The Name I Read From the Bleachers

The salute

Dad stood up last.

It took him a while. He put both hands on his knees and pushed, and he got his feet under him the way he does in the mornings, careful, one at a time. Nobody helped him. Nobody needed to. The whole gym waited.

He was thin in that windbreaker. He has gotten thin this last year.

The cap sat a little low on his white hair, the way it always does, because he will not buy one that fits and says the old one is broken in.

Then he raised his right hand. Halfway, the way he had held it all through the forty one names.

He held it there a moment, open, a man waiting to be called on.

And then, slowly, so slowly I could have counted it, he lowered that half raised hand.

He brought it all the way down to his side. He straightened his back as much as ninety four years let him.

He turned to face the flag in Jaden’s hands, and he brought his hand up again, crisp, straight to the brim of that dark cap, and he saluted.

He was not waving at the kids. He was not asking for anything anymore.

He had been called, and he was answering, and he was answering the flag, not the man at the podium.

I heard the woman beside me catch her breath. I did not cry.

I would like to say I did, but I was too busy holding my own two feet still on the bleacher board, because I wanted to go to him so badly my legs shook.

Jaden held the flag steady. He did not lower it until Dad dropped his salute, and then he dipped it, once, and brought it back up, and the color guard wheeled slowly back to the front.

Then the gym began to clap. It started slow and got loud and stayed loud a long time, and Dad stood there in it with his hands at his sides and his eyes on the high windows where the November sun was coming in.