Why We Were There

It had seemed like a good idea a month ago. By last Thursday, it didn't seem like such a good idea. When M came home from school sick, I had a glimmer of hope that we wouldn't be able to go. But she was fine and the plans were made, so we went.

At breakfast at the hotel, there was a family from Colorado with eleven people, but we had them beat. There were sixteen of us: Aunt M and Uncle J; my mom and stepfather; my sister, her husband, and her two kids; me, M, and E (where was S? do you even need to ask? at work, of course); my stepfather's younger son, his wife, and his two kids; and my stepfather's older son (his wife was at home and his son was partying in Amarillo, having been evacuated from Houston). E and her family made twenty, though they weren't with us the whole time.

Cellphones were crucial. I don't know how we used to manage without them. Of course they were that much more effective once my mom realized that to answer her phone all she had to do was open it--when she opened it and then pushed OK, as she did for most of the day, bad things happened. But thanks to cellphones, we knew that M and J's train had an electrical problem and they would be late--very late, as it turned out. E and I found each other with our phones: "I'm by the flag." "I'm by the flag." "I'm by the people with the blue hats." "What people with the blue hats?" "I can't hear you, they're singing." "They're singing by me too." "I see you!!! I'm over here!!" We wrote our phone numbers on the kids' arms, cognizant of the post-Katrina instructions for parents evacuating with their kids from Rita.

We stood still for way too long with E's husband and his gang. Then E and I cut out with the kids for hot dogs, pretzels, and running around on a lawn. Miraculously we found the rest of my family--my sister by accident (though we were only a block from where we were supposed to meet), the rest of them via more laborious cell phone instructions ("Come down another block, cross the street, look for us on the grass."). When we went back, there was finally movement, and we found outselves walking with the gals in pink, which was quite ok with us. E was tired, so I carried her, then P carried her on his shoulders, then I carried her and she fell asleep, then M carried her while she slept. Thank goodness for strong stepbrothers. We cut out at the White House and headed for snacks at Starbucks and more running around in a park.

Mainly it was a lot of people and logistics and trying not to lose my kids.

The next day, I was talking to someone who was the sole survivor of a military accident in World War II. I was thinking of the other people on his plane, people he'd known, people who'd lost the future he went on to have. Then I started thinking about World War I when an entire generation was lost. My grandmother, a young woman in Germany, married a man twenty years older than her who told her on their wedding day that he had a mistress and children and he wasn't giving them up. She had no choice, she said, because there were no young men.

Imagine what the world might have been like if all those men who died in the trenches had lived. Imagine if they had survived that ghastly war and come back and made it their lives' purpose to prevent another war. Or maybe not. Imagine that they had just come back and written the sonnets and painted the pictures and sold the shoes and fathered the children that never happened.

There was a field of crosses by the Washington monument. There was a long string with a photo of every single soldier who has died in Iraq so far, alphabetical and numbered. I ducked under the string at 201, somewhere in the B's, trying to find a hot dog truck to feed my kids.

I get so used to the numbers and the lists. I read the biographies and the articles about the funerals and families, and I get sad, but the biographies and articles focus on the past and the present.

It suddenly hit me that what is lost in war, especially this kind of a pointless war, is the future. Individual futures, family futures, national futures, world futures. An unspeakable waste.

I'm glad we went.

[And if you want to say that wars are fought for the future, I might agree that that is true, as well, for some wars. But not this one.]