28 June 2003

Don't Stop

It is Saturday morning, the only time in the week to think about what is next, not that I obsess about it. It is just the only time when there is no work and no dread of what is coming tomorrow. Sort of like the old Fleetwood Mac song "Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)."

I am thinking about a couple things besides the next steaming mug of coffee. is it rain today? It is gray enough out there. not that I haven't, but there are several of us thinking about next things this morning. I no longer have to pay child support, for example. At least not formally. My younger son is eighteen and a high school graduate. The Court of Fairfax County that has come to be an integral part of my life has decreed that I should pay $715 a month until this time, at which point I am relieved of the obligation to provide that amount of money per month for his food and sneakers.

Now of course what it actually means is that I start paying $1400 a month for his college tuition, which my wife's fiendish attorney tried to get inserted in the final decree. Not that I wouldn't pay it, mind you, but I resisted on principle that it would be part of a Fairfax County mandate. I imagine the plan was to provide it to the ex, who would in turn provide it to Michigan State University.

I don't imagine my ex has reviewed the settlement, so I expect there will be some unpleasantness when I give her the monthly check. When September rolls around the amount of "spousal support" which I am obligated to pay will decline to $2,500 per month, which would be tough to get by on if you were just sitting at home, looking at the four walls with everyone else gone. Of course she is also entitled to 40% of my pension, by law, and I am going to retire on the first of September, so all told, she is going have to get by on $54,000 a year out of my pocket. I hope she takes the summer off. She has been through a lot.

But she needs to think about the future.

Goodness knows there was enough to think about in the past this week. Strom Thurmond, Lester Maddox and Maynard Jackson let us this week. Old Strom spanned a third of the history of this country, and he was the only one of the unlikely trilogy I had the pleasure to meet. It was just a couple years ago, the ancient Senator chugging along the gallery on the Senate side of the Capitol headed somewhere on his geriatric autopilot. I was giving an impromptu tour of the place to some visitors. I attacted his attention by greeting him as "Mr. Chairman," which works for nearly everyone down there but meant something in his time. He was a courtly old automaton, shaking hands all around before shuffling off in that queer gait of his. A Major at D-Day he was, and I think maybe the senior man left who was on the field that day 59 years ago. I don't know if they will place one of the little souvenir axe-handles in Lester's coffin, the kind he used to hand out to commemorate his threat to beat any African American who tried to eat in his fried chicken restaurant.

And Maynard, the first African American to be elected to lead a major southern city, will be buried in Atlanta today. I don't know who will leave the larger legacy. Mayor Jackson, I suppose, though they are all a part of a chapter in our national life we ought to continue to think about else we repeat it.

I don't imagine Chante Mallard, the former nurses aide who ran down a homeless man and got him wedged in her windshield for a day or so before he finally died and she and her friends dumped his body in a local park. They sentenced her to fifty years in the slammer. So she has some things to think about and I doubt any of them are particularly pleasant. On the up side, she will be eligible for parole in 25 years. And the Supreme Court decision on sodomy should clear the way to formalize relationships up the river where she is going. Something to think about. I imagine the Justices think about the future, that being their job to look at the past and cast the dice into the unknowable future. Interesting job. A friend of mine was railing about Antonin Scalia, the perky little Italian American justice whose wit is incisive and who has a better sense of what the High Court is about than some of the other airheads up there. The Liberal wing seems to think that they can legislate better from the bench than the states can from the floor of their statehouses. I am pretty sure the Framers never had any of this in mind when they wrote the Constitution. And I tend to go with the Framers original intent when there is any question. Wait to see the cascade of change that comes from the Texas sodomy decision. We will not recognize the landscape when all the wreckage settles.

But of course on the facts, the two guys making love in their own house when the cops burst in. No place for the police in the bedroom unless there is a compelling public policy reason for them to be there and I can't. So, oh well, I agree with the verdict, but I wonder about the consequences.

But that wasn't the only story that involved things to think about. The New York Times hit me hard this morning. Attacks and sabotage continued in Iraq. The latest violence occurred just after 11 p.m. Friday, when attackers lobbed a grenade at a U.S. convoy through northeast Baghdad in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood called Thawra. One American was killed and four were wounded. An 11-year-old Iraqi boy slain by American troops who mistook him for a gunman. They found the bodies of two U.S. soldiers who had been missing this morning, kidnapped four days ago from a guard post north of the capital along with their Humvee.

