What a day yesterday on the journey to this Mother of Mondays.
 
I got up early enough this morning to be productive and wasn’t. I am still leveled and the emotion has only reinforced the somber mood.
 
I had a great scheme to transition the Admiral’s bio; it is good to have a project and a deadline. The imagery is compelling; against the wreckage of a smoldering Washington, a war rages on in SE Asia, while the Russian Bear decides to go for a swim.
 
It is in the next few chapters of Rex’s life that mine intersects his; I don’t know if his official car would have seen the ratty knots of protestors here on that May Day, long ago, my first visit to his town on my own. He was at the Hoffman Building down in Alexandria briefly, and Suitland in Maryland and the Pentagon as 1970 rolled past.
 
I will have to get to that presently, and to the dramatic change in landscape that confronted him as the Soviets surged merchant ships and naval vessels into a global demonstration or resolve that caught the Navy in a treacherous cross wind of wars in progress and those possibly to come.
 
Later it would be one of the challenges that occupied my time, professionally, that and dismantling a war machine that no longer had a war to fight.
 
That will take more than a couple paragraphs, and the Mother of Mondays, first of the year, first of the decade, mother of all the ones to follow through the rest of this brand new cycle around the sun lies ominous before us.
 
I thought about that yesterday morning, the unreality of this morning still hanging there, crystalline in the imagination.
 
The wind was as harsh as anything you can imagine; colder than Michigan, with the gusts to 50 knots. Visibility unlimited, with periodic body slams of ice blast.
 
There was no getting around it. I had to check the property and motored down to the farm and found it intact, with no evidence of holiday trespass in my absence. No cats, of course, and I hope they have found a refuge someplace. I put out food and hoped I would see them again, though of late I have come to realize that nothing is sure in this world.
 
Was it only weeks ago that I was here, the bad storm coming in and the world suddenly on its head? I gave a low whistle, moved some ice around and unloaded the trunk.
 
Then I buttoned my white shirt and put on my black bow tie. I slipped into the black jacket and hiked up the black trousers and pulled up my black socks over the black shoes.
 
Then the ride back, headed for something that filled me with dread.
 
I made it early enough to get a parking place close to the building. I remember fighting the construction of the place when the plans were announced, going to Zoning Board meetings in righteous indignation.
 
As it turned out, the facility is not bad, and quite necessary in function. I don’t know where else one would do these things. The crowd was large and somber. The parents held it together better than I could, and the embrace with the Dad was immersed in the deepest grief I have felt in years.
 
The girls looked lovely, considering that they were in their caskets; they were open, of course, as it was a traditional ceremony, and I wept without restraint.
 
The older girl, a classical beauty, had 19 magazine covers in her short modeling career, and a former colleague summed up the light she brought, saying that in Shanghai, after she arrived, no one else was able to get work.
 
The slide show on the big screen at the front of the chapel showed scenes of mischievous effervescent youth.
 
While the tributes and remembrances were shared, I wept steadily.
 
I took down the lights and banished all the holiday crap when I got home. This is not a just world, we know that, and mostly don’t complain, but this is just not right. Then I was embarrassed at the emotion I felt that my own sons were safe and back on the ground from the mid-Pacific.
  
Mom and Dad did not answer the phone when I made the usual call around dinner time; that resulted in a triangulated coordination between Arlington and Anchorage and the package store down the street from the place in Michigan  where my sister has a friend.
 
The house was visited, and they were in bed, asleep.
 
I was just there days ago, and know it is dark by that hour, pitch black, and I feel they are drifting away in the warm bubble of their house, floating in the blast of the harsh cold of the Michigan winter.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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