It was mid-afternoon on Halloween but Camo Guy at the credit union wasn’t in costume. This was an everyday look – woodland camouflage field jacket, embroidered desert camo ball cap that read “IRAQ WAR VETERAN.”
He asked the teller, “Do you know what’s happening with SNAP?”
The teller was wearing heavy, Hulk-green face paint and said he did not.
“I still have $20 on my card,” said the veteran.
Federal food benefits were set to stop the next morning – incidentally the fifth anniversary of my brother’s death – a week and a half before Veteran’s Day. The vet was near enough my age and his jacket, and his stonewashed 90s jeans and white gym shoes, reminded me of Tim, who wore out dad’s Vietnam field jacket over many years.
I followed the vet outside and we talked on the sidewalk. He lives on about $18,000 a year. Has a small apartment and a sister in South Bend. Did two tours in Iraq. He asked if he should spend the $20. He worried the government might take back the money. We decided that probably wasn’t going to happen.
He seemed overcome by circumstance, gentle and confused.
“Have you called your congressman?” I asked, thinking of the flags and banners in that particular office, its thank-you-for-your-service tenant.
The veteran said he hadn’t called anybody.
Maybe he would call.
***
Thanksgiving is at my in-laws’ in Muncie this year and so last weekend we hosted an early holiday dinner with my family using exciting new developments in Artificial Intelligence. You can now communicate with the dead using lifelike holograms.
So for the first time in 21 years, I got to see my grandpa, Norman McNeil, in his holiday sweater – a floating hallucination as he crossed the room without moving his feet, holding the carving knife in a hand with six fingers.
There was grandma Ethel McNeil, who died at 92, and mom’s mom, Grammie Anne Brown, who died at 89. There was mom’s sister, Priscilla, and her strange Swedish bachelor friend Gunnar who made a scene at Thanksgiving in 1994. And there was Priscilla’s strange Chicago widower friend Ed, a devout numismatist and who slept on the carpet in her living room.
It was a misfit group so the small talk was about the bird and gizzard gravy, the hand-mashed potatoes – and who has the corkscrew? A case of Beaujolais already half empty in the kitchen.
Dad was out of his blazer and down to the turtleneck, telling a story about a high school track meet in 1963 – long before the failures of jobs, marriage, so much else.
Tim was Tim, a scowling cloud. The fun just wouldn’t come.
But mom was laughing – even with dad in the room – her eyes bright and cheeks rouged. It was her I wanted to see, wanted my son to see. She died unexpectedly and alone, three years before he was born, during a period of personal crisis and loss. It still seems ugly and unfair.
More on that in a moment.
The holiday party was pretty awkward. The old frictions did grind, the jealousies and grievances survived the grave. And why not? That’s how we lived. It wasn’t pleasant to revisit.
Except to hear from mom, Brenda B. McNeil, who took me aside in the kitchen to say she did not choose to die like she did – crumpled in a small bathroom inside a dump apartment – but it was all right. It was not an indignity.
“At least I was at home,” she said.
“I was not torn from my family. I was not beaten or restrained. I did not die among callous, rank strangers on the floor of an ICE dungeon.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I want you to worry about that.”
My son found us near the fridge. Mom turned to him and winked.
She knelt and reached for him with apparition arms.
Music: “Rank Stranger” by Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys
