I notice the cleaners. Doesn’t matter where. They pass by pushing utility carts. They are quiet, stoic, aware, and usually all too kind. They are focused, nonplussed. They spend their days invisible. No one wants their job. The work they do is hard, unpleasant. There is no pretense with a cleaner, just understated nobility. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cleaner I didn’t think was beautiful.
There are a few, small details about D-Day that have always impressed me based on my own reading and consideration of the event thirty years, nearly to the day, before I was born.
First: on June 5, 1944 at four in the morning, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff at SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) met quietly in London. The weather reports leading up to Operation Overlord had been ill advised for months–timing was off and the allied forces were literally coming down to their final window of opportunity to unfurl the massive armada that had been building throughout early 1944. On that fateful morning there was slightly good news. It appeared there would be a break in the weather and that it would hold for no more than 48 hours. Eisenhower knew the risk he was considering. He also understood that if he didn’t act at that moment and take advantage of the opening in the clouds, the invasion at Normandy may not happen at all. Eisenhower listened. He looked into the eyes of his advisors sitting around the table and then said three decisive words: “Okay, let’s go!” And with that he got up and walked out of the room and down to his driver and waiting car. The woman behind the wheel looked at Ike and saw the light in his eyes. He told her, “It’s on and nothing is going to stop us now.”
Second: Americans awoke the morning of June 6, 1944 to the sound of ringing bells all across this great nation. FDR had ordered that church bells be ringing throughout the day to remind the country of the terrible cost that was being paid with the blood and courage of our young boys in Western Europe. People gathered in great and small groups to look into each other’s eyes, to hold each other, and to pray. I can only imagine the emotion of that moment all across America and the world.
Third: I am reminded of a particular scene in Steven Spielberg’s film, Saving Private Ryan, after the Allied Forces have attained the beaches of Normandy at Omaha and Utah. A food station has been set up where thickly-cut corned beef and spam sandwiches are piled high on a clean, but dirty-fingered plate and adjacent to it a full kettle pot of steaming black coffee is being poured out of a long-necked spout into a tin cup held tightly in the charred hand of a soldier.
After the horror of heavy combat and the inexplicable courage to face the abyss, weary men found sublime comfort in a cup of coffee, a cigarette, a piece of chocolate, in the sound of the air and sea.
These details stir my soul.
My father told me a story, one night when I was little. It’s about a large man in big overalls who carried a handicapped boy up a mountain. Dad was seventeen, working on staff at Camp Tracy Wigwam, the summer of ‘66. These details I got later when I was older and I’d ask him to tell me again about the man with the big pockets and the boy in the wheelchair with the small crooked feet. It wasn’t much of a story really, just a point of observation with the kind of details that never leave you. As he would retell it I remembered the first time I heard it: me, tucked neatly in my little bed in our yellow house on Beech Street in Caldwell, Idaho in the fall of 1981; Dad sitting on the floor with his back to my mattress, me listening, as he describes a small boy scout in a metallic silver wheelchair excited to take a high-adventure hike with his troop, and a younger version of my Dad trying to explain to the little boy why he can’t go on the hike, and then out of nowhere a big burly man in faded farming overalls stepping forward to declare, ‘I’ll carry the boy up the mountain,’ as he lifts the scout from the wheelchair and situates him in a piggyback hold, sliding the boy’s misaligned feet into his big pockets so that the boy can rest his weight inside of them as he is carried onward by this giant of a man.
Those big pockets.
Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are completely wrong. They’re focused on things that don’t really matter and usually make no sense. Distortion and disillusionment blur the lens of our vision and prevent us from seeing the stories we should tell ourselves. Most of the time we let others tell us the stories and we take no part in the journey. This is a great tragedy.
I don’t need much in life. I refuse to go blindly through life. I want to feel what there is to feel. I want to be more aware. I think, if there is a purpose, it’s to sponge up as much of the good stuff and remember how it feels when it’s sponged up; how it’s changing me, changing how I think and what I say to those I meet along the way. These small hours are all that matter. In them I try to listen with more sensitive ears, try to see with more sensitive eyes.
These Small Hours podcast is the direct outlet for essays I’ve written. Here are short-form pieces of thought about life and letters, art and humanity that I have created. I choose to shine a light on simple things I notice which comprise all the reasons why I write. These small hours matter, I give them indefinite leave to remain. I trust they will remain with you. I offer them freely.
Thank you for being here. Rise and walk with me–or, if you cannot, I have big pockets. I can carry you.
RCS
22 April, 2020