Elegy for Al Ackerman

You were always number 1, alphabetically. But what if you’d been a Zuckerberg or a Zipp, a Miller or a Sanchez? What happens to a fellow who’s always first in line for fluoride in the nurse’s office, first to be weighed during the President’s Physical Fitness Test? What was it like to get your grades first, your diploma first, your draft card first? To be the first guy from school sent to Vietnam? To be Al Ackerman, the first guy who never came back?

 

You were never not first. First flesh identified after the barracks exploded. First corpse’s name shouted on the local airwaves. First prom date with a grave.

 

First memory forgotten, as the rest of us malinger on: Getting fatter. Smoking more packs of Marlboros. Driving more second-hand Ford pickups to more Little League ballgames. Attending more class reunions, in more rundown banquet halls, where the name Al Ackerman is never mentioned. Plodding through the Reagan years, the Clinton years, the endless eras of Bush . . . R to B to C to B. Alphabetical order means nothing these days.

 

And what is left of Al Ackerman, the emperor of A? It won’t be long till the letters on your headstone wear away in the sandy wind. Won’t be long till some kid with a school assignment—a Zuckerberg or a Zipp, a Miller or a Sanchez—kneels beside your name, tracing paper at the ready, and asks his dad, “Is this an A or an H?” The dad will slip on his reading glasses and ponder. “Hal Hackerman. I think I knew that guy.” And the kid will nod, comforted by the existence of facts.

 

Yet that night, at the scrubbed kitchen table, this kid, who is supposed to be finishing his algebra homework, will ink a brand-new history of you. Hal Hackerman, named after a prince in a play. You loved card games and you were born long ago and you sailed the ocean blue. You fell in love with a short man named Don and went bald at the age of nineteen. You grew roses in your backyard and your favorite food was spaghetti and you only went to church on Easter. Once you met the great pitcher Bob Gibson, and he shook your hand and fixed you with his mean pitcher stare, and you never forgot it. Your grandchildren got tired of hearing that story about Bob Gibson.

 

But of course they loved you anyway. You led a life. And now they miss you so very, very much.

[a small fiction: maybe forthcoming in the next collection, or maybe not.]