When the flag ceremony was over, Jordan stood up and said, Uncle Walt, since we are honoring veterans, I would like you to meet Mr. Pruitt, he asked me to wait until today, and the old man in the Korea veterans cap rose slowly at the end of the folding table, holding a folded letter in his shaking hand.
Mr. Pruitt cleared his throat and told the VFW hall something my grandson had never mentioned to a soul in the family. For the last year, every single Tuesday, a young Chick-fil-A shift manager had been bringing him lunch. Not because it was his job. Because a year ago Jordan noticed an old man come into the restaurant alone, count out change for a small coffee, and sit by himself for hours because he had nowhere else to be and no one to be with.
The boy Walt mocked for serving waffle fries had spent a year quietly feeding a lonely Korea veteran every Tuesday, sitting with him, listening to his stories, and becoming the only family a forgotten old soldier had left.
Mr. Pruitt lost his wife six years ago, he told the room, and his only son in a war long past, and he had gone a long time with no one to talk to, until a twenty-two-year-old in a Chick-fil-A visor started sitting down across from him on his breaks, and then on his days off, and asking him about Korea, about his wife, about his life, the way nobody had in years.
The folded letter was Mr. Pruitts discharge papers, and pinned to them was a medal, and he held them up and said, I have carried these sixty years and never showed them to anybody, because there was nobody who wanted to see. This boy wanted to see. This boy gave an old soldier his last friend.
Then Mr. Pruitt looked at Walt, the colonel who never let anyone forget his rank, and said, quiet, you served this country, sir, and I thank you. But this young man serves it too, one lonely veteran at a time, and do not you ever call that just waffle fries.
The old men who laughed at Walts toast were not laughing now. Several of them were wiping their eyes. Walt stood up, and to his credit, the colonel walked the length of that hall and saluted my grandson, and then hugged him, and could not speak.
Jordan just held onto Mr. Pruitt. He still brings him lunch every Tuesday. My pleasure, he says, and he means it, the way he means everything. God bless him, Walt had said, mocking. God did. He made him the kind of man who feeds the forgotten, and a whole VFW hall saw it.