The Bar

Two young veterans sat in the darkened bar, sipping beers, recounting their shared experiences overseas, united this week by the passing of their grandmother.  Having served in different phases of the war, pre-surge and post-surge, they relived their missions.  They talked in a shared language filled with acronyms and military terms that other patrons in the sparsely populated bar would hardly understand.  For them, getting to know each other after all these intervening years, they spoke in an old, but not forgotten language.  Relieved of the burden to explain terms and background, they understood each other’s actions, anxieties, frustrations, and triumphs.  Each spoke animatedly, finding a positive, non-judgmental sounding board, touching shared emotions long buried, coaxing them up from the depths to be briefly revealed once again in the dim shroud of night. 

 

The strum of a guitar, the scratch of a fiddle, accompanied by a bass and the twang of a banjo mutedly drifted from the jukebox.  Their conversation ceased, unnoticed by the other tenants of the bar.  Each were transported back to a time and memory juxtaposed by the glint off the liquor bottles and tiny bubbles rising languidly in their glasses.  Fixated on a place so alien from home and family, each silently recalled how they had dreamt of being right here, right now.  It seemed immediate, yet a lifetime ago.  An American song spanning the northeast and south, spoke of wandering for the truth, love, wind, rain, and being gently rocked by a southbound train.  Lost in their respective memories, faces and places surfaced randomly, were caressed and returned to their places of rest. 

As the final chords faded they looked at each other and toasted their friends that live now only in their cherished memory, picking up their conversation where they had left off.