I shouldn’t begin with the punchline to this story, but it’s popped into my mind more than once in the past few months as this perceived-to-be-significant birthday has been on the horizon. I was in Nashville, hanging out at Bullet Recording Studio with Earl Richards, jb, and a band called Dreamer. Earl was stripping my vocals and some of the instrumentation from my “Thunder and Lightning” and adding steel guitar and a couple of other countrified additions to go with Dreamer’s vocals, remaking the song into a country record. It was the wee hours, maybe two o’clock in the morning, and Dreamer was hungry. Earl thought up an order and asked me to go down to Krystal on West End for some cheap eats.

So, I made the short trip and walked up to the counter, where a short woman, probably in her 30s awaited my order. She wore the company headgear of those days (which might not be the same as pictured here). Her black hair was escaping whatever means she was using to try and contain it. And when she smiled her welcome, she was missing her two top front teeth.

“Can I help you?” she asked, at the ready to take my order.

“Yeah, I’d like sixty Krystals, ple–“

“Thixty!?!” she exclaimed, squinting up at me.

It’s a funny memory, and I’ve often shared it with friends over the years. Her expression has faded somewhat now, but I can still hear the way she said — or sprayed — sixty. And as I’ve been approaching my 60th birthday, I’ve heard that funny exclamation often, and I find myself thinking it–not only in relation to that number of the little gut bombs but also to my years on Earth–with something of the same surprise and shock she must’ve felt when I started my order.

November 25, 1958, 1:57 AM, the hospital at Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina.

We lived in Sumter for a couple of years, I think, before moving to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for a couple more and then “home” to Walnut.

From zero to sixty in ever accelerating years . . .

November is a problematic month for me. I lost both my father and father-in-law in separate Novembers. But at least it has Thanksgiving, perhaps the best and least commercialized of the major holidays in these United States of America. And November has my birthday, although I’m finding that increasingly problematic as well.

As my computer counts down to 1:57 AM on November 25, 2918, I’m in South Carolina again. In Charleston this time, the Holy City, with Leesa. Nothing could be finer.

I’m sure I thought I would write a lot more than this on such a momentous occasion, but it’s practically two o’clock in the morning, for crying out loud! And I’m now sixty years old!

So, it’s late on Sunday, 11 November 2018, Veteran’s Day in the United States of America. The most important veteran that I celebrate today is my father, Plumer Jean Cody, who served in the Air Force from early in the 1950s — maybe even from ’48 or ’49 — into the early 1960s. His service was probably the most significant individual experience in his life, and before he, at sixty-five years old, walked on into the next world on 7 November 1996, twenty-two years ago, he and Mom had begun attending reunions of the 602nd Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, Birkenfeld, Germany. He was really enjoying those reunions.

On the twenty-second anniversary of his leaving us, I was reading the 7 November entry from A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. That day’s reading is titled “Working for Peace.” Here’s what Merton wrote on 12 November 1961, less than two weeks before I turned three years old and sometime near the period when Dad retired from the Air Force and we moved our mobile home from Trailer Town in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to the end of the long yard at the Reeves homeplace in Walnut:

I must pray more and more for courage, as I certainly have neither the courage nor the strength to follow the path that is certainly my duty now.

With the fears and rages that possess so many confused people, if I say things that seem to threaten their interests or conflict with obsessions, then I will surely get it.

It is shocking that so many are convinced that the Communists are about to invade or destroy America: “Christians” who think the only remedy is to destroy them first. Who thinks seriously of disarming? For whom is it more than a pious wish, beyond the bounds of practicality?

I need patience to listen, to learn, to try to understand, and courage to take all the consequences and be really faithful. This alone is a full-time job. I dread it, but it must be done, and I don’t quite know how. To save my soul by trying to be one of those who spoke and worked for peace, not for madness and destruction.

November 12, 1961, IV.179

Although I didn’t write in Gabriel’s Songbook about a military man like my dad, I’ve begun to adapt rumors, legends, and stories heard about Dad’s time in the Air Force into other pieces I’m writing. Although I’m not a poet, here are the closing lines from a poem I wrote about him:

That night he shed his life like Wednesday’s dirty clothes

and would have been surprised by all who braved

early snows to see him laid down

in a proud soldier’s grave.

Southern Poetry Anthology, VI: Tennessee