33.

But why do I worry? The war’s long over, isn’t it? They can’t come and get me again, can they? It’s not dangerous anymore, is it?

Right now, it’s a Saturday evening in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Not a sergeant anywhere. It’s May. I’ve mowed the lawn and pulled some dandelions. My wife is out of town, and I turn on the television to find a little company, and there it is, of all programs, a rerun of the ancient Lawrence Welk Show on public television.

“Here’s our chorus now to sing a song made popular by Rudy Vallee,” Lawrence says. His powder-blue suit is a little too bright, like someone working overtime to stay cheerful. “A-one, an-a-two, an-a-three.”

He turns, holding his hand out, and the TV screen cuts to a row of singers. They are elbow to elbow, arrayed in a V, like a chevron, with the tip at the back of the stage. The women are on the left side of the V, the men on the right. Their clothes are all a matching orange, a color that seems vaguely familiar—and then I remember. Of course. Tang. That bright orange, awful-tasting breakfast drink. Tang. It went on the first manned space flight. Ahh, the footprints of the sixties, like the footprints on the moon—they never seem to go away.

How startling is the shift from Lawrence Welk’s baby-blue suit to the glowing orange of the chorus. The women’s skirts puff out with taffeta. They sway slightly back and forth with the rhythm of their song. The men have middle America’s version of the British Mod look, with page-boy haircuts and wide, orange ties and orange shirts with oversized collars. Since most of the men are forty or fifty years old, they look awkward in their costumes, as if they’d drunk from a diluted fountain of youth.

We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way

Baa, baa, baa.

How mournful their singing is, how solemn, in spite of all that orange. As if something unspoken has gone wrong that even accordions and bouncy rhythms cannot cure.

We’re little black sheep who have gone astray

Baa, baa, baa.

The singers raise their hands ever so slightly, as if pleading with us for understanding. The lovely Lennon Sisters on the left—Dianne, Peggy, Kathy, Janet. There, on the right, is the man with the deep bass voice. Larry Hooper.

Gentlemen songsters off on a spree

Doomed from here to eternity

How odd to see this show nearly forty years after the fact, but I think it was the one my mother and I watched the night before I went in the army.

Yes, that day was also a Saturday. It had been hot. I mowed the lawn that day, too.

It’s Saturday evening. I am to leave for the army in the morning.

After I mow the lawn, I grill two steaks. My mother and I eat them on TV trays I bring outside. Afterward, we set the trays aside, sitting there in the backyard on East Memorial Drive, in the webbed lawn chairs, smoking Lark cigarettes.

It is still light. The sky has that sudden clarity you get just before the sun goes down, and I think, I’ve got to get in shape. My God, I’ve put this off long enough. I’m going in the army tomorrow, and I’ve got to get ready. So I stand up, flick away my Lark, do some deep knee bends, and begin running around the backyard in my loafers. I go first along the side of the garage, then north past the sandbox. I turn west by the raspberry bushes and then turn again by the grape arbor and come back along the picket fence. I’ve run maybe a tenth of a city block.

“Be careful, son,” my mother says, lighting another Lark. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

I go around again. And again. It’s easy. My body, my heart feel light.

Oh, this is nothing, I think. Nothing at all. I feel bullet proof as I go along the garage again, turning by the raspberry bushes and then back around the apple tree.

“Don’t you think you’ve exercised enough, Son?” my mother yells. “You don’t want to get sick. You shouldn’t be running on a full stomach.”

The army’s probably going to be tough, I think. The army probably won’t care if my stomach is full or not, so I head around a fourth time. I’m starting to sweat, but I do another lap, and then a sixth and a seventh. I’m puffing.

“Do you think I’ve done a mile?” I ask my mother.

In truth, I’ve probably run a small fraction of a real mile.

“Oh, at least,” she says. “Probably more. I lived through World War II, you know, and I never saw anybody run as hard as you have.”

I sit back down in the lawn chair with the webbed covering and light up a Lark. The twilight is darkening. When I finish my cigarette, I flick it into the air, where it glows with the fireflies.

I come inside, and my mother and I fix ourselves a pitcher of iced tea, and then we sit in front of the television to watch The Lawrence Welk Show.

“Oh, mom,” I say. “I hate The Lawrence Welk Show.”

“Do it for me, son. After all, you’re going in the army. These songs will make you feel better.”

And there it is, the chevron of singers arrayed across the stage in their Tang orange outfits, singing “The Whiffenpoof Song.”

Gentleman songsters off on a spree

Doomed from here to eternity
Lord have mercy on such as we
Baa, baa, baa.

“Wait, mom, isn’t that the title of the movie. From Here To Eternity?”

“Oh yes,” she says, “that movie about World War II. It’s too bad—they’re just not making good movies like that anymore.”