Got this while enjoying breakfast at one of my favorite places on earth today, and wanted to get it down before I lost it. Let me know what y’all think:

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“Here you go,” the waitress said sweetly.  She set a large plate, almost overflowing with eggs, biscuits, and chorizo gravy, in front of me. 

I looked up in surprise.  I had been engrossed in reading a news site and hadn’t heard her approach. 

“And let me fill that up for y’all,” she drawled.  The sweet sound of coffee flowing into my mug momentarily broke through the background noise.

“Thanks!” I said, trying not to reach for the coffee too quickly.  It had been a long night, and today was going to be even longer.

She gave me a dimpled smile, then continued her circuit around the room.  Her shoulder-length hair, the color of ripe wheat, swung with the rhythm of her steps as she went from one table to another.

I unfolded my silverware from their napkin cocoon, placed the napkin on my lap like my mama taught me, and dug in.  I was in Chattanooga for an executive protection job, but I had a couple of hours before my principal would be out of bed and off to his mid-morning brunch and first meeting.  I’d taken the opportunity to walk a few blocks from the convention center we were staying at to grab a bite to eat at a coffee house a friend had recommended.

So, in the early morning Tennessee humidity, I was ensconced in an eclectic place dubbed ‘The Frothy Monkey’, enjoying a twist on southern breakfast, and loading up on caffeine for the day.  I needed the coffee to kickstart my morning , and I would need the calories for what was likely to be a long day on my feet.

My principal was an author who had gained quite a following over the years, and he was attending a convention to meet old friends and fans.  Unfortunately, gaining fame had also gained him a host of, well, let’s just call them detractors.  He was unashamed of his positions on a lot of issues, and wasn’t afraid to express them publicly.  What should have gained him only scorn and disinterest from those who disagreed could now gain him confrontation and maybe even violence from those who equated words they found distasteful with, well, violence.

His publishers, and his wife, had decided that he needed some discreet oversight while he attended talks with other authors and readers, met with publishers, and just enjoyed the company of his tribe.  No specific threats had been received, so far, but they felt that it was better to spend a little money to be prepared for someone to do something stupid than to deal with the aftermath of stupid upgrading to insane.

After meeting the man, I had to wonder why he needed my services.  I’m not called the Boogieman for nothing, but this guy towered over me in both height and bulk.  His handshake, warm as it was, engulfed my hand when we had met the day before.  He didn’t do that big-man “break the joints in the fingers” handshake, but I’m pretty sure that was due to a conscious choice, not due to a lack of ability.  An ox would look at this guy and realize that it needed to up its game at the gym.

Any thought that I was being hired because I was good with a gun was thrown out when I did some research on the guy.  The man was a stone cold gunslinger when he wanted to be, and I had no illusions that I could keep up with him if it things went from jaw-jaw to stab-stab or bang-bang. 

No, my job was to discreetly stay somewhat close to him, watch for anyone who looked to be considering committing public idiocy, and to intercede before things escalated.  He had an assistant to get him from one place to another at the convention, but I was to stay in the background with the rest of the big guys wearing Hawaiian shirts until things started getting out of hand.

But, that was for later.  For now, I needed to fuel up.  I poured a few dashes of hot sauce on breakfast and dug in.  As early as it was, the place was relatively busy, and the background conversations and piped-in hits of the ‘80’s made for a wall of white noise between me and the rest of the world. 

Since my nose was no longer buried in my phone, I noticed when an older lady came into the restaurant.  She was quite a bit older than the rest of the crowd enjoying their breakfast and morning pick-me-up, but it was how she was dressed that really caught my eye.  In my jeans and tee shirt, I was on the upper end of the fashion scale for the room.  Most of my fellow caffeine aficionados were dressed for comfort, not style.  Shorts and tee shirts as small as the law allowed made up most of the feminine attire, while the men ranged from baggy tee shirts to loose tank tops. 

This lady, on the other hand, was dressed in a cream colored women’s business dress that would have been the height of fashion when my grandmother was a child.   Sensible pumps, matching the dress, of course, clicked on the tiled floor as she walked to the counter, a clutch purse beaded with what looked like pearls swaying against her hip.  To finish her ensemble, she wore a classic veiled hat, complete with a small flower tucked into the band, atop a head of silver-white hair.

Honestly, if I hadn’t known better, I would have said that she was a ghost of Chattanooga past come back to shame the rest of us for our lack of style. 

Before I realized I was staring, she caught me looking and gave me a small smile.  I smiled back with a nod, then turned my attention back to my plate.  Friendly curiosity is one thing.  A strange man wearing a Metallica shirt eyeballing you as you order coffee is another. 

Imagine my surprise when I heard those pumps click a couple more times, then saw the lady sit down at the table across from me.  I looked up in shock, my fork hovering an inch from my mouth.

