Marshall Ramsey

The Confederate solider statue looked out at the Southern city and just stood there.  He always just stood there.

He saw the tornado hit in 1893.  He saw Yellow Fever kill indiscriminately the next year.  He saw the fire of 1904. He remembered the celebrations after the Germans and the Japanese were defeated.  He laughed at the funny-looking kids who protested the Vietnam war.  Recently, he had noticed more people living in the park around him.  It reminded him of the the Great Depression. And then there were the pigeons. The damn pigeons.  He couldn’t do anything about any of it. He just stood there.

His soul had entered the statue the day he died. It was a few years after the Civil War (or war of Northern Aggression as the tourists liked to call it).  The war. The bloody, noisy affair that saw his brother, father, neighbor and best friend all get killed.  His home had been burned and his family starved, too.  The war.  He gazed out at the courthouse square and watched the tourists file by.  It was 150 years later and he still couldn’t glamorize it.  But they sure did, and that was understandable.  They hadn’t seen the rivers of blood at Shiloh. They didn’t have to eat rats in Vicksburg. They didn’t see Jackson go up in flames. They didn’t see their brother’s head evaporate from a cannonball.

He fought to protect his home.  Not much glamor in that, really. Every father would do the same.  He didn’t go chasing some glamorous lost cause.  Slavery was why many of his neighbors had fought; not him. He knew it was wrong from his reading of the Bible. When General Lee laid down his sword, the solider put his arms down, too. He then walked back home to become a small farmer again. For four years, he tried to protect his wife — and in the end, he failed. When he saw her grave that spring day in 1865, his heart was the first part of him that became stone.

Now he was a sentinel over his former hometown. Stone. Cold. Standing there, quietly as the sun came up and the sun went down.  He watched as technology changed before his fixed eyes.  He remembered the first time a giant iron bird flew over him. And it had been at least 75 years since he had seen a horse.  Another pigeon landed on his head.  “Oh, here it comes,” he thought. He wished someone would invent a way to get rid of pigeons and their spastic colons.

Being a statue wasn’t fun.

He felt the warmth on his side as his cold, gray stone turned pink. It was sunrise.  Another day to stand guard over his home.  Another day to watch the world change without him.

Like the first wave of a bloody invasion, the thunderstorm’s first rain drops were mowed down by the late-July heat.  Each giant drop hit the earth and instantly turned to steam.  The following drops, though, overwhelmed the heat’s defenses.  The record temperatures soon surrendered to the cooling rain. The summer would win the war, but today it had lost the battle.  The man and dog on the porch took their victories where they could get them.  It had been a brutal summer — in many ways.

The man poured a glass of lemon-ice water, took a sip, flipped through the mail and gently rocked on his porch.  His mind was lost in the hiss of the rain coming through the oak leaves.  His attention was brought back to the present whenever there was a rolling clap of thunder.  And then it faded off again.  (Thunder that made the dog nervous. He had been that way since Katrina.)

A mist began to shroud the rolling countryside.  Hills that had been fought over by the likes of Sherman, Grant and Hood now grew corn and oak trees.  The record drought had burned up the landscape.  But today’s rain broke that drought. The man thought he could see the corn start to rebound right before his eyes.

The Great Recession had been another drought that had wilted his professional crop.  For six months, he had angrily sat on his front porch watching his career wilt like the corn.  And as long as he was angry, no clouds of opportunity appeared on the horizon. He sat there, burning up and steaming between his ears watching his world wither and die.

About a month ago, he released his anger.  He just let it go. He forgave those he had held a grudge against so long. The people responsible him for being in this mess. And most importantly, himself. It was his rain dance. His gesture to the sky.  Part of his rain dance was to get up and get moving. To smile more. To laugh at the absurdity that life had dealt him.   The dog sensed a change, too. Dogs usually are smart like that.

Another clap of thunder rattled his house, much to the dog’s displeasure.  The rain was coming down harder now with three inches in the rain gauge so far.  The man smiled,  took another sip of cold water and looked through the mail in his lap again.  The top letter was a job offer.

“The rain dance worked,”  he thought.  As he and the dog watched the rain continue to come down, he knew the drought was over.

Before there were pink ribbons, Susan B. Komen events, “Save the Ta-Ta’s” t-shirts and breast cancer support groups, there was Betty Ford.  At time when breast cancer survivors were forced to suffer in silence, she announced to the world she had had a mastectomy — and just a month after President Ford became President in 1974.  A topic that had long been taboo was suddenly being discussed openly.  It was no longer a “loss of your sexuality” or a something that “was not discussed in polite company.”  It was a disease. A disease that threatened moms, daughters, and sisters. Breast cancer survivors got their first taste of support. How the disease was viewed was changed forever.

As a family member of a breast cancer survivor from that era, I wish to say  thank you, Mrs. Ford.  May you rest in the peace that you brought so many others.