Apologize if these remembrances appear out of order.
I find them, I share them. Almost remember them sometimes.
From June 7, 1989. – JDW
My little brother died five years ago on Memorial Day weekend.
So, excuse me but this holiday lacks that certain sense of frivolity I’m normally looking for in a day off work in the summertime.
Don’t really have any great inclination to memorialize anything on this day. If I have to celebrate anything, I want to celebrate life.
And the lively.
I spent the entire three days trying to deny the dead, trying to ignore the unfurled flags, trying to look ahead.
And so I really like to focus on enjoying myself on this special weekend. I try to do something that’s pretty fun. Maybe even unusual.
This year I thought it might be cool to head out of town. Anything to forget.
Friday night started out normal enough. Norma Louise and I were only fifteen minutes late. Guido Maldemara, David Rabin – The Best Copier Salesman In Town – and other friends were already waiting for us at Casa U-Betcha. This place is smokin’! The most personable service around, squared-away margaritas. Good food and what some might call ‘action.” A whole lot of energy.
Unable to face another nacho chip, Guido, Norma and I headed down to Cisco & Pancho’s – ironic, huh? – to hear Paul Delay.
With three dollar cover, we got a complimentary personalized Paul DeLay souvenir matchbook.
Some friends had offered us a cabin at Cove Beach, north of Manzanita.
The first moment we could, Saturday evening, we packed up the car and headed west.
Fifty-seven miles later, we stopped at the Morris Family’s Camp 18 restaurant. The place reminds me of the Flying “M.” https://www.jackdogwelch.com/?p=8362
Without Bob, taxidermy and the cowboys.
The magnificent log construction declares, this is timber country.
The privies are labeled Lumberjacks and Lumberjills. If this is the beginning of a trend, it bears watching.
Prime Rib ($14.95), Veal Pizzola (11.50) and fresh Salmon (13.95) spoke to me. Like a chorus.
I went with the fish and spent the rest of the meal listening to Norma Louise go on and on about what a wonderful place this is.
About ten minutes after I paid the check. I was sitting alongside the road in front of a publicly-owned black & white automobile.
“May I see your license, please?”
“Is this your correct address, Mr. Welch?”
“Does your speedometer work properly?”
“I’ll be just a moment. Please wait here.”
The trooper goes to check me for outstanding warrants or prior arrests, whatever it is they do.
“Well,” says Norma Louise, always reassuring. “At least you weren’t driving as fast as you usually do.”
The trooper is back at the window.
“Here’s your license, Mr. Welch. Now, I’ve cited you for violating the basic rule..” He is quite polite and smiling. “Since you slowed down a little coming off the hill. I’m writing this for $57. Another couple of miles faster, and it would’ve been $160.”
“Thank you, Officer,” sounding, I hope, more grateful than I feel. Wanted to tell him I had spaced out. I’d been thinking about when I was a kid and my brother and I had marched side-by-side in our navy blue Cub Scout uniforms. General Eisenhower was President, and a local Spanish-American War hero always led the parade.
You can’t really try to forget some things.
“Have a nice day.”
South of Cannon Beach, we pulled up in front of the Arch Cape Deli for firewood. The place had already closed.
I realized that about the same time I realized I’d forgotten the directions. Along with the map. We are doomed.
Norma Louise remains calm. Something I ‘m not sure I could’ve done if the situation had been reversed.
“Now, try to remember what you did with them, after I put them in your hand,” she says soothingly. As if talking to a child.
“I had them. Then I lost them.” I recalled that much. “I don’t know where. If I knew, they wouldn’t be lost.”
You can’t really try to remember some things.
So, we were lost.
An hour later, we found the cabin right where it had been all the time, the first three times we passed it.
“I’m sure it looks better in the daylight,” hoped Norma Louise, trying in vain to obscure her disappointment.
The place was a far cry from what I had imagined. Cinder blocks, painted moss green on the outside and winter gray on the inside. The interior decor might be described as Early Lucy & Desi.
It’s like being on another planet. All I could hear was the pounding of the surf off in the dark someplace. Wave after wave after wave after wave.
There’s no television. No radio. No VCR. There are no neighbors.
There is no backyard. Well, there’s half of one. I discovered that when I woke up the next morning.
We are not only at the beach, we practically ARE the beach. Another five yards of missing soil and the living room becomes a balcony.
The fall would’ve killed me.
Which got me thinking again about memorials and death and my brother.
Michael was never the same after Nam. Two tours.
I had been out of the Air Force a couple of years – I was a Czech linguist but that’s another story, – when Mike came home from the war.
He wasn’t a kid any more.
He was a lot quieter than I remembered. He didn’t laugh as much as he used to.
When I asked what it was like, he said he didn’t want to talk about it.
When I asked him if he had any snapshots, he showed me one photo of a country road. With a charred hand curling up, laying in the dust.
Nothing else in the photograph. Just the dust and the hand.
When our mother finally asked her younger son about his service, he showed her the same picture.
And she never again asked him about the war. She didn’t really want to talk about it either.
That’s the reason I don’t make any special thing about Memorial Day.
The bullet that killed Michael Charles Welch a few years ago in upstate New York might as well have come from an AK-47 in the Mekong Delta two decades earlier.
Rarely a day goes by I don’t think about my war dead. About my brother. About my lost Michael.
We shared a little bedroom.
I don’t need a three-day weekend to remind me.
Some memories you can’t escape.
Even if you try.
