Chapter 209

“For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.”
—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

EMILY MADE THE RUN to pick up our parents at the airport Friday afternoon, accompanied by Leah as her security. They’d gotten to know each other during the run and were coordinating transportation. Of course, the rest of us had been transported by coach to Symphony Hall to set up and rehearse.

Symphony Hall in Boston. If possible, this place impressed me more than Carnegie Hall in New York. Built in 1900, it’s been home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops for 122 years. And it’s beautiful. Walking on stage, my head was filled with images of concerts directed by Arthur Fiedler directing the Boston Pops. This hall had seen literally thousands of orchestral and chamber performances over the years. Standing on the stage, I felt dwarfed by the orchestra seating and two wrap-around balconies above. I wondered how the four of us would ever be able to fill this space with our music.

But Symphony Hall has impeccable acoustics. As Cindy and Remas did some warmups, I stepped off the stage and went to the back of the hall to listen. Flawless. We wouldn’t be using instrument pickups or a voice mic for Desi. This hall had seen thousands of recordings of the orchestra and the recording of our two performances here would be carefully edited to create a full CD of our live National Service tour. It was almost overwhelming.

Our rehearsal went well and we were conducted to a ready room where we could all change costumes, eat our light dinner, and greet Mom, Dad, Mark, and Betty. We weren’t changing our program significantly, though #Jacobisnotdead had fallen off the trending lists and national news had moved away from the splashy coverage of the hurricane in Texas. When we moved away from Boston, I was definitely changing my mid-concert spiel. I made a few alterations for tonight.

First, I hugged my parents.

“I’m so sorry you had to go through what you did,” I said. “I’m still digging into what happened and trying to bring them to justice. I’ll find them.”

“Don’t put yourself or your family in danger,” Dad admonished.

“Your parents are tough,” Mom added. “We know you are called to do a difficult job. We knew when we watched reports of your last tour that it could be dangerous. Just know, my dear son, that we are at home waiting for your return. We will be there for you.”

“Thank you, Mom. That means the world to me.”

This beautiful concert hall is a 122-year-old reminder of what it means to have and maintain a dream. Cindy, Remas, Desi, and I are awed to be performing here. This represents what it means to us to recover the dream of the National Service.

We’ve come to a point where my family, even my parents who are here on stage with us, can joke about hearing the announcement from the National Service Survival, Search, and Rescue team that I was dead. We’re pretty sure they were fed faulty information somewhere along the line and I assure you, we bear no hard feelings toward that remarkable team. I’m awed by their performance in Galveston. They are part of what it means to recover the dream. They are the best, strongest, and bravest of what the National Service has to offer.

We have sent out word to invite them to appear on stage with us so we can thank them for the shining example they’ve set. Sadly, they seem to have slipped off the grid again and no one, even in the Office of Civilian Service, can locate them.

I think that’s an indictment against our current National Service laws. We owe the people of America the knowledge that service corps members are cared for and supported in every endeavor. For all we know at the moment, they could be on assignment in China where funding for such an organization would be easy to get. It would surely be much easier than finding secret funds at this level to support training and supplying them off the grid in the United States.

That is why we need to support service reform and to vote against any candidate this fall who opposes reform. The only reason a candidate can have in light of the evidence presented by the President’s National Service Reform Commission to oppose reform is that they somehow personally profit from maintaining the status quo. Certainly, we know there are American companies who profit greatly from selling to the National Service or getting agricultural labor at a steeply discounted rate from service corps members. But what could possibly motivate the people we elect to represent us to ignore the clear mandate to improve labor and service conditions for us in the service?

We are determined, in this mid-term election, to recover the noble vision for the National Service by electing only representatives and senators who will seriously hear the reform measures, debate them openly and fairly, and act to help the ten million youth serving today to recover the dream. We offer this, not only as our campaign, but as our prayer.

I didn’t like the SSR disappearing again as soon as the emergency was over. That meant they could pop up anywhere, including in our RV park. Even having identified the members of the team through the confusion of the rescue in Galveston, the AI had been unable to locate the signal from their badges. I knew the badges were still sealed in Faraday bags.

I’d been watching the Weather Channel on TV, and there was an Atlantic storm east of Puerto Rico that looked like it had Florida in its sights. It was moving northeastward and was named Delilah. There had been so many tropical storms and hurricanes this year we were in our second time through the alphabet and everyone was hoping this would be the last one. I figured if it hit, the SSR team would be first on location. Of course, it could always be an earthquake in California instead.

We watched the news feeds for anything we could imagine as a response to Friday night’s concert and saw nothing, so after our run in the morning we loaded the coach and picked up the parents to head for Boston Common to play tourists for the day. After exploring the common and historic sites, we headed toward Faneuil Hall and stopped to explore the Park Street Church cemetery where so many early patriots are buried. We had an early dinner at Legal Seafood Company and the coach picked us all up for a quick trip back to Symphony Hall to get ready for our evening performance.

We tried to make the performance as identical to the one the night before as possible, since the two performances would be cut together with best takes to create our CD. I didn’t change my spiel much, just getting a couple of tips from Donna on cleaning up a few phrases. I didn’t know if we’d be including the speech on the CD or not. Regardless, the audience was welcoming and enthusiastic.

After our run Sunday morning, we were just relaxing in the motorhome. There might have been a little kissy-huggy-fucky going on. I’m not saying. Remas had turned on TV and was watching Face the Nation. It caught my attention. The interviewer was Brett Farnswell. His guests were none other than Dan Schaffer and Marissa Chamberlain, the notification team that had been to my parents’ house.

“With me today are Dan Schaffer, District Director of the National Service in Indiana, and Reverend Marissa Chamberlain, Chaplain of the Service in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Director Schaffer, recently you and Rev. Chamberlain came under fire for delivering word to a family that their son had died in service when, in fact, he was talking to them on the phone. Can you tell us who the orders came from to notify the Hopkins family of their son’s death?”

“Family notification is one of the sad responsibilities of managers in the National Service and the instruction of whom to notify and when comes from an automated system.”

“There are that many deaths each year in the service?”

“Mortality statistics have not changed significantly in the age group 18-21 since the inception of the National Service nine years ago. Sadly, we still see in excess of 20,000 deaths a year in this group. The difference is that these kids are often far from home, serving their country, and we try to make notifying their families a priority,” Schaffer said.

“Yet not only was this notification false, it was delivered after news had already been delivered over the national media,” Farnswell said. “Since the automated system failed, can you tell us what delayed the notification?”

“We were set up,” Marissa said. “We received notification in plenty of time but were given faulty information.”

“In what way?”

“First, notification of the parents was not the intended target. We were told that Mr. Hopkins was part of a plural domestic partnership and his home address was in Indiana. A PDP automatically takes priority as next of kin and we went to the address of the farm the PDP used as its residence.”

“And?”

“We found it empty. A man mowing the grass told us the pod had recently moved to Washington, DC,” Dan said. “That made the notification even more urgent and after confirming a new address, Marissa and I took off for DC. It is not unusual for people entering the service to have a temporary address and maintain the home address where they originated. We were disappointed to discover no one in residence at the house. It appeared we had failed in our task.”