Not This Day

I was seventeen years old, fresh in the Air Force, TDY to Charleston, South Carolina. I had just finished washing my 1991 Honda CRX Si at a coin-op car wash. The kind of afternoon where you feel invincible for no good reason.

I was pulling out of the lot when my passenger door opened.

The man was huge. He said drive. So I drove.

I was unarmed. I was a kid. I was a long way from anyone who knew my name. Somewhere on those back roads of South Carolina, I decided that if this was it, I wasn't going out begging. I just talked to him.

Not a strategy. Not a technique. I just talked to him like he was a buddy I was giving a ride to.

Where you from. What branch.

He was Marine Corps. Less than honorable discharge. I told him I was an Airman. After a while, he couldn't help it. He talked back.

We pulled into a clearing in the deep woods. Poor area. A group of men were waiting and started moving toward the car like they'd rehearsed it.

Then he waved them back.

He looked at me and said, "I'm gonna tax you for some gas money."

I told him I had nothing. I was living off a government Amex card. Then I remembered my change holder. Full of silver, mostly quarters. This was 1996.

He took it all in one handful and let me drive away.

His buddies were not happy about it. But I'm here today.

Or maybe it wasn't the quarters. Maybe it was the conversation. Maybe somewhere on that drive he stopped seeing me as a target and started seeing a kid in uniform who reminded him of somebody. Maybe himself.

I'll never know.

A year later I was asleep in the passenger seat of a truck. My buddy Eli was driving. He fell asleep too.

I don't remember the impact.

I remember waking up, pulling Eli from the cab, dragging him to the side of the road, and then collapsing.

The paramedics marked me as DOA. They thought I had been ejected. Nobody pulls a man from a wreck and then just drops.

But that's what happened.

I woke up in the ambulance. I had a major head wound and had lost a lot of blood. In the ER, I watched the doctor stitch my head back together. I remember the nurse wiping blood from his face shield.

When he rounded on me the next day, I recognized him. He told me that was impossible. I had been unconscious the entire time.

I had amnesia for days. My father called and I didn't know who he was.

But I remembered that doctor.
I remembered that nurse.

I remember being there, but not on the bed. Not floating above it either. Just... present. Like I was standing in a place that didn't have a floor.

I was eighteen.

When I was seven, I shared a queen bed with both my brothers. My grandfather had just passed from cancer. Quick. We weren't that close, but he was grandpa.

I woke up in the dark and felt someone there. I saw a figure. Young, with wild hair, like a shadow that didn't belong to anything in the room. I pulled the covers over my head and felt a weight settle on my chest.

Not crushing. Just present.

I told my grandmother what I saw. She went pale. I had described my grandfather as a young man, decades before I was born.

I still don't have words for that night.

I've been close to the edge a few more times since. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever once, bad enough to wonder. Another time a surgeon scoped my stomach, found a weak spot, and punched a hole removing it.

That night I could feel my energy slipping away. Not pain. Something quieter. Like a slow leak you can hear but can't find.

I was surprised to wake up the next morning.

In the shower I started having the worst burps with a taste I couldn't place. Copper. Metal. Then it hit me.

I moved to the toilet and confirmed it. Black, tarry, loose. I needed transfusions and emergency surgery.

Each time, I knew before the doctors did. Each time, my body was already telling me the story before anyone ran the labs.

I don't know what to call that. Instinct. Intuition. A door that cracked open at eighteen on the side of that road and never fully closed.

Animals find me. Cats, dogs, strays. I'm not an animal lover, not in the way people mean it. I could take them or leave them.

But they come to me anyway.

I've been told I have a calm energy. Maybe that's true. Or maybe they sense the same thing I sense in rooms where someone has died.

I've seen my share of dead bodies. I have always known when someone passed. There is a stillness in a body without a soul. You feel the absence.

It's not silence.

Silence is empty. This is different. This is a room that just lost something it can't get back.

When Norma's stepfather Pete was dying at the VA, I stayed with him on the hospice floor so Norma could get a shower and some sleep. Pete was unconscious. A few moments after the nurse left, he woke up lucid and clear.

He looked at me and said, "Tommy, when are we going to blow this joint?"

I had to tell him the truth. He had pneumonia and a hole in his lung. The pneumonia was plugging the hole, keeping him alive, but at a cost. The fluid or the hole was going to take him. It was only a matter of time.

His number was punched.

So I prayed with him.

I'm not a chaplain. I'm not a holy man. I'm a man with dirty hands who has been close enough to the edge to believe there is something on the other side. I told Pete there was hope for us. Even for men like us.

He thanked me for praying with him and drifted back to sleep.

He died the next day.

I don't know if I gave Pete peace. But I gave him the truth and I gave him company.

My brother Tim loved Carl Sagan. He didn't believe in God. He thought when we're done, we're done. Stars and math and a universe that doesn't care either way.

That was his honesty, and I respected it.

I feel a pull that there is more. Not because I read it in a book. Because I've been there. I've felt the seam between my body and my soul. I've stood in places with no floor. I've seen things I still can't explain.

Tim and I loved each other and saw the world differently. If he was right, he's at peace. If I'm right, he knows it now.

I feel him sometimes.

I struggle with some of the same demons my daughter Coralie fights. I know what it's like to wake up sore, stiff, head swimming, foggy. Like you haven't slept in days. I know what it's like to feel the weight of everything pressing down until you think the next one might be the one that breaks you.

I've popped smoke at times in my life. Started over when fixing where I was seemed impossible.

I know that urge.

But wisdom tells you the truth: your problems have your forwarding address.

I'm not a perfect father. But I am a father who fights the same fight and keeps getting up. That's what I can give Coralie. Not answers. Not a cure. Just proof that you can carry it and keep walking.

Tim lost that battle.

I'm a warrior. I'll fall one day.

But not this day.

I've carried people for a long time.

Since I was seventeen in a CRX full of quarters. I carried Eli from a truck. I carried Pete to the edge with a prayer. I carry my children. I carry Tim. I carry myself.

Some nights the list is long and the music is the only thing that makes sense. Jim Croce. Harry Chapin. Gordon Lightfoot. James Taylor. Men who wrote about time running out, fathers and sons, and love that is simple and complicated all at once.

Tonight is one of those nights.