Diarist's note: All the events in this story are true, however, in the interest of the privacy of the parties other than myself, names have been changed.
We had quite a galvanizing experience a few weeks ago. My husband, an inveterate scavenger, found a pool table on Craigslist. Now we've looked at several pool tables, something I desperately don't need. But this one was in Clarksville, which is about an hour away, and it was a beautiful day for a drive in the country. Clarksville is on the TN side of Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne.
After some calling for directions, we arrived at the home to meet the woman who put the table on the list. Her name is Noelle. From the outside of the house, with the pickup loaded with bicycles, and the assortment of "Little Tykes" on the front porch, it was immediately apparent this was a house with kids. Noelle greeted us at the door with a toddler crawling up her legs. She was a very pretty young woman who looked like the subject of an Italian Renaissance portrait, with her long, dark hair; still young enough to be beautiful without makeup - I'd guess mid twenties.
We stepped in and the house, which had already had much of the contents removed, looked all to familiar to me - that unpleasant combination of moving, overwhelmedness and depression which I know all too well. On the table in the front hall was a street sign "Jesse A. Botero Drive" "Who's Jesse A. Botero?" asked Lou, making casual conversation. "That was my husband. He was killed in the war."
The moment of stunned silence was broken when, a second toddler appeared - looking just like the first. Twins! Adorable little guys with big brown eyes, wearing matching red shorts, and neither wearing a shirt in the beastly hot weather. "Well, how old are you?" "I'm three!" "I'm three, too!" They were soon crawling like kittens up Lou's pant legs as well , as we attempted to regain our composure and feign interest in the pool table - as though we could even focus on it. As Lou bent down to look at the underside of the large table and wipe his eyes, a tiny little girl toddled into the room. "About 18 - 20 months?" I asked. "eighteen."
The negotiations continued as we watched all three children now vie for their mother's attention. With only two arms however, she could not hold them all at once, although she was smoother than I ever was at somehow giving them all attention while simultaneously carrying on a conversation with us. The children, meanwhile, crawled under the table, in and out of the dog's crate, up and down the stairs and on anything that would support their tiny bodies. She said that she herself had been in the army as well, but had been mustered out in order to stay with the kids when her husband had gone overseas. She was now moving to be near family in another state. She wouldn't have to be out of the house until the end of the month, so we didn't need to get the table out immediately. Well, need it or not, there was no way that we weren't going to buy that table.
It was a pretty quiet ride home, in stunned silence. When I got back, I looked up Jesse A. Botero. He was twenty-five. He had been permitted to delay his deployment by two weeks, for the birth of his daughter. Then he shipped out. He departed this life scarcely four months later, the victim of an IED in Baghdad. For the last eighteen months, Noelle has been single parenting three kids, none of whom will ever remember their father.
A small price to pay? Perhaps you'd like to tell that to Mrs. Jesse A. Botero and her children, Rep. Boehner.