The Woman Who Called Him Grandpa
I asked him why he kept it all in a box on top of the dresser instead of hidden away, if he never wanted anyone to know. He thought about that for a while, the way he thinks about everything, and then he said, “Because I didn’t want to hide from it. I just didn’t want to hand it to you. There’s a difference. A man ought to be able to look at where he’s been every morning while he’s putting on his socks. He just doesn’t have to make his kids look at it too.” Then he closed the box and put it back on the dresser, and we did not talk about it again for a long time, and that was all right, because he had let me see it, and seeing it was enough.
Word got around our town, the way things do. Somebody at church had seen the video before I could tell them the story myself, and for a few weeks my father could not walk across the square without somebody stopping him, which he tolerated with the grace of a man enduring a long dental appointment. But a funny thing happened underneath the fuss. The men his own age, the ones who had known him for forty years as the fellow who sold them bolts and plowed the church lot, started talking to him a little differently, and he started talking back. Two of them turned out to have their own boxes on their own dressers, things they had never told anyone either. One of them, a man who had sat three pews behind my father at church for thirty years, turned out to have been a Navy corpsman in the same war, and the two of them, who had exchanged nothing but nods for three decades, started having coffee on Thursdays. My father told me that too, sideways, looking out the window. “Turns out I wasn’t the only one keeping a box,” he said, and left it at that.
I have thought a great deal about Brittany, more than she deserves and more than she would probably like. I do not know where she was going in such a hurry, or what her life is like, or whether she thought about that morning for even a minute afterward. I hope she did. Not because I want her to suffer, but because there is a lesson sitting there in that gate for anyone willing to pick it up, and it is not really about veterans, or airports, or even manners.