Reader Boards

Are you familiar with reader boards? They are those signs that stand in front of businesses with personal messages on them. They can be changed at any time by just rearranging the letters. In our little town, they are used for anything from advertising a house for sale, to congratulations on a new baby.

This week, every reader board in our town and in the small town next to ours, says the same thing:
"Hospitalman Ryley Gallagher-Long. Our Hero. RIP. We will miss you."

I don't remember Ryley as a hospitalman. I remember him as a curly-headed 10-year-old, with a peaches and cream complexion and a taste for mischief. I also remember him, and his twin brother Wyatt, as two of my son's dearest friends in junior high.

The boys graduated from high school when my son did. My son went off to college in Vermont. Ryley married his high school sweetheart, and joined the Navy to work as a medic. Last month, he was sent to Afghanistan and three weeks later, he was lying dead after his group was apparently ambushed. The paper said Ryley had gotten out to tend to a wounded soldier. He was killed instantly by a shot to the chest.

"What kind of person shoots someone when he's trying to save someone's life?" my son asks me. I don't know that I have ever had an answer to that.

In about 15 minutes, we are leaving for a glow-stick memorial for Ryley. It was organized by his friends at a local place with huge outside gardens where we usually attend wedding receptions.

Not tonight.

The reader boards are everywhere you look. Today, flags appeared up and down the main streets here. That's what happens in a small town. You are so much closer to life and death here--and people come together for both.

A month ago, a dear young couple that are friends of ours had their first baby.

Next month, two of Daniel's other good friends will be married.

Daniel will be 20-years-old next week. The hour he was born, another friend of ours passed on. The irony wasn't lost on any of us.

By the time tonight is over, I will have gone to two memorial services in five days. The other was for a 25-year-old man who killed himself in a fit of despair.

I keep thinking about Joni Mitchell's Circle Song.

And the seasons they go 'round and 'round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game