Touching the Wall

It was a couple years after the boy and the mother came to live with me. The boy might have been eight or nine at the time. One of the mother's jobs was as a breakfast waitress at a Denny's, so she was already up and gone as we sat at the breakfast table before his bus came. I could tell he was not in the best of moods and asked him about it. He told me he hated school. I told him that hating school was a natural thing and no bid deal, as long as it didn't go hand in hand with hating learning. My early years were at the hands of tutors and nannies who were instructed by my father to maximize learning with the minimum disruption to my stage duties. After my father died I was introduced to public schools which struck me as wondrous preparation for an assembly line job that only from time to time dabbled in the art of learning, almost as an afterthought.

So the boy tells me that they think he is stupid, when in fact he is bored or at best uninterested. So I ask him what he is studying and he says Washington, D.C. I ask him, innocently enough, if he had ever been there, and he looks at me as though I had asked him if he had ever been to the moon. You see, some people can hear of the far away and imagine it as a wondrous place. The boy had spent much of his life up to that point having enough trouble coping with the here and now not to put any faith in the benefits of that which is not sitting in front of his nose. So without a thought, which is how my Margie thinks I come to most decisions, I say let's go to Washington, D.C. and find out first hand why anybody would care about it.

Stuck in his here and now mode of getting to the bus on time, he continued to shovel in his cereal while I was telling him how he'd need to pack a few things for our trip, and maybe make a sandwich or two, because money would be in short supply until I could get a hold of Margaret and/or my grandson to bail us out once we were well enscounced in our DC hideaway, and the location of a Western Union could be discovered. I knew we could get down there because my daughter Margaret had given me a credit card with a limited but sufficient credit line, forgetting that it would not prevent trouble for someone who considered working out how one gets out of trouble as an issue better left for when you already knew just how much trouble you were in.

So I tell the boy to get on the computer and first look up Amtrak and then a hotel close to Union Station. He looks at me like I am some geriatric case unable to focus on his need to make the bus. So I assure him that the bus will still be coming to pick him up after we get back, and it finally dawns on him what is happening. He tells me that he doesn't think this is a good idea, and I remind him of all the times he has had doubts about my ideas, like the time I told him to go up to this bully that had been bothering him in the park and tell him off, not understanding that I had donated monetary resources to someone older and tougher to convince this bully that it would be a good idea to tread lightly around the boy in the future. Well the boy still was confused about how that had all worked out, but he had to admit that I was right about the outcome. So he says OK, and we are off to the races.

I spent my childhood on trains so don't remember a time when it was a novelty. The boy thought it was the most curious thing that you could see into other people's back yards from the track. So we take a long taxi ride to Union Station in Springfield and pickup this commuter to New Haven before getting on a first rate train to DC for about an 8 hour trip. Anyway, a note was left on the kitchen table for the mother indicating that we were on a day trip that might have to be extended a day or two and I would call her that evening when the details were worked out. To say that she was furious on that first call would be an understatement, but I put the boy on the line and his unfettered enthusiasm for the project seem to make her think better of it, if not of me. It was not her first experience of me at my best, so there was a certain amount of resignation in her tone from the start, which is the best I could ever hope for on these matters.

So we crossed Mass Ave and headed over to the Phoenix in time for a late supper. These Washington folks must be rich or something. I was shocked by the cost of the meal. So when we made it back to the room and made the first phone calls I knew I would have to up the amount my Margaret would have to donate to the cause. With the necessities out of the way we watched a Bruce Willis movie and went to bed.

The next day we made it over to the mall bright and early, went to the museums that the boy thought were awesome. The capital was off limits because of 9/11, so we headed back to the Washington monument. That was closed as well. Not that I would have climbed it mind you, but the boy could have hitched a ride with some other family. It all struck me as being odd that while our soldiers were heading over seas risking life and limb that we seemed to be afraid of our own shadows with jersey barriers everywhere, even beautiful Lafayette park, as though they could have prevented some hobo terrorist from pissing on the statue.

