Page 37 of When Wildflowers Bloom

I smile at him as I drop a piece of junk mail in the trash and shout-say, “I don’t think so, Sam, and my name is Birdie!” Sam refuses to wear the hearing aids his kids keep buying him; therefore, my throat is usually exhausted at the end of every Wednesday.

“Bah!” He swats an annoyed hand through the air, as if batting my name away. “Either way, you ain’t got no tits!”

I can’t help it, I laugh. Out of every client I have, Sam is the biggest pain in my ass. I was offended the first time he told me how disappointed he was in my chest, but now it’s just part of our banter. He tells me I’m flat-chested, I tell him he’s a grump.

“Tell me about the Donut Dollies!” I say loudly, opening an electric bill, highlighting the due date.

He squints at me from his chair, rolling his cane between his hands. “First of all, they had tits, and nice ones.” He shoots me a glacial look, as if I need to be taking notes on how to growtits.

“Noted!” I roll my eyes. “What else?”

With a sigh, the grumpy old man’s face softens to an expression that’s almost wistful. Sam’s eyes look into the distance at a place that doesn’t exist anymore.

“’Nam was a hot hellhole, I’ve told you that much, I know. It was miserable. Even on days where your friends weren’t dying or you weren’t worried about dying yourself, it was still miserable. It didn’t take much time there until home seemed like a fairy tale. The way kids imagine Neverland is how you start to picture home. Unreachable. Mythical.” He startles me by sending his cane slamming onto the top of the coffee table and scattering the stacks of mail with a loudthwack!“Get that photo album for me over there on that shelf!” he barks. I glare at him and all my scattered papers before doing as he says.

His old, spotted hands tremble slightly as he flips to the page he’s looking for. “Here we are.” His finger taps heavy on a photo.

A group of men—kids really—leaning against a military-style vehicle with a canvas roof, somehow smiling despite every horrible thing Sam has shared with me. They are bare-faced, bare-chested babies with crooked smiles and a pain rooted beneath their ribs that the photos don’t capture.

He flips the page again. “That’s me.” He smiles.

Young Sam in the photo is handsome, wearing what I imagine would be an army-green hat if it were in color and a white T-shirt. His arm is draped around a girl with her hair in two dark braids and a patch-adorned dress. She’s smiling. She looks like the girl next door.

“Is that a Donut Dollie?” I ask, leaning down to look closer at the photo.

He nods.

“They’d come to camp and play games with us, give us snacks, sometimes Kool-Aid or coffee. Why we needed coffee in that hot hellhole I’ll never know, but we drank it anyway because they smiled at us when they poured it. They were a taste of home when life was anything but.”

Then he’s quiet, staring at the album, no doubt thinking about that time of his life that words will never accurately describe. I’ve heard his stories every Wednesday for nearly two years, and I still can’t wrap my brain around what it must have been like to be there, fighting that war in those conditions. Looking at the photos, I know now he kissed his youthful innocence goodbye in that jungle.

He flips the page again, and a photo of him grinning and covered in shaving cream, fills the page. He chuckles.

“Is this the day you learned to shave?” I tease in a voice loud enough he catches my tone.

Another chuckle, another wistful look. “They had us play a game this day. I’d just lost my best friend, Mac. He died right in front of me.” I’d heard the story of how Mac died before, somekind of explosion, while Sam watched the whole thing happen, unable to stop it. “Anyway, the Dollies came right after that, and they wanted to play this game with shaving cream. They blindfolded us and we sprayed each other all over the place. We laughed, really laughed. For a split second, I forgot Mac was gone.”

He slams the album shut and drops it onto the table with a thud where the once organized mail is now scattered. “They were the best worst days of my life,” he says with a heavy sigh. “I hated it all, but I’d do it all again. It’s confusing to anyone who wasn’t there.”

“Thank you for telling me about them!” I tell him, realizing I mean it. I’m honored to know his story.

I look from him to around his house, now seeing it differently after this story. He has albums on shelves and pictures of him on the walls. A soldier. Father. Husband. Friend.

Artifacts of a life, no matter how hard, well-lived.

Then I look back to Sam—skin spots, thin hair, bulbous nose.

If I somehow lived through this year, and the next, and the ones after that so I could be his age, what would be on my walls? What stories might I tell? Do I actually have any? Standing in the midst of the richness of the life he’s lived, a life so full he surrounds himself with pieces of it and retells the stories of it every week, mine is inadequate. Bland.

For some reason, the thought puts my singularity under a magnifying glass.

Bo was right. I’m alive but not living. I feel that truth on a cellular level.

He squints at me, and I prepare for a barked-out order that usually comes with it, but instead, rolling his cane between his hands, his voice is calm. “The Veterans of Blue Ridge is hosting a fundraising event in a few Saturdays. There will be a band and dancing and some of my friends from ’Nam. My kids are busy, so I’m wondering if you might take me.”

My chin jerks back in shock. He’s never asked to do anything like this.Ever.

“I’d love that, Sam. It’s a date!”

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