SOLDIER

They come home to cameras and flags,
balloons and poster boards.
They come home to old soldiers
in receiving lines with flags raised—
Hip Hip Hooray
old soldiers who form a gauntlet civilians hesitate to walk.
Like the mounds of dirt we skirt in a cemetery
(even after the soil settles),
we are not worthy to walk their gauntlet.
Don’t shake my hand; I only work here.
This receiving line is not for me.

And I wonder . . .
Are these new soldiers in it for the money?
Don’t hate me, I merely ask.
Serving merely for pay, says Webster,
is the definition of mercenary.
With the flag sewn backwards on their sleeves,
do they know what it means
to be in it for the money?

Sometimes they fly in alone to a girlfriend or a parent
and I wonder how they managed it.
There’s room for honest emotion
without the media attention and the old vets
who only want them to have what they didn’t have.

A mother and father wait outside the security checkpoint
with eyes fixed on the horizon of the terminal
for a glimpse of their boy.
They shyly hold two small flags,
like the ones sold on the 4th of July
that you’re supposed to—I guess—stick in the flowerbed
like an ornamental praying mantis
to show your support.
Thrust upon them like the recruiter’s handshake,
they aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do with them.

Their boy walks down the exit lane to meet them.
“Put those away,” he says. "I need a cigarette.”

Character Flaw

I was stopped at a traffic light on the airport-access road when I noticed her sitting on the curb with her head in her hands. She was dressed in jeans and a baby blue sweatshirt. She didn't bother to stick out a thumb. Nobody picks up hitchhikers anymore. I looked for a stranded car. Nothing. A companion walking the berm. No one. What was her story? Was she running away? Miss a flight? Did she need a ride? If not, why was she sitting on the curb? And if so, why didn’t she act like it? She carried nothing, not even a purse.

She was as out of place as the wheelbarrow I once spotted in the middle of a wintering field with snow on the horizon and the crops in the barn. Nothing except in things. Left in the center of a fifty-acre field, a quarter of a mile from a house or an outbuilding. What happened to call the owner out of the field with such urgency he left his conveyance behind? Why can't I get that image out of my mind?

The light turned green and I accelerated with the rest of the traffic, behaving as expected, like a good citizen. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw her stand and stretch. Hands in pockets, going nowhere.

Inside at the checkpoint I was checking IDs. The man standing in front of me was shaking so badly he couldn't get his wallet out of his pocket. I waited. He was thin with long blonde hair and an angular face. Shaking. He pulled it free and I checked his license. I let him leave it inside the clear sleeve of his wallet. I could see what I needed to see. He wasn't expired. I followed him down the line and watched him try to take his shoes off. Painful. I pointed him to a chair. He declined. The cops would think him under the influence, or an addict. What's an addict but a person in pain? Maybe his blood sugar was low. That was it. He was hypoglycemic (the disorder of the hour), hair lank and hands shaking, a mess, but he had a plane to catch.

The airport is a bad place to be sick in. Strangers watch, afraid to extend a hand. Everyone's afraid they'll catch something. A cold, an addiction, bad luck, sudden hair loss. I talked to a man at the MSU Organic Conference who fed his chickens a bad batch of Purina chicken feed full of GMO corn and they all lost their feathers. Every last chicken lost every last feather.

Sometimes I want to lock myself in the women's bathroom and stay there until The World leaves.

But back to my traveler. Was there a connection between him and Baby Blue? Only in the interlocking circles of my mind. I didn't stop to help her because to do so would've made me late. (Like the circles of Dante’s Inferno, this was bad. This was probably number four or five.) But what's more important than getting to work on time? Nothing in the beaten-down soul of the American worker. We're all energizer wind-ups.

I didn't help her, but I could help him. I picked up his shoes and set them on the x-ray belt. From a co-worker’s reaction, you would've thought I'd picked up a cow patty and threw it at her like a Frisbee. What? Oh, I'd forgotten to don my smurf gloves. I despise those nasty blue gloves made in some slum factory in Asia we have to wear. You ever notice all those bottles of hand sanitizer sitting around airport checkpoints? Yeah, everyone is obsessed with GERMS. Squirt squirt squirt. Hand sanitizer does not take the place of washing with soap and water and I don't think I'll come down with Rocky Mountain Fever or some other exotic disease because I picked up a man's shoes.

I ate dirt when I was five and probably a little cow patty too. I would've helped him take those shoes off and put them back on if he'd wanted me to. People don't always want help. Is it easier to extend a hand than to take it? I never do enough. But I swear I’ll do better the next time I see someone sitting on the side of the road.

THE TRAVELER

He was slim and well-dressed with a nice haircut, not too short, not too long. He wore a black tailored jacket and well-made jeans. His black leather shoes showed no sign of the slush outside the airport. He could have stepped off the pages of an Eddie Bauer catalogue.

But he had something he shouldn’t.

He mopped his face with a white linen handkerchief as he put his shoes back on, and I wondered if he was sick. He didn’t look sick. His face was tanned with no sheen of perspiration. I’d never seen anyone perspire so politely. His handkerchief was the size of a large dinner napkin with embroidered edges. I didn’t know anyone other than my father still used them.

I had to search his belongings—two Apple notebook computers, one purple and one green, a black leather satchel for compact electronics, a shopping bag full of gifts, and a gallon-sized bag of small toiletry items of the type one would collect from hotel rooms. From the looks of the assortment he’d been around the world, and as he patted his forehead dry, I wondered what else he’d collected in his travels.

The suspicious item was a bottle of water. It was from Neiman Marcus and it wasn’t plastic. It was sturdy cardboard of the type cartons of milk are made out of. The only plastic on it was the screw-on lid like they put on cartons of half and half. It was quart sized. Too big.

Who buys fancy bottles of Neiman Marcus water? Maybe a better question would be why aren’t all water bottles made of this material? Maybe a better question is why do we continue to allow Nestle to siphon water out of the Great Lakes aquifer to ship around the world in single-use plastic bottles that end up in landfills and waterways and the ocean where there is a growing plastic dead zone the size of Greenland? Yes, Nestle has diversified into something more profitable than candy bars. How about a bottle deposit on water bottles? The politicos won’t do it. They won’t even take the steps necessary to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, so how would they gather the will to keep plastic out of the oceans? But I digress.

Back to my traveler. He was polite about my having to throw away the eco bottle of water (though I wished there'd been a way to put it in a display case). He shrugged and mopped his face again. He slipped his belt back through the loops on his jeans and his watch on his wrist, then patted his forehead dry and wiped his neck. With each step of putting himself back together he had to wipe his face, and he was well put together. I stepped back and watched.

He dropped his bag of toiletries into the large shopping bag of gifts, wiped his face one last time and put his handkerchief in the pocket of his jacket. He threw a laptop bag over each shoulder and went off to find his gate. I changed my gloves and watched him out of sight and couldn’t help but wonder at the story of his life.

I filed him away in my character memory folder, fodder for the basis of a short story or maybe a larger piece, a snippet of a life on the edge. Do you do that with interesting people you encounter? All these innocents who don’t know they might be written about as they go through the motions of daily living? Have you ever recognized yourself in a novel or short story? They say that friends and family members of writers are doomed to a loss of privacy, their tightest-held secrets revealed under the thin disguise of fiction. How many families have been torn asunder by the writer in their midst? How many friendships broken? I, myself, have done it. I couldn’t help it. And I’d do it again. Have you?