It was August 29, 2017.

I exited the hotel and turned left, and left again at the corner.  Clearing my mind, following my instincts.

It was a warm but wet late summer afternoon in Washington, D.C.  The lonely purr of a Hammond organ in a melancholy old song accompanied me down 21st St., NW.

"A rainy night in Georgia,
a rainy night in Georgia,
it seems like it's rainin' all over the world."

I continued briskly down 21st, eventually happening upon the Washington Mall, and crossed over Constitution Avenue toward those vast open lawns.  To my left was the Washington Monument, reaching up into the cloudy skies.  I started off toward it but stopped and looked to my right to check for bikes.

 I stopped when I saw the somber black wall.

The Wall.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

I hadn't known it was there.  Like some famous places – Mount Rushmore comes to mind – it's not as large as I had always imagined; I had almost walked by without noticing it.  It isn't high.  It's built into the side of a gentle rise and easy to miss.  There was no line of visitors; indeed, there was hardly anyone there – just a small group of five or six people huddled against the rain.  I walked over to take a closer look, all the time knowing exactly what I would find.

Name after name...

...after name....

...after name...

...thousands upon thousands, from the bottom to the top, end to end.

More than 57,000 names in all.

A lonesome bouquet lay in a puddle at the base of The Wall, in a silence broken only by raindrops on the cellophane wrapper.

"Such a rainy night in Georgia
Lord I believe it's rainin' all over the world
I feel like it's rainin' all over the world."

I recalled a moment from a few summers earlier, on stage during one hot August night at an outdoor concert in the park in Orangetown, N.Y.  My band was finishing off the set with Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."

"I had a brother at Khe Sahn
fightin' off the Vietnam Cong.
They're still there, he's all gone"

As I hammered out the chords, a stark thought crossed my mind: what if someone sitting out there on his lawn chair tonight really had lost a brother at Khe Sahn?

And what would he be feeling right now, all these years later, when reminded once again that he isn't here anymore?

Perhaps just hope, now fading through the years, that he was still remembered.

The group turned and shuffled off toward the Washington Monument, heads down in the rain, but one young man – maybe a teenager – lingered behind.  He was much too young to have lost a parent or a sibling; maybe a grandfather or a great uncle.  Maybe just some distant relative, or a neighbor from back home he never even heard of.

As I watched, he approached the black granite, and tentatively reached out to touch a name.  Someone who served and gave his life, deprived of the chance to live it in full.  Someone he had never known, but wished he had.  After a long, wistful moment, he walked off to rejoin his group.

The skies opened up, and the rain fell harder.  I looked up at the rain and let it fall on my face, then glanced down again at the soggy flowers.  I pulled the hood of my rain jacket back up and turned away, trudging slowly now, back toward the Monument.

And it felt like it was raining all over the world.