A Rapid Undoing

It was near the end of my day. A car pulled up to the doors to Entrance #2 amid a brief flurry of business and I went out to the driver's door with a valet ticket in my hand. "Do you want valet service today, sir?" He was an elderly man behind the wheel of the late model Honda.

"Yes," he replied. "You staying warm?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "This job keeps me moving; I stay pretty warm!"

"It's okay," he said as he gripped the interior handle of the open car door and slowly pulled himself to his feet, "you don't have to call me sir..."

"Oh, I call all men--"

"I was only a sergeant," he said, cutting me off; he hadn't heard my response. "I wasn't an officer." He offered up a handshake. I took his hand in mine.

"Thank you for your service, sir," I said. "Army?"

"Nineteen-forty-two to forty-five." He had read the next question in my mind.

"My dad was in from '42 to '46. Were you in the Pacific Theater or in the..."

"Europe!" His hearing was perfect, now. "I was with General Patton."

"Now, was he First Army or Third?" My father served in Europe during World War II, so I have the smidgen of European Theater of Operations knowledge I learned from him.

"First," he said.

"Ah," I smiled. "My father was in the Third Army." I couldn't think of the general's name who led my father's neck of the war. "Were you in the Battle of 'The Bulge?'" Another thing I had learned about my father's service. (Patton's First Army was in position to the north of the Belgian town of Bastogne, while General Omar Bradley's Third Army was about equally as far to the south of Bastogne. A thinly defended supply line was established between the two armies, and that supply line is where the German Army attacked in an effort to recapture the harbor of Antwerp, Belgium. The American forces along the line fell back westward in an effort to contain the German offensive, thus forming what the press of the time described as a "bulge" in the line.)

The gentleman smiled slightly and nodded.

I laughed. "You may have rubbed elbows with him!"

"How's your father?" he asked me.

I put my arm high up on his arm, near his shoulder, and said fairly matter-of-factly, "He passed away in 2008."

Then the man said, "I'm 91."

"NINETY-ONE?!" I blurted. The really quick part of my brain — the part that never shows itself for any practical purposes other than avoiding traffic collisions and recalling useless information — momentarily thought he was guessing my father's age, because, in that instant, without having to do any math, I knew 91 would have been my father's age this year. "You're doing good! You're doing GREAT!" I patted him on the arm in the same spot.

He hobbled past me toward the entry door to the medical building. "The good lord gave me a great life."

I walked ahead of him to open the door, and suddenly found myself struggling mightily to hold back tears. In that instant, I missed my dad terribly and I wanted desperately to sit down with this gentleman and ask him a million questions. What a tremendous obstacle placed before the men of his generation that they overcame! Most of them, anyway. And the sacrifice and the loss. The fear and the pain. What images must float up in his mind when he says things like, "I was only a sergeant, 1942 to '45!"

And now they're dying off to the tune of hundreds a day; maybe thousands.

I couldn't regain my composure quickly enough, and as he stepped through the doorway and away from me, my wish to him to "Have a good afternoon, now," came out as a wobbly, warbling croak, which I was grateful he couldn't hear.

Choking on the lump in my throat, I walked back through tear-blurred vision and quickly inspected his car for any prior damage, got in and headed to the valet stalls where I parked his car. And I let it happen. It was brief. I wiped my cheeks and my eyes with my hands, and I trotted back to Entrance #2, happy for the flurry of business that prevented me from dwelling on what had just transpired.



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