Tuesday, January 13, 2004

There is a hole in me, and it will be forever empty.

In spite of the magnitude of anyone's loss, time continues to roll forward, which is both comforting and saddening. The 101st Airborne will be home in less than a month, and knowing that my brother came so close to making it back tears at me, like a great beast scrabbling with steel talons at my heart. Right now, we should be buying a new car so that we could give my brother's back to him, saving up some money to take him out to a bunch of restaurants, and buying him some welcome-home gifts. Instead, I talk via e-mail and IM to other soldiers in his platoon about him and how much he is missed.

It feels like the moment after you drop something and it breaks, when in the stillness your brain sputters "Oh God no wait rewind it just happened a second ago Iwanttogobackbackbackbackback," but it never happens. That one second has stretched out for more than a month now, and it will probably continue for a long time.

The worst will be when I see news reports about the 101st Airborne coming home, and when I see video of them stepping off the planes. When they're back, that's when it's going to be the most real, because we'd be seeing him then; my parents would have met him at Ft. Campbell and drive to Houston and then we'd all have dinner and talk. Instead, my brother's homecoming was last month, in a beautiful flag-draped gray and chrome casket. Instead of his laughter, I have a flag, folded with absolute precision by the Army-provided honor guard and sealed in a cherrywood and glass case.

As a wise man once said, that's all I have to say about that.

Sunday was Laura's and my first anniversary. We'd planned an exciting day--we were going to check in and stay for the evening at the Lancaster, the hotel at which we stayed for our first married night together on our way to our honeymoon. While there, we were to have dinner at the Bistro Lancaster, a lovely little restaurant attached to the hotel where the food is extremely expensive but worth every single penny.

Everything was wonderful, until dinner time. We'd taken our seats in the restaurant and been presented with the menu. I ordered an appetizer and soup for me, and a salad for Laura; for our entrees, I'd ordered grilled salmon for me and grilled quail for Laura. The appetizers and soup and salad were absolutely amazing, but when the entrees arrived, Laura's eyes almost bugged out of her head; the quail were served mostly de-boned, except for their wings and legs, and they looked like two perfect little bird-bodies, with little legs and wings sticking out, grilled to perfection.

Laura was a little freaked. I yanked one of the legs off and tried it--it was mouth-wateringly good--but the fact that the bodies had been de-boned but were still basically shaped like little birdied really bothered her. So, trying to be a good husband, I took my knife and fork and began pulling them apart into manageable chunks. Unfortunately, this REALLY disturbed Laura. Poor thing :-) She didn't eat too much of the quail. My salmon, however, was fabulous. To make up for the unsettling nature of her dinner, I ordered her a large ginger cheesecake for desert. This scored me many points in the "sexy husband" department :-)

We had a wonderful evening, with both of us agreeing that we should stay in a small luxury hotel more often :-)

Posted by Keeper @ 03:55 PM CST [Link]