Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [28]
What we missed also bound us. We missed the trends in fashions, and we missed teenage music. I remember sitting in geometry my freshman year of high school and reading a letter from Linda Stuntz from Annapolis. The Beatles had performed in Washington, D.C., and Linda wrote that Susan Schwartz had passed out at the concert. I leaned over to the next desk and pointed to a word in the letter.
“Can you read that? What is that word?”
“It’s Beatles, I think.”
“With an a? Is that right?”
Then from another desk, “Yeah, they’re a new band from England.”
Susan Schwartz was passing out, and I hadn’t even heard of them, couldn’t even spell their name. And so it went.
We recovered from the missed music. We were spared the missed shopping malls. But we missed big events in America. We shared our through-the-keyhole, everything-at-a-distance look at them, but always with a difference. My dad was the officer of the day on the day President Kennedy was shot. The job of officer of the day, who is responsible for order and security on base, rotates among various officers. News such as the death of the commander in chief would come first to the OOD. So the news of the assassination of the President came first to our house, by telephone, in the middle of the night.
Everyone woke to the ring. We could hear Dad hurry down the hall to the only phone. We could hear him moan Oh my God. And then we were all up, all crying. What is it? It couldn’t be. The crying had to stop so Dad could make the calls he needed to make, and then he dressed and left, and we could only turn on the radio and listen for details. There was mourning in our community, but for us, the President’s death was accompanied by an eerie ghost-town-like feeling on base as fathers involved in intelligence disappeared for weeks and by a heightened degree of alert whenever we stepped off our base.
If it wasn’t enough that we all had the same code of conduct, that we all wore clothes from the narrow selection at the exchange, that we went to the same theater, the same teen club, the same school, there were still other things that bound us together. At sunset, the flags on base would come down, the sound of Evening Colors would roll across the station, and the world would come to a halt. The baseball game would stop. Mother would stop the car, and we would all get out. No one would speak. The world inside our gates, inside our world, would be completely quiet save for that single bugle. And we would all face the sound of it and the flag, even if we could not possibly see it. When Evening Colors was over, and the All Clear sounded, life would begin again as quickly as it had stopped. The Pledge of Allegiance in school assemblies, the National Anthem before every movie, and the shared knowledge that when our fathers were buried, we would have to stand, backs straight and jaws set, as the most mournful call of all, a lone bugle playing Taps, said goodbye to a soldier, a sailor, an airman.
It is not like we were little cut-outs of the same people. Far from it. Guy Decker wore white all the time; we thought he played tennis, but he thought he just looked best in white. He turned down a singing career in Japan when he was eighteen. Gayle Steele, pretty and affable, spent a lifetime trying to replicate the close community of Zama and finally found it in a Minnesota town. Jim Little played Big Ten football. Paul Bolinger carved Christmas ornaments while his brother Jan flew airplanes. We produced our fair share of lawyers—Eddie Northwood and Martha Hartmann and me—and a few nurses, Barbara Bradford and Glenn Tart. Keith Carmack is a doctor. My brother