Contemplation on the eve of Veteran's Day

[HereSince1628]

A couple of miles away from home there is a place where usually grouchy old men smile and hold the doors open for twenty-somethings. It is a place where eyes are not diverted from those in wheelchairs and where patience rules the loading and unloading of elevators. In a busy world where memories of last month are swept from shared consciousness like dead leaves from a suburban lawn, it is a place where the past holds people together and unlocks more than doors.

That place is the VA's Zablocki Medical Center in Milwaukee. I usually notice it in passing just once a year when I make my Veteran’s Day pilgrimage to the national cemetery that's just a stone’s throw away from the hospital. I can’t know, but I suspect, that most of my suburban neighbors don’t think of the VA hospital any more often than I do. Like me, my neighbors mostly know such places exist from ‘feel good stories’ on television or in the Sunday magazine section. Or they know of VA hospitals from frustrations with service stifling bureaucracy voiced in television stories and internet chatrooms. I expect Zablocki generates both types of stories. It isn't a perfect place.

Finding parking there is insane, waiting rooms are crowded and consult rooms are sometimes distinguished from old patient rooms only by the lack of beds. Floors are patchworks of mismatched tiles. Sometimes, the latest technology clearly is late in arriving. Huge numbers of clients move through the clinics and a person could quickly feel like a mite lost within an ant hill.

You really could feel that way, but only until your eyes meet the eyes of the people around you. Familiar eyes on stranger’s faces. Eyes that without having been there somehow shared a view of your past. Eyes that don’t ask questions. Eyes of defenders with their defenses down. Once proud eyes today in wincing poverty. Eyes stuck in today seeking tomorrow. Eyes that unlock old cold hearts.

Tomorrow morning I will stand amid the naked maples on the hilly fringe of the national cemetery and remember--not just the fallen but all those eyes.