“Oh, darlin’,” the lady said quietly, “Sorry for startling you.”  She set a steaming mug of something on the table, then lay her purse next to it.

I quickly swallowed the mouthful of egg, cleared my throat, and replied, “Sorry, ma’am, but do I know you?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, sweetie.” Her smile widened to show pearl-white teeth.  “My name is Louisa Maier, but all my friends call me Lou.”

“Hello, Miss Louisa. Have we met?”

“Oh, no, but your grandma told me I would find you here.”

The hair on the back of my neck went up.  Both of my grandmothers had been dead for quite some time.  Grandma Taylor had passed away before I was born.  All I knew of her were pictures in my mother’s albums and stories about her adventures in the Army Air Corps during the war.  Grandma Shelby had gone to her eternal reward while I was out of the country on a job about a year before Deb and I got married. 

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I think you’ve got the wrong guy.  My grandmothers are….”

“Martin Shelby, correct?”  Her dark eyes twinkled.

“Uh, yes, ma’am.”

“Elma May told me that I would meet you here.  That is your grandmother, correct?”

My eyebrows shot up at that.  “Uh, yes, that was her name, yes, but…”

“But she died several years ago, and you think you have a crazy woman sitting across from you.”

“Well, not crazy, but I’m definitely confused.”

“She said you’d say that.  She also said that the ‘gentleman’ you met that time you were doing gardening for her didn’t even try to make a claim on her soul when she ran into him at the Pearly Gates.”

She suppressed a giggle at the look on my face.  “You really aren’t very good at poker, are you?”

I closed my mouth and sat back.  “So, my dead grandmother sent you here to see me?”

“Oh, no, darling, nothing like that.” She picked up her mug and took a sip.  I saw that her lipstick left a slight mark on the porcelain when she set it back down. “I asked around for someone to help me, and she was the first one to reply.”

“So, you’re talking to my Grandma Shelby?”

“Well, yes, you could say that.  I can sometimes get in touch with those who’ve moved on, and she definitely has a presence when she wants to.”

I nodded.  ‘Presence’ was one way to describe my grandmother’s way of living.  Apparently, that remained the same in the afterlife.

Yeah, I know, it sounds crazy that a complete stranger had me believing her when she said she communed with the dead, but that’s not even in the top ten weird things I’ve run into.  When you’re a private detective that specializes in working with things that go bump in the night, you either get used to what others would characterize as crazy, or you change livelihoods right quick.

“All right, Miss Louisa, what can I do for you?”

Before I begin, please give this a quick listen:

I served for just over 9 years.

I spent about 2 years of that in training of some sort or another.

So, the ‘useful’ part of my service lasted around 7 years.

Not counting field problems, where I was sent with my own unit to do get better at my job and to train others, I spent about half of that seven years deployed, attached, or on temporary duty, usually by myself. “Individual augmentee” was used to describe me on five continents.

Every time CNN would broadcast video of someone having a rough time in some third world country, the folks around me would start a pool on who would go and how long they’d be gone. By the time I left the Army, I hated the sight of Christiane Amanpour.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I got to go places, meet people, and do things that I never would have imagined, much less dreamed of, because of these times. Heck, once or twice I even volunteered to go.

But the one thing I can say is that all of that time away from home and family made little to no impact on the situations we were trying to help. Peacekeeping missions only lead to peace, for some definitions of peace, for a little while. Countries we were trying to forge ties to after decades of animosity still hate our guts. People are still manufacturing drugs and smuggling them into the United States. Let’s not even start about the number of people who cross our borders unmolested.

But, hey, it was the Clinton administration, and a foreign policy and military lacking a defined, cohesive mission had to find something to do with its soldiers, so off I schlepped to one shithole after another.

In the end, the birth of my daughter and the warning that I was about to spend most of the next two years away from home gave me the push I was looking for to get out and start over as a civilian.

Was my time in as hard, dangerous, and gut-wrenching as what the rest of the military had between 9/11 and the fall of Afghanistan? Not even close. What those folks did was amazing, and I will never take away from that. The fact that I could not pass a physical to reenlist in 2002 will always be one of the things in life that I regret.

I guess my point is that if we are to continue to push our military to go, come back, go, come back, then go again, we have to provide them with the support they need and missions that matter. Otherwise, all we are doing is spending blood and treasure to make it look like we’re doing something.

Our nation, especially the people who protect it, deserve better.

Mama, mama, don’t you cry

Your little boy ain’t gonna die

We’re off to war, and I must go

And when I’ll return I do not know.

She stands alone with tears in her eyes

As she hears the soldier’s lies.

She says “My son, I’ve heard it before.

The day your daddy marched off to war.”

Rest in Peace, Bernard Hill.

Hail, Theoden King!

A bear in his natural habitat – a Subaru