An odd thing about 911, for me anyway, is that it happened the day after the anniversary of the sudden death of my son and the day before the anniversary of his funeral, which is today. He was seven weeks old, beautiful, seemed in perfect health. Already he was recognizing me, smiling when I came to him in his crib to take him to his mother to breast feed, and afterwards, when I changed his soiled diapers and put him down to go back to sleep. Never before had I felt so alive, so vibrant. And never since. When he left, something in me left with him. When he died, something in me died. When my father called me maybe three weeks after the funeral to say he’d done some checking around and had learned that it would be socially acceptable for me to name my next son after me, thus after my father, I was barely able to softly say I didn’t think I could ever name another son after me. And I never did. I didn’t have another son.
His death exposed me to the Vietnam war draft. I had one semester of law school remaining, and was deeply divided in myself over whether I should enlist in the Marines or apply for a student deferment, which would enable me to finish out my law school training but would guarantee my induction upon graduation. A law school graduate almost certainly would be put into the Judge Advocate General Corps, to serve as a military lawyer in some capacity, unless I asked to be put into combat. This was the dilemma I faced, as I became more and more anxious, until the point that I finally drove from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham, to my Draft Board, and signed forms for the student deferment. The anxiety subsided, but there remained a sense of something heavy hanging over my head, something that didn’t feel very good.
Oh, maybe it was two weeks after I went to the Draft Board that Dianne learned she was pregnant. Oh, that was not good news, because I was heading into the Army for sure sometime after the first of the year. Clutching at straws, hoping against hope, I drove back to the Draft Board, to attempt to get my father deferment reinstated. The same clerk who had helped me fill out the deferment forms greeted me when I got to the counter. Upon hearing my story about why I was back, she shook her head, said she was really sorry, but the student deferment was irrevocable and I had signed a form saying I knew that, which was not news to me. She opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a file, mine, and opened it and looked inside. A puzzled look formed. “There’s been some mistake,” she said. “What kind of mistake?” I asked. “You signed the wrong form. Your student deferment is void. You will have to sign the correct form for a student deferment,” she said.
I didn’t ask to see the form I had signed. I simply laughed, said I would go back to my father deferment and left feeling as if the weight of the world had just been lifted off me. All the anxiety was gone, all the dread. Only now, in writing this, does it occur to me that maybe I did not sign the wrong form; that something seized that woman, or she was so moved by my story that she simply could not follow the rules on that day. I suppose that’s a fairy-tale way of looking at it, instead of the way I’ve always looked at it: I did sign the wrong form, it was a miracle. Either way of looking at it, I suppose, was a miracle. But it did not heal me. A new baby didn’t heal me. I was unable to get that close to her and to her sister to come. I was afraid they would leave, too. Eventually, they did leave. They just quit communicating with me, without saying why. Nobody said why. Not even in my dreams was I told why. Maybe I’m about to find out why. I’ll know soon enough.
Meanwhile, perhaps I should return to last Sunday morning, the day before the anniversary of my son’s passing. The thirty-ninth anniversary. I was at Tropic Cinema in Key West, listening to candidates for the City Commission be interviewed, and the conversation turned to the Vietnam War Memorial. I’ve told the story of the miraculous saving of me from Vietnam many times. Sometimes I’ve told it simply to share a personal experience of having God step in and change the course of human events. Other times I’ve shared the story to indicate how God felt about Vietnam. My son did not die in Tuscaloosa. He died in Memphis, where Dianne had gone with him to see her brother off to war. He was shipping out to Bangkok with the Air Force, to service B-52 bombers. There, in their parents’ home, while their parents were saying goodbye to my brother-in-law, they said good-bye to their only grandchild.
I did not want Dianne to make that trip. We fought violently about it before she left. I stayed in Tuscaloosa. When the news came, it was like getting one of those “We regret to inform you” telegrams so many parents received during the Vietnam war that was never declared a war. The telegrams so many parents received during a war in Asia that President Johnson had promised on national television he would never send American boys to die in. The war I later would learn was fabricated by American business and military and political interests, to obtain Vietnam’s rubber plantations and to test, manufacture and sell military hardware. The war that killed America’s spirit as surely as the death of my son killed my spirit. The war that left America thereafter seeking somehow, in some way, to win a war, and in that way somehow be healed of the senseless war it had fought and lost.
For good reason the wall in Washington D.C. is black. There was no light in that war. There was only death. America’s. 911 offered salvation. Salvation was declined, when ninety percent of all Americans supported George W. Bush’s war policy. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, as surely as the chickens came home to roost when I was unable to bond with my daughters in the way I had bonded with their older brother. A year and a half after his passing, I awoke one morning with a disease no doctor, priest or medicine man could heal. I wager there’s not a chronic homeless person in Key West, the Keys and America, who does not have a similar story to tell. Maybe we should try to keep that in mind, when we feel inclined to call them “vagrants.”
For those who might still be wondering . . . Yeah, I had dreams this past night getting on my case about not writing about this already. When I tried to write about it two days ago, it did not read like it reads today, because I was not ready to write about it two days ago. Is this what is meant by “creative writing?” You tell me. This kind of writing is what I’m going to offer to teach in the continuing education program at Florida Keys Community College. There are plenty of people teaching the other ways to write. I teach the only way I know:
He feels deep beauty in the dark pool
from which his writings flow.
She clings to him like precious oil, fine silk.
She feels solid, compressed . . . like
a black pearl growing from inside out,
Ever larger with each stroke of his pen,
Pushing her precious waters over her banks
into his dreams and life.
The church learned through the years that its mystics suffer horribly as part of their coming into union with that which is incomprehensible. The tribe learned that its shaman suffers terribly in preparation to serve as the transformer between the tribe and the spirit of all that is and was and ever will be. All of this is great and wonderful, all of it necessary for the people to survive on this world. All of this have I experienced, and more. Yet none of it comes close to the love I have in my heart for my daughters and for a woman named Patricia. A love no words can describe, so I will not even try. Let my tears and heaving heart explain why I awoke at 4 a.m. and began writing. I have always associated 4 with Patricia, the 4th of my wives to know me after God snatched me up and started turning me every which a way but loose. Patricia brought me news of 911, and while everyone around us was feeling that the sky was falling, as I wrote yesterday, we were in Paradise. Mizpah, Patricia. Mizpah, Nelle and Alice. God be with you while we are apart. I can’t stop loving you, so why even try?