I was beat and we went back to our room to take a well earned nap for me anyway. We headed back out latter in the day and visited the World War II memorial. The boy and I were awed by it. It made me feel like it was appreciated for the grand task that it was. The boy was carrying his cornet with him and this old gent asks him if he can play it, and the boy goes into a rousing rendition of Chattanooga Choo-Choo I had taught him. I could tell the old guy had a hard time holding it back given where we were. And he wanted a picture with the boy because he knew the boy was going to be famous someday and his children would have the picture and the story.

And we proceeded on to the Korean War memorial and to the Roosevelt memorial. There is one spot where Franklin is sitting in his wheel chair with that great big smile he could wear with such ease and these two teenage girls ask if I would take a picture and they both climb on to his lap and plant a kiss on each cheek. Oh, how FDR would have loved to see that. It will never happen to that moron in the White House today I thought to myself, old jersey barrier George.

We headed over to the Lincoln memorial and the boy who had just heard the Battle Hymn of the Republic at a souvenir stand and has the gift for knowing what keys to depress upon a single hearing stands in front of the great man himself and gives the crowd a version of it with an ever so slight swing in style. I thought to myself that I would sure love to see them teach the boy what he was feeling right then in some classroom. The crowd erupted in appreciation, to which the boy gave a slight bow and came back over to me.

And we headed down to the left and I knew we were coming to that thing I both wanted and did not want to come to. I knew from the start that I had been bringing myself here every bit as much as I had been bringing the boy. I was afraid. Because when it came to my Sean, it seemed that all I could hold inside of me were all the defeats. My own words were echoing in an emptied mind. He was against the war and I had called him a coward for it. He had talked about his hero, Jack Kerouac, and how I had it all wrong in that I was often thinking there was nothing in something, when in fact I had it ass backwards; there was only something in nothing. I told him that of all the dumb clap trap that had come from his mouth over the years that just about took the cake. I thought of the young little leaguer who simply wanted me to throw the ball to him and I didn't know how, for all that I had done in this life, I never learned how to throw that damn ball, and at that time that is all he wanted in a father, just like the Kerouac loving anti-war kid just wanted me to say I understood and I didn't know how to do that either.

So I stood there looking at the long expanse of wall with all the names written in small print as though I was only allowed to be in the presence of the whole thing, and it was useless to try and find his name amongst so many, as if there was no way to get close to something so gone. I was wiping away the tears of my frustration when this young woman dressed up in the green park service uniform with the wide brim hat came up to me and asked me if I was here for a particular name on the wall. I told her, Sean Houlihan, and she asked me if I knew the year of his passing. She then brought me to a particular set of panels and as we were getting close I looked amongst all the names and it was as if his was calling out to me, because I really didn't have to look but saw it.

I have no desire to go into what happened next, but would rather just say what I know now from this far remove, because contrary to current notions there are gifts received in this life that should not be messed with. Let us just say that it was the gift of remembrance: that wonderful trip to the city that final time I saw Muggsey, just before he died, who Sean liked a lot and brought us to the Bluenote and backstage to meet Thelonius Monk; all the wonderful summertime vacations of their childhood spent at Old Orchard; all the dinner table conversations that would start with a serious matter like the priest's sermon and degenerate into a joke fest about it. But I will bend this prohibition on enquiry with a single statement: when I touched the wall, what came of it had something to do with Sean's believing that there could be something in nothing.

I reached into my back pocket and took out my wallet which held a brownie camera photograph on my son at the plate ready to swing his baseball bat. I had pulled this picture out from time to time over all these years as a form of penance. I must of said out loud that I need to stick it on the wall, because this kid pulls my shirt collar and hands me a small piece of his wad of gum. I stuck the picture on Sean's name. After a time the boy seeing that I was still in distress, took my hand and we went back to the hotel room. It was late, but he gave me a concert that night, and I told him the story of my son. The next morning we took the train back home.

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