I Sat Quietly at My Father’s Veterans Ceremony Until a Uniformed Officer Ignored the Stage and Came Directly to Me

The radio found the local station on its own, as if the car remembered where I came from even when I preferred not to. I had driven this stretch of Virginia highway enough times to know each exit by the feel of the grade change rather than by reading the signs, and the familiarity of it, the pine trees and the particular quality of the low afternoon continue reading …