(03 Feburary Snow at Tunnel Eight, Big Pink. Photo Socotra.)

The snow kept up all night. When I got up I went straight to the balcony to judge the depth of the disaster and was impressed, though apprehensive. I could see black below the slush on Pershing Drive, and that meant cross-country travel might be possible.
 
Fairfax and Arlington Counties threw in the towel and cancelled school, so the mushy roar of traffic from Route 50 was muted, and the branches on the trees captured- briefly- a few vertical inches.
 
I clicked on the radio mode on iTunes and my fears were confirmed. The roads were passable enough that the Government was open, though with “liberal leave” in effect. I have never understood what that meant, except that business was normally impossible even though appointments had to be kept regardless of the slush.
 
Not enough snow to stop anything. Damn.

That means I have to show up at the Pentagon as scheduled at ten. Pain in the butt. I was hoping for a snow day, but that is selfish. Not enough white stuff means that it will be easier for all the people all over who are traveling today to be present for the interment on Friday.
 
I had not got to bed until nearly midnight. I was spun up from the drive to Reagan National in the heart of the mini-blizzard to pick up Rex’s companion Jinny. She had hopped from Lindbergh Field in San Diego to Houston and then on to the Capital. She arrived on schedule, and I was there, yawning a bit, but alert enough to navigate.
 
I gave her an orientation to the minor mysteries of Tunnel Eight in Big Pink, and turned the master suite over to her. We talked about Rex, and how he had appeared in our lives. For her, it was twelve years since he got over the death of his beloved wife Derlie, and they embarked on an unconventional bi-coastal relationship that had them shuttling from the sublime castle on the hill in Rancho Santa Fe and Rex’s condo in Florida.
 
There was a reason for all the travel, since they would not have done that much shuttling across the country on a bet once they got to a certain age.
 
We talked about all sorts of things. Ohio, of all places, where she grew up in the little village of Medina, and what she planned to do with the rest of her life. She is a feisty woman, and still a great beauty.
 
Also no fool. She lived here in Washington for many years with her husband Barney, and she knows the quirky nature of February in this company town.
 
“Rex and I talked about it,” she said firmly. “Don’t die in the winter is what we agreed. She looked out the window at the snow coming down hard outside. “But it didn’t work out that way.”
 
I thought back. I think it was in winter when Rex called me out of the blue. Must have been after the Kerry defeat, late 2004 or early 2005. That was a hard winter, as I recall, chill and dark.
 
He had seen an article I did on Jack Graf, since I had always been curious about the one naval intelligence officer we left behind in Vietnam, and I pieced together a narrative from the recollections of Tom, who had been at NIS Saigon at the time, and provided the information to the guys in the field who ran several operations into the bush to try to get him back.
 
Rex told me in his soft voice that he was interested in ensuring that Jack was remembered, and that the memory of the sacrifice of the men assigned to the intelligence arm of Operation SEALORDS.
 
I told him I would look around and see what I could find, and that is where it started. First sources were the Naval Intelligence Liaison Officers I knew- the Artful Logger and Drifty Pacer. The thing took on a life of its own from there.
 
I could understand where Rex was coming from, since the Swifties were now famous due to the dust-up over Senator Kerry’s service had made their mission area a verb more descriptive, and less crude sounding than what happened to Judge Bork when he was nominated to the Supreme Court years ago.
 
If I was to be trashed in the public forum, I would rather have be Swift Boated than Borked, you know?
 
Anyway, I got Jinny settled and then tried to wind down sufficiently to sleep but it was to no avail.
 
I pulled down a couple books I had been meaning to get to and slumped into the brown chair. One is a conventional novel, and the other is an example of that strange new hybrid of Manga and comic book, the graphic novel.
 
It came highly recommended by a friend who haunts bookstores, and that was recommendation enough.
 
As the digital display marched toward the witching hour, I read “Stitches.”
 
It is the quirkiest, most powerful thing I have read in a long time.
 
David Small captures Detroit in a way that evokes memories of the time before Vietnam was a conflict, and what the hospitals were like when we were small.
 
I had my tonsils removed when I was five or so, and the whole episode constitutes some of the early memories I carry around. The Docs cut our throats as a matter of routine then, and there were complications.
 
I hemorrhaged after I got home the first time and had to go back.
 
The hospital was near the Ford Rotunda, which Small drew with great delicacy, and might even have been the same one in which the outrage was perpetrated on him.
 
I ogled the drawing of the cars with admiration. And the Cass Corridor was my downtown hangout when I lived in the dying city after graduation, just months after Jack Graf was shot dead by his VC captors trying to escape his tiger cage.

He made it to the river, Jack did, but no further.
 
I imagine I will be able to put all this aside, once Rex’s funeral in done in a few days.

“Stitches” did not take long to read but it left me drained by the end as the clock struck midnight. I knew I was screwed for the morning, but felt uplifted. Life is good, when you have it, and much preferable to the alternative.
 
But it is important to recognize that sometimes you have to let it go, but do it on terms you can live with.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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