To Seymour with love from brother Buddy

To Seymour with love from brother Buddy

fiction
edward w pritchard

for JD

Sometimes I'll see a Chinese woman, one of over billion faces of that race, and somehow her face will look like my American cousin or my first boss at the Restaurant where I washed dishes when I was fifteen years old. The face of the woman in question is definitely 100 % Chinese, with jet black hair and peculiar Chinese eyes but the expression and the nuances of the face are familiar as if there are only so many faces to go around and as if God has a limited supply of apparitions to grace the faces of the world with.

As I sat silently sobbing at my son JD's funeral, JD displayed in full military tribute after being killed and being recently shipped home from our Country's Middle Eastern War in honorable military tradition; as I sat sobbing it dawned on me as I looked at JD's face laying there in the heavy military casket that somewhere in the world someone with JD's face was going about his or her daily business unawares that a 24 year old American soldier who looked at little like them but from a different race and creed, was laying dead in his coffin while his Mother sobbed, too overcome with grief and despair to cry anymore.

Would that other face far away, maybe in China wash his hands over and over after carrying a dead kitten on a leaf rake for burial in our mulch pile, or would that other face fuss and fumble with his trouser cuffs when he met someone new in a formal setting? Would that other person still alive far away in China hug his Mother only with his left arm because his right shoulder was bad from a bicycle wreck as a six year old boy?

As I thought JD's bad shoulder laying there in his casket, I began to smile very inappropriately for a grieving Mother at a formal military funeral, and at that instant as the Minister continued his eulogy and glanced at me the sobbing Mother, I had a most inappropriate apparition on my face.

end