When I bought my new vinyl copy of Wilco's 2002 record, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I remembered why it hit me so hard back then, almost 20 years ago. I remember buying the CD in our local mall, at a Musicland, no less, and wondering whether it would be as good as Summerteeth. I shouldn't have worried, since the live performance I took in felt exalted in that trance-like way some bands have of making you feel like you're floating on every note, and you're so into listening to them that you even forget whom you're sitting next to or that you've had to use the facilities for over an hour at least.

What hit me most, hardest, about the new record, though, was that one song,

"Ashes of American Flags," found on side two, last song.

That shimmering chime intro and a guitar that keeps refraining something sad, a lamentation for something past or lost. And then, the lyrics:

"the cash machine is blue and green for a hundred in twenties and a small service fee I could spend three dollars and sixty-three cents on diet coca-cola and unlit cigarettes."

I see the cash machine near our cereal box high rise. Mark and me, C&C Bank. Blue and green. Our collective balance was hardly ever more than $50 and often down to less that $5. We'd milk it dry, and then, either go to the all-you-can-eat taco bar for $4 a head, or stop by Weigel's so that Mark could get a "Big Gulp" of diet Coke and the most generic brand of cigarettes he could buy. I see yellow packages of "Kost-Kutter" smokes, and Mark, sucking them down like candy.

I might have sprung for a regular coke, some Lance peanut butter/cheese crackers, something to fill the time and my stomach while we rambled over the streets, putting off a thesis or dissertation — I was working on playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote's plays and Mark was dissecting Yeats and Blake.

Life seemed rich even in the poorer moments. That last five dollars could buy a personal Chicago-style pizza from Stefano's, that is, if you didn't mind stiffing the delivery guy.

This was circa 1980, and Mark had been campaigning for John Anderson, convincing me finally that a Third Party needed our support. Later, in 1984, he rejected the Mondale/Ferraro ticket because he claimed Ferraro didn't look "Vice-Presidential." Tell me, please, who DOES look Vice-Presidential, and please describe the look so that I never get fooled again?!

Mark later became a banker, never finished that dissertation, married a sweet girl who had worlds of troubles. I lost him somewhere after 1986.

Mark celebrated America, partly because he had a hole in his heart which caused him to have to give up a starting punter's position on the Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket football team. His father was a military colonel, divorced from Mark's mom who later married a man named "Buddy," which had been my childhood nickname.

Mark had a little American flag on his desk, next to his bottle of heaven hill bourbon and his one-hit bong. He once mistakenly threw away a good bag of pot, but we retrieved it from the dumpster — that high-rise trash chute was too convenient.

We'd play music while we were working: The B-52's, The Clash, The Police, and Mark got upset when Sting intoned,

"Poets, priests, and Politicians"

in the same breath.

"Poets are different, truth seekers," he cried every time that song came on.

"What do poets think about flags," I wondered.

I know what they use ashes for, as in Eliot's "Ash Wednesday."

Mourning. Remembrance. Something mystical, tending toward the above-natural. Mark knew that, too.

What would he think of all the flags flying today?

What do I think? Are these trumpy white patriots telling everyone to support the established, traditional America where not even all white people are equal, and, in our culture, seemingly not even created that way?

If kneeling toward the flag is blasphemy and a desecration, what is marring the flag by inserting a blue-lined special stripe?

Why do people in my neighborhood hang their flag upside down?

Why does my friend John, a moderate Democrat, feel the need to fly his own flag? To show everyone that Democrats love America, too?

Don't we?

"I know I would die if I could come back new

I would like to salute the ashes of American flags and all the falling leaves filling up shopping bags."

My father, who fought in Patton's army during WWII, never owned a flag. He indulged something in my mother when she hung on to Confederate emblems — a battle flag hung in my bedroom, a portrait of Lee and an old officer's sword.

After he died, Mom bought an American flag and hung it off her front porch. She was a lifelong Democrat, but after 1968, my Dad became a Republican. He didn't need a flag to vote for Reagan.

Listen to the end of this song, the tatters of guitars and piano notes. It makes me think of the bags of leaves we'd collect every fall from our front and back yards; bags we'd eventually dump in the gully near our alley, back when any coke cost a dime and my mother paid a dollar a pack for Salems.

I want to rake some leaves now on this early fall day, but they haven't fallen yet.

"if I break my tongue speaking of tomorrow how will it ever come…"

Yes.

How?

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And here's another: