Sally Huggins Toner

The baby looked like she could leap right into the painting behind her. She wore a red and orange onesie that meshed with the arbitrary colors—a stylized bass player in mid jam. Her eyes were sponge wide, her mother chatting constantly as they waited for someone to join them.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the child as I sat on the second floor of the wine bar and had half-priced mussels and a bourbon, by myself, on Veterans Day.

But this post isn’t about me. Well, okay, maybe just a little bit. We’ll get to that in a minute.

Sitting there, watching, I remembered two other babies when they were about the same age. One of them was our oldest daughter. The Christmas after Aimee was born, my Aunt Sudy came for a visit to meet her, and we went to a travelling Van Gogh exhibit at the National Gallery. Aimee was in a cloth carrier, facing out from her father’s chest, and her gaze was that same infant sponge—mouth open with a touch of drool running down her chin. She babbled, arms outstretched, her fine shock of red hair sticking straight up like wheat before it would lay down under its weight a few months later. With her blue irises, that wild head of feather flame, that expression belonging to the artist she would become—she literally could have hopped into one of Vincent’s bedrooms in Arles.

We bought an advent calendar that night that still hangs in her bedroom. Behind each cardboard window is a replica of one of his paintings, and there is one that she recently said always scared her. Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette. Even at his most pastoral, Van Gogh was always holding hands with death.

Today, on Veterans Day, I want to acknowledge that every soldier does the same.

My aunt, who was with us at that exhibit, posted the following on Facebook today:

Lt. James Robert Vance, USMC, who served with valor. On this day, we remember him and so many others who are serving.

Here’s where the post becomes about me, the third baby. I have multiple men in my life who have served—My grandfathers Francis Stephen Huggins and David Ashley Tompkins, my Dad, James Boyd Huggins…and another.

My birth father, James Robert Vance, died in service when I was about the same age as the baby I was staring at tonight—the same age Aimee was that December her great Aunt Sudy met her for the first time.

My mother married another pilot, and watching him look up at the sky when a jet passes overhead, I have always understood what Sudy wrote about her brother recently.

“Jim Vance was born to fly.”

Those who serve understand the sacrifice. But they also understand the need.

I won’t lie. I shudder at the weapons of destruction that kill innocent people. I despise the damage of war. But I was raised to appreciate our men and women in uniform. I was raised to recognize the joy of breaking the sound barrier in an F4, the rush of catching the arresting cable with a tailhook on a postage stamp floating in the ocean.

Yes, they are heroes. They are also fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers. They are best friends and lovers—people whose absence, whether it be for months during deployment or forever, is felt, is mourned.

Yes, veterans. Thank you for your service. You and everyone who loves you. I just wish, with all my heart, that we lived in a world where there was another way, another context, in which to, as the sonnet says, “trod the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and touch the face of God.”

I was raised to know that, sometimes, there is not. So today, on Veterans day, I am grateful. And proud.