Shoe Polish, Vietnam and Memorial Day

My brain makes strange mental leaps sometimes. I’ll bet yours does, too. Here is how my brain put shoe polish together with the Vietnam War and the pain some families feel on Memorial Day.

We went to a beautiful wedding on Saturday and the reception was held outside. Thankfully, we were in a big tent since it rained all day (May apparently being the monsoon season in Michigan). When we got home late Saturday night, both Gretchen and I looked at our dress shoes and wondered if they could recover from their day in the wet grass and mud.

Sunday afternoon I got out my ancient shoe polishing stuff and went to work. The black shoe polish is – without exaggeration – at least 25 years old. It was hard and cracked, but I knew with a little water and effort I could revive it. In the midst of my ministrations an idea came to me. I only needed to put this stuff in the microwave for a few seconds and it would melt into something I could use. So I set the microwave for 30 seconds but stayed close at hand in case I’d need to take it out after 15 or so. Who knew six seconds would do the trick? I heard it explode and cautiously opened the door to find the inside of the microwave spotted like a Dalmatian – and smelling like shoe polish. Oops. Hadn’t planned on that, but fortunately it cleaned up pretty well and then I got to work on the shoes. The shoe polish now had the consistency of a melted fudgesicle, so I decided to use a Q-Tip as an applicator. It didn’t exactly have great coverage, but eventually I got the job done. In the process I got melted shoe polish all over my pants and my hands started smelling like the microwave. As for the shoes, they’re okay, I suppose. But I am wondering if I could have done just as well using a black crayon.

After my series of errors I found myself reflecting on how often one small disaster leads to another slightly bigger disaster and on and on. How many car wrecks are caused because something small goes wrong – a bee flies in the window or you don’t like that song playing on the radio or just this once you really need to send a text to someone because you’re running a few minutes late. In dealing with the first problem a much bigger, much worse problem happens.

Here’s where I made the strange mental leap – for some reason this made me think of the Vietnam War, the war of my childhood. I remember the days when Walter Cronkite would sum up the week just past by saying, “386 American soldiers died this week while 573 enemy soldiers died.” I knew if we just hung in there long enough, we would win. Sad to say, the logic of our nation’s leaders wasn’t much better than the flawed thinking my elementary school mind came up with. We never set out to lose 58,000 young people or damage the psyches of untold thousands of others, but we did. Sadly, our leaders train of thought was like me trying to clean up my shoes. We never declared war and there was never any one event that led us to fight. It just happened incrementally – we started as advisors who eventually turned into combat troops – one bad decision led to a worse decision and then to another. In the end, America was massively committed to fighting for no purpose other than trying to avoid humiliation.

I always fly the flag on Memorial Day, to honor the ultimate sacrifice others have made for our country. I don’t honor the flawed logic that led to some of those sacrifices. When I was a kid, the grief of one family came into focus for me. Here’s a poem I wrote a while back about it:

One of Fifty-Eight Thousand

Along about 1970, when I was in junior high,
A new friend invited me to hang out at his house.
Another invitation followed -- to go downtown
for the Memorial Day Parade.

In the car I noticed his parents looked older than my parents.
The mom wore a scarf over her dull gray hair
and the dad a dirty windbreaker over a sweatshirt.
But who doesn’t love a parade? I wanted to have fun.

After watching various beer-bellied codgers
from the American Legion and the VFW walk by,
there was a band playing, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”
I started to sing along in an obnoxious voice.

The kid elbowed me.
I looked and saw his mother crying.
His dad was searching the sky, looking for something or someone from the past.
I shut up.

When we got back to his house, the kid showed me a picture
in a back hallway of a soldier that sort of looked like him.
An older version of himself.
I had thought he was an only child.

He said he would show me his brother’s Purple Heart and other medals,
If I came back when his parents weren’t home.
I never went to his house again,
Not possessing the equipment necessary to enter into that kind of pain.