Rex was part of the Greatest Generation, one of hundreds of thousands of boys from the Midwest who put their lives on hold for four or five years to fight World War II. Back then service to your country was a proud calling, and most young men were less afraid of war than of the shame of not doing their part.
I'm not sure, but I think Rex was an infantryman, and I think he served in the European Theater of Operations. That would have put him right in the meat grinder, in the front lines at places like Nancy and Aachen and the Argonne Forest. His service ended when a sniper shot him in the neck, and he carried the bullet there until the day he died.
Rex came home, married his sweetheart, Muriel, and went back to farming. He grew corn and fed hogs and carried mail his whole life, and raised two sons and a daughter. She was an athlete and a cheerleader and pretty much the life of her high school class, and odds are good she ran Rex and Muriel ragged for a few years. The oldest son was steady, it seems, but from what I hear the youngest was a wild one.
In the end, it was cancer that got Rex and Muriel both, and they died within months of each other. That was last year, a tough year for the family. The younger son, Jim, just didn't know what to do with it, and this weekend he chose to take his own life. His wife came home from work and found him in the recliner with a bullet hole in his head. His funeral is tomorrow.
I didn't know Rex or Muriel, or Jim. I heard their story this morning when I got to work, told in compassionate detail by another not-so-ordinary person. Rick is a part of that backbone of America that does shift work, clocking in every morning to make the goods that drive our economy, putting in ten solid hours a day at a job the world scorns. Like many of his kind, he's a tough guy, and life hasn't given him reason to expect much. He's closing in on 60, but this morning I realized that, like all of us, he still thinks he's young.
Rick stopped me to ask for time off for the funeral, but he got to talking about growing up across the street from Rex and Muriel, of the crush he had on Jim's sister, and of the trouble he and Jim got into.
He described the day Rex and Muriel moved, within a year of their deaths, to be closer to the cancer center where they were receiving treatments. He told how when he knocked on Rex's door, there were tears in the eyes of that once-capable soldier, now an old man whittled down to 120 pounds by an enemy he couldn't fight with his hands, when he realized that he didn't have to pack the moving van by himself.
He described too the hug he finally got from the sister he'd admired from afar, a hug of gratitude that meant more to him than the hot flame of passion might have. And he got a little angry with Jim for taking the easy way out, in Rick's view, and leaving so many people with so much grief and so many questions. According to Rick, he sure never learned to give up from Rex.
Rex and Muriel and Jim and Rick would be called ordinary people by some, but not by me. These are my people, just small town folks trying hard to be good citizens and good parents and good partners to the spouses we committed to as kids. We shop at Target and think a night out at The Olive Garden is a big deal; we go to work every day and pay our taxes and spend our evenings at middle-school band concerts and high school baseball games. We're not rich, but we have enough, and we have some things not even Warren Buffett could buy.
When we look at the people society idolizes, sometimes it seems like the world is going crazy. We see Paris Hilton being famous just for being famous; we watch Lindsay Lohan and wonder why her folks didn't love her enough to spank her. We see philandering athletes and crooked CEOs, and philandering, crooked celebrities, and self-starved fashion models wearing what looks to us like Saran wrap and feathers. We see all these people the world reveres, and we shake our heads, say a prayer for our kids, and get back to work.
Because that's all a long way away and there are folks on our own street who need a helping hand, and there are people in our church who need a meal brought in, and there's volunteer work to be done at the local park. Our schools and towns and neighbors need us, and we need them. Individually we're the little people, but together we've built a marvelous thing: The American small town, that place of Mayberry RFD and Green Acres, where if you leave your glasses at the Post Office they know they can probably catch you at the grocery store.
By today's definitions Rex wasn't much of a success, but he was man enough to volunteer for something most are too scared to do, and he was man enough to be faithful to his wife for a lifetime. Muriel probably didn't show much skin or have her tummy tucked, but she kept the love of her husband and kids until the day she died. I live with hundreds of Rexes and Muriels, not-ordinary people living extraordinary lives, and I wouldn't trade them for any number of Derek Jeeters or Charlie Sheens or Rick Perrys or Barbara Boxers.
You see, the rich and powerful think they don't need anybody else. I'd rather have neighbors who will swap fresh vegetables with me and let my grandsons play on their swing sets. Here in flyover country we intentionally entangle our lives, so much so that we can hardly live without each other. We laugh and work and fight in groups. And we never have to cry alone.