Thunder in the Morning Calm by Don Brown Page A

entered the kitchen. She reached for the remote control and turned on the TV. A small flat-screen television on the kitchen counter came to life with the sight of a giant smiling Bambi bobbing in the sunlit skies between skyscrapers of Madison Avenue. Ah … the sights and sounds of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York made her feel better. Over a light breakfast of coffee and toast, she watched the colorful floats brighten the dull gray exteriors of New York skyscrapers.
    Breakfast over, she turned down the volume and perused the checklist on the counter.
    Peel potatoes.
    Prepare dressing.
    Sweet tea … two gallons.
    Set table.
    Set table. Yes, of course. The hard part.
    For the next several hours, she worked on her list, peeling potatoes, chopping celery and onion for the dressing, and brewing the tea. With the food well in hand, she moved to the dining room for the next step.
    The placemats, silverware, and Waterford crystal glasses already adorned the table. To be sure, she counted in her head again the number of plates she would need … Gorman and Bri, Little Tyler and sis Jill, and one for her.
    She counted again. One, two, three, four, five … plus one.
    She reached into the china cabinet and extracted six dinner plates. Five were of a now-defunct but beautiful pattern called Chinoisserie, with black-and-gold banding around the white center and colorful Japanese lettering and figurines on the black banding.
    She set four plates around the old mahogany table, then set the fifth at one end.
    One plate remained in her hand. It was different from the others. She looked at the plate and then looked at the chair at the head of the table.
    The white envelope lay on the placemat, waiting to be covered by the plate. Folded inside was the letter she penned years ago, during an hour of deep self-reflection, after some traumatic and emotional changes in her life.
    She walked to the head of the table and kissed the plate that was unlike the others. She had ordered it from the Marine Corps Exchange at Camp Lejeune several years ago. Engraved in the middle of it was a gold globe-and-anchor, the symbol of the United States Marine Corps.
    With the dignity of a soldier guarding the Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington, she set the plate down over the top of the envelope.
    There. All done.
    Back to the kitchen, back to the checklist. She reached for her scissors and snipped open the plastic bag in the box of brown sugar. She dug a tablespoon into the sugar and sprinkled the sugar on the sweet potatoes in a Pyrex bowl.
    How could she not read the letter? She had written it, and it had meant so much to her then.
    She dropped the spoon on the sweet potatoes and went back to the dining room.
    She stood at the head of the table for a moment, then sat down in the chair. Carefully removing the plate, she picked up the envelope, extracted its contents, and began to read.
    Dear Daddy,
    I was almost five years old when you went missing in action in 1950. They say you disappeared in a place called the Chosin Reservoir. Mama was left with me and my twin brother Jeffrey.
    I only remember one thing about you — your arms reaching out tome to pick me up at Thanksgiving, and I remember you holding me in your arms and smearing my face with chocolate pie! At least I think I remember. Mama is gone now too. She always had trouble talking about you. Jeffrey is gone too. I learned more about you from your brother Bill and sister Maydie than from anyone else.
    I know you were a great athlete in high school, that you were a star quarterback, and that you were a young Marine officer who loved this country. They said you’d planned on getting out of the Marines and coming back to Virginia to run Corbin Hall. They said you would return to us. I believed them.
    We moved around a lot, Daddy. We lived in Iowa, New Mexico, California, and South Carolina. Mama always said I looked like you. She never could deal with the thought of you being gone for good.