There have been 22 Americans killed since we declared combat operations over in Iraq. I suspect we will be seeing the Humvee again sometime soon. Something to think about for tomorrow if you happen to be manning a checkpoint in Baghdad, scanning oncoming traffic for a threat.

I have lived this before, I feel a sense of déjà vu. The daily body count. The funerals will continue over at Arlington. The caisson platoon that cares for the stately horses who pull the gun carriage that bear the coffins of the dead has the last active stable in the U.S. Army. The Old Guard of the Third Infantry runs the stables because they manage the ceremonies at the National Cemetery. I thought they had Lippazon stallions, the magnificent warm-blooded breed of the Habsburg Emperors. They came to Ft Meyer courtesy of the people of Austria. The breed had never been permitted to be exported. But some were given to George Patton, who liberated Vienna to the chagrin of the Allied High Command. The Red Army was supposed to have pride of place on that one, like they did in Berlin. The Allies figured the Russians had paid for the right in blood. But Patton had some other thoughts and on the whole, the people of Austria are grateful to him and his Third Army

I was at the stables just a week ago with a recovering dressage queen. She wanted to see the Lippazons and she wanted to see the last active stable managed by the Army. Once the mounted Calvary was the most effective and fastest instrument in land warfare. Now the last of the horses pull the carriages of guns the Army doesn't use to carry us retirees to our rest. There are a lot of us, particularly if you include the WWII guys like Strom. And now the active guys, the ones who are dying day by day in Baghdad will be coming home. I saw one of the few graves from Afghanistan when I was at the cemetery for my own private memorial day cemetery, and I saw fresh red clay turned to accommodate the kids who were lost in the fierce fight to take Iraq. Now the kids will continue to come in a very fierce peace. I wondered if we had thought this part of it through, Saddam still out there and Task Force 20 scouring the western desert for him or his DNA.

You can tour the Old Guard stable after noon, when the horses have been turned out and fed and watered. The stable is a quaint low brick building in the historic portion of the Post. It is dark inside and great fans are set to waft cool air down the central aisles. The horses are handsome. We talked to Lee, a beautiful gelding by the front door. We were looking for the Lippazons. A specialist with short-cropped hair and BDUs approached us to make sure we didn't do anything rash with the animals. He said there were no Lippazons, not any more. The Queen is mostly recovered from her dressage days in traditional costume and hair braided to match the mane of her mount, but she still has some of the fire in her.

She intently questioned the Specialist and was slightly offended to discover that he had simply enlisted and been assigned this duty. She would have given an arm to have this place under her custody, and this was just a hitch for the young man, a thing to do while he was in the Service. I was chagrinned to discover that when they take me to my grave here they will not have boots placed backwards in the stirrups of the single stallion who accompanies the caisson team. I have enough rank, but only Colonels of the Army or Marines are honored with the symbolic boots. I don't know what the Navy guys get. Maybe they drag a Danforth anchor behind the caisson. Or a symbolic empty mug of coffee.

The Specialist lost interest in us and wandered away, but not so far that he could not take action in case of mischance. The Queen could take it on herself to throw open a stall, leap bareback on a swift steed and jump the metal rails of the turn-out paddock to ride pell-mell down Route 50 in a last Calvary charge on the capital. We walked to the cool darkness of the second aisle of stalls. The smell of horse was rich in the air and in a darkened corner a vast black shape was rooting about in fresh hay. We walked over the stall gates and the Queen talked to the horse, summoning him. I blinked at the black shape in the darkness. The horse was huge, more than sixteen hands at the wither and powerful. It was a stallion and he responded to the Queen as a kindred spirit. He stuck his great head and neck out to inspect us. The Queen massaged his teeth and gums and stroked the special spots on his heroic muzzle. She scratched him behind the ears and subbed his eyes of crust. He was very comfortable with her, and by extension, I explored the places she showed me, and the special place above his barrel that loved the touch of a human. He nuzzled me, pressing his weight against me and his hose into my armpit. The Queen warned me that he would nip me, not out of malice, but out of curiosity and amusement. She knows these things, and saved me from a bruise.

We walked away and I knew she was not happy that the soldiers did not have the same passion for these animals she did. We emerged into the afternoon sunshine, the humidity just coming up and the air rich with stable smell. "They will be needing that stallion for the next few months," I said. "There will continue to be funerals here for the kids in Iraq." The Queen looked back at the red brick of the stable. She asked me if I had seen the name on the stall. I had not noticed, fascinated more with the magnificent animal himself.

"You should have. His name was Patton."

I whistled out loud. Now that was something to think about.