Well, now that y’all know far more about my past than most of you ever wanted to… I
suppose we can get back to the present.
The farewell tour. Right. OK.
As y’all know by now, I am not a Southerner by birth. I became one over the last 22
years. I have fallen in love with the American South. That does not mean that I am any less
Viking… it doesn’t mean that I don’t miss the icy winds and snow of my homeland, but it means that I have fallen in love with the rolling hills and mountains, beaches and cities of the South.
But I was headed home to the icy North and needed to say a proper goodbye to Dixie.
I spent my last few days in my favorite places. I went to Richmond and visited Tredegar
Iron Works. Once the only iron works in the South capable of producing large metal items,
now the National Civil War center.
I went to battlefields and monuments, I reveled in the
beginning of the Civil War at Manassas (see… I really am kinda Southern) and the end of it at Appomatox. I reveled in the beginning of America as colonies at Jamestown and Williamsburg and the beginning of America as a country at Yorktown. I visited D.C. and the graves of those I respect most at Arlington. I went to the Naval Academy and visited the oldest war memorial in the US, the memorial to the Barbary wars which sits on the Naval Academy campus behind the museum. I visited the grave of the little sister of my childhood best friend.
A bit about that.
When I was a kid my best friend was a guy named Josh Simer. Josh was awesome. He
was smart and was just as into all things military as I was. We were as inseparable as two pre driving age boys can be who live 30 minutes apart. He had a little sister named Joanna who was 3 years younger than we were. Joanna was everything a little sister is supposed to be. She followed us around always wanting to play war with us. Josh, as all older brothers are, at least in sight of their friends, wanted her to leave us alone. Josh and I had an imaginary war to win and no time for the interference of his little sister. I strongly suspect that this rejection hurt her feelings badly… I am sorry for that now.
She grew up and graduated high school and was accepted into the United States Naval
Academy. By all accounts she distinguished herself during plebe summer.
She died suddenly, the day after my 22nd birthday, to a “previously undiagnosed heart
condition”. She is buried in the cemetery at the United States Naval Academy. A fitting resting place for one who, surely, would have been as noble a warrior as ever there was. I didn’t know this until later; weeks later.
Since that day, every time I have found myself in Annapolis, and as many times as I
could, I have visited her grave. I have placed stones on her headstone in the hope that she will somehow know that I care. In the hope that she will somehow know that I was there. Joanna, if you are reading this, I love you. I miss you every day and I am so very proud of you for all that you achieved and all that you may have achieved. You were the best of us.
Ok… enough.
I went to the Outer Banks and to Winston-Salem, in North Carolina (my adoptive home
state). I even went to Fort Bragg.
In the end, I tried to say as fond a farewell to the South as I could. She was not my birth
mother, but an adoptive son may love a mother just as much.
Esse Quam Videri
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