Saturday, January 13, 2007

FAMILY AND SERVICE

Dear Spike:

For the past few weeks I’ve been growing a beard. Today I’ll shave it off.

I’m not leaving for Afghanistan as I’d thought I might next month. My editors decided they didn’t want to spend the money on the trip, after all.

Your mother threw her arms around me when I told her. Seems this trip, to yet another new and dangerous place, was one final worry in a season full of solicitudes.

I’ve told my editors that, once you come, I won’t be traveling for a while. I’m not sure they really care. There are few rewards, in this industry, for adventurism any more. The safe profits are close to home. Once, newspapermen were the minutemen of written history. We’ve long since abandoned that post.

In the past I’d be angry with my editors for letting dollars get in the way of duty. In this case I was relieved. I got to come home, flowers in hand, and tell your mother that this scraggly beard was going away.

As it happens, I’d been thinking a lot about how to balance my job and family, as of late.

Yesterday I attended the memorial service of three airmen from a local base who were killed in the war in Iraq. Their desert combat boots were lined up in a row, behind a line of inverted rifles, capped with empty helmets.

The slain service members were bomb disposal technicians. So where shots might be fired into the air as a final salute to some service members, these individuals were sent off with three resounding explosions. The end of the service, though, was the same old song: Twenty-four notes, played in the most hauntingly melancholic musical composition ever written.

Sobbing in the front row of chairs, as Taps was played, were the wife and child of one of the airmen, the most senior of the group. Eulogizing the man, a fellow sergeant said he’d never known anyone who had worked so hard to balance family and service.

He died, just the same, on a road south of Baghdad, leaving behind a sobbing wife and son at a time when most of his countrymen believe the cause isn’t worth his sacrifice.

I wonder if you’ll understand, when I leave you and your mother for long trips to dangerous places, why I do what I do.

There won’t be a flag to wrap yourself in when I go. And if I fall, no one will play Taps over my grave. There will be no shots fired. No resounding explosions. And most of my countrymen, who long ago gave up their subscription to the morning paper, won’t understand the sacrifice.

Of course it is far more likely that we’ll be together for a very long time. I’ll grow to see you grow and your children grow and your children’s children grow.

Whenever the end comes, I don’t know how well people will regard the way I balanced my family and my job. Most probably won’t think I did very well at all.

But I don’t live for them. I live for you. To be there for you. And, when I am not, to be an example for you.

And I will not abandon that post.

Love,
dad

3 comments:

Kris said...

Beautiful post.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure if it's your writing, or my raging pregnancy hormones, or a combination of the two, but I'm misty-eyed. Okay, it's the writing.

shannon said...

this is a beautifully composed and emotionally moving blog...thank you for sharing it.