Remembrance

Armistice Day in Canberra. A day of memories and ceremonies. Veterans in faded uniforms, politicians laying wreaths at the Australian War Memorial. A couple hailed me outside a museum.

“Airport, please!” he said, helping his wife into the back. Red remembrance poppies in their buttonholes, a row of ribbons over her right breast.

We paused at their hotel where he went inside to retrieve luggage. I turned to the wife. “Did you have a good look around the War Memorial?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” she replied.

Oh? Visitors say what a wonderful, emotional place it is, how they could have spent days exploring the halls, how the bugler’s call tugs on heartstrings at sunset, the eternal flame lighting the long lines of names in the cloisters.

“We lost our son,” she explained.

Oh. The Governor-General had held a private ceremony that morning. Ten new names had been added to the thousands.

Her husband and I loaded the bags. I pulled out onto Limestone Avenue, past the War Memorial where the temporary seating was being packed away.

I had jazz playing: Tenderly and These Foolish Things mellow in the late afternoon. My eyes were brimming as I thought on the couple in the back. So very young to have had a son in uniform, who must have been of an age with the cadets from the service colleges who often piled into my cab for a night out with their comrades. A son now “lost” but cherished in their thoughts and their hearts.

We pulled up at the terminal. I cleared the meter, said “No charge,” held the door open, and lifted luggage from the boot.

He didn’t understand, pulling out his wallet.

“The fare’s already been paid,” I explained.

“What? Who by?”

There was a catch in my voice. “Your son.”