The roofing crews will pause from raising the usual, and stick with an eyebrow. We’ve already had heat this year. But yesterday felt like the first real blast of June, where the heat baked the center of the cookie of the world, or at least the parking lot of the gas station.
I waited for the kid behind the counter to make the sandwich. Irrelevant thoughts rattled around like moths. Charles Dickens hated 4 pm. So do I. (Perhaps that’s a good sign for one’s writing. Like Twain, I was born under Halley’s Comet. I share a birthday with the guitar god Randy Rhoads. I’m still waiting for one of these things to click.)
4 got pushed to 5 with traffic and a late afternoon lecture, but the grumps remained. I flipped open the paper on the rack.
Remembering A Small Town’s D-D Sacrifice 80 Years Later.
Oh snap. D Day. The Bedford Boys. They were the same age as the kid making the sandwich behind the counter when they were sent to be shredded on Omaha beach. 35 boys from the town went. 12 boys from the town returned.
D Day is tomorrow.
I bit my sandwich. It tasted sandy.
Here’s a piece about the boys, their town, and ghosts.
Ghosts in the Clear Blue Sky
Ray looks down from a post. The breeze ruffles his hair, forever 21, his two-dimensional body rippling in time with the banner he's printed on. Gunmetal eyes gaze at the bank across the street for eternity–or as long as the vinyl lasts. The light turns green, and my car wheezes away, past George and John and Charlie, rippling also. Do they remember the Longest Day? The street is empty. The sky is empty. Something is haunted.
What is a ghost? Is a phantom a bit of swamp mist, chilly, moaning through corridors at three am? Or is the lack, a hole in the tapestry of life, instead of a knot, a shadow in absence of light, the anti-particle to our electron?
Today is shrill. Most of my days are. That's how I sell things. Fast. Caffeinated. Self-employed. I usually miss the juxtaposition of the profound with the pressing: the great subtle echoes of the Past, while I host a fiesta on a lifeboat, bobbing with the swells.
A phone beeps, a text, a GPS screen, business cards, girls, coffee, well I would say that, more business cards, coffee, a sullen barista, all, all under a blue sky as searching as a baby's stare.
There's something about the neutral and the innocent that instantly shows my rust, be it this empty sky in late winter, or a curious infant gaping from a carrier in line at the store. Faced with either of their gazes, I wilt. Pretense is useless against someone who doesn't know what envy is. The Inquisition and the KGB missed their mark. Why didn't they recruit babies as interrogators? I'd buckle, and confess every sin against God and State, past, present, and future, pitted against the perfect circles of a baby's eyes. The sky looks down like that, unblinking. I hunch over the steering wheel, driving to the next sales account: an old folks home.
The stately building lurks among the cedars and oaks, aging quietly like it's residents, a pothole in the driveway laughing at the welcome sign. Here and there a glimpse of a person, or the back half of a car, hints of life, but strangely quiet. Must have come in the wrong way I mutter, the next ding of a text message hushed in the crush of years huddling 'round the grounds. I check it anyway, compulsively. The light through the trees is so clear.
Hands are shaken, cards exchanged, I smile in and out the door, bustling along in the working world, trying to ignore how fractional this piece of time is.
My car wheezes on, down the street, harsh in the still. Children's laughter would fill the schoolyard, but it's not recess, and only the sun takes a swing while a breeze from the west rattles the chains.
They say there's no sound in space, but we always put that wooshing music in our Earthly movies for the gaping maw. The blue above is veil of the abyss, a false ceiling till sundown.
It throbs with another sound of lack–of the gnashing of unseen teeth in the bottomless pit, of the silence when she's gone for good and it's all your fault. Bedford is haunted.
What? I ask, staring back at the blank face of a sign.
Suddenly, I believe in ghosts. Not Casper or King Hamlet, but the gaping, aching, might have been. It staggers me, hoping in the passenger seat like an eager hitchhiker. Or loneliness. Twenty three Bedford boys never came back from the War. Twenty three rooms sit empty at the old folks home. A hundred or more people aren't here, never were, and never will be. Maybe a ghost isn't a remnant, but a reminder, a void, a hole, an anti-particle. The phantom rattles the chains of Nothing, and I jump.
Another breeze from the west. Another rustle of twenty two vinyl banners, waving from light posts.
The blue sky looks down, forever.
