I know that we had seen the same structures that are featured on Tony's drive in New Jersey in the opening credits.

We got up early yesterday and went in the drizzle to Fort Myer. We produced appropriate identification for the sentry and parked the car in the lot near the old chapel where the stone wall separates the Fort from the Cemetery. We took the long walk down the bluff through the Gardens of Stone to visit Vince and Dan where they lay across from the Pentagon where they died at their posts on 9-11.

I am normally not that emotional at Arlington because there are so many people like me who did not pay the supreme price, just did their jobs and then lived full lives. Walking along you see some amazing themes, careful placement of graves with a scheme only known to the Administrator of the Cemetery. There are rows of District of Columbia vets, and group burials from air crashes. There is a section for newborns who did not really make it to life at all. I stood over one, a child who lived three days, the son of a Navy LT. The child's stone is identical to all the others.

The bigger kids who did not get those full lives are the ones who made get weepy. The President was coming later in the morning and we did not go up to the marble colonnade that leads to the tombs of Those Known But to God. Where we walked it was quiet and the only flags were the little ones that adorn each grave. We walked along in the gray mist. We passed Jackson Circle where the first Confederates were interred here and saw the mast of the USS Maine. The buses full of the honor guards passed us, the ones who augment the normal compliment of the Tomb Guard of the Old Guard, the 3rd of the First, for big ceremonies. The other services are welcome for that, and for the burials of their own. But the Old Guard own this place and make no mistake about it. Screw up on etiquette at The Tomb and the Guard on watch will tell you in sharp and uncertain terms. But mostly they leave you alone at Arlington to your memories.

This Memorial Day we sank in the waterlogged sacred soil up to our ankles. The rain has pooled in places and some of the stones seem to float in reflective pools. It had been raining here, with some brief respites, for what seems like a month. We walked downhill past the Civil War vets and WWI and the fill-ins, past some of the folks I know, and a new stone atop a Navy Lieutenant who died in the big Special Operations dust-up in Afghanistan Week Three. I stopped to give him a moment, marveling that they now record the campaigns on the slim marble monuments. Then we passed section 60, which is down the hill toward the flat marshy land near the Pentagon. That is the section the President talked about, where they are moving dirt to accommodate the kids who died in the Iraq campaign.

We sloshed between the rows to where they have laid the kids killed in the Pentagon attack. We saw the new six-sided marble memorial that has all the names of those that died that day across the road. Only about twenty-five of them are here in three rows, since many were not eligible for burial here. The active military were awarded the Purple Heart for their sacrifice that day. It is carved on the stone. When I was here last Veteran's Day the monument was present but still in the crate. The sod has taken nicely, and it is hard to believe that we stood on this row when it was raw red dirt and deep holes.

When the ceremonies were done, twenty-five in a week or so, and the flags presented and the crowd had departed, nervous, sad and a little angry. We left them there, frozen in time, right across the highway from where they were taken from us. It is the groundskeepers that made this section all whole again, neat and green and organized in those superb rows of white marble. They will make Section 60 whole, too, in time.

It was a memorable Memorial Day. Just us in the rain. The ones who could leave and the ones that couldn't.

Later that morning I took my friend to the airport and did not want her to go and she didn't want to go either. When I eventually got to the e-mail I found out about a paper that my younger boy needed to have done by today to actually graduate from High School and he didn't have time to do it. So I searched Google, found some material on Mexico and Chaipas and Russia and Chechnya, and wrote what could be my last High School paper. I finished in time to drive out to the County to have dinner with my sons. And when I got back to Arlington the skies were clear and the water was draining off Arlington Cemetery. Somewhere alon the highway my friend and I decided to get married again, once we figure out the details. There are a lot of them, but the summer beckons.

How was your weekend?

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra