Life in the Dumpster

I keep remembering a man named, Roy – a Korean War POW who had come back home to TX. He built a brick house. He married and raised a family. He lived a happy life. Then, he got dementia and sometime later Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017.

Strike Team Charlie was tasked to assist this war hero with his severely damaged home. We arrived to find that the seams of the brick were completely ripped apart in some places. The sheet rock and insulation in those places were eaten away. Most of the house was filled with a couple of inches of water. Roy was living out of his beat up, old pickup truck parked beneath the only shade tree on the property.

We were all pretty sure the place was a total loss.
Still, we were going to do right by Roy. He was desperately trying to make sense of the tragedy as he sat in his truck. We promised to salvage anything we could out of the home that had survived so many storms before. His daughter had signed the necessary waivers, and we went to work.

I was assigned the bedroom. The floor was spongy and I tried to walk along the joists. I couldn't help but pause and admire the framed family photos that lay in the muddy chips of sheetrock fallen from the ceiling. The bed was covered, too. I gathered as many heirloom items as I could and placed them in a pile on a clear spot on the ornate bureau, as I caught a glimpse of myself through the filthy glass of its big mirror. I was not looking forward to what was coming next.

I opened the closet door to see how Roy's Sunday Best made out. These were the items that he and his daughter had begged us to save if we could. We couldn't. As I cracked the door, a flood of putrid water poured out, mixed with construction waste, animal feces, small carcasses and water-logged jars of change.
Left behind were Roy's stinking, molded clothing. Suits. Shirts. Bow ties and straight ties and ascots, walking sticks, bowler hats and Irish caps and stetsons and fedoras. All irreparably damaged and soaked through. That entire part of the State was shut down indefinitely; there was no place that could even attempt to dry clean any of it. So, to me fell the miserable job of taking Roy's memories and parts of his very identity and throwing them out the window into the dumpster waiting below.

As I performed my unenviable duty, Roy slipped from his lucid state. He got out of the truck and looked up at the window, no idea who the intruder was who had broken into his home to throw his life into the garbage. I had to stop long enough for us to get his daughter back to the house to help her father. Even when she did, and things had settled down a little, they both refused to leave. They sat there in the truck and watched me get rid of the most famous part of Roy. The most endearing part to all the church ladies. The best lesson in gentlemanliness that the young bucks in the neighborhood had ever gotten.

I still think about Roy. I wish we could have done more for him. Beyond the sorrow I felt about the basic indignity of it all, I couldn't help but think:

Roy fought for his country. He was imprisoned for his country. He returned home and was a contributing member of society in his country. I wish we could have given Roy more than he got in the end.

What does it have to do with the preservation of Tradition – particularly the externals? I guess I'd say:

Why would no modern man or woman hesitate to lament the loss of Roy's Sunday Best, while - even RECENTLY! - there are cases of jackhammers being taken to high altars in the Philippine? Why would no modern man or woman dare to give Roy or his daughter a tongue-lashing for mourning the loss of the externals of worship, while there were the more practical matters of health and safety to be concerned with? Why does no one fault ME for expressing what was at that time an almost overwhelming sadness while disposing of Roy's things, but accuses me of neo-pelagianism and of treating the Mass like a museum artifact which no 21st century people can relate to?
Maybe it's because it messes up the narrative when you sit in the back row and throw rocks at someone who turns out to be an American hero with a debilitating cognitive issue?

Could be.

That said, I know why the clothing had to go; what is specifically dumpster-worthy about Tradition?

Anyway, I think about Roy a lot.