The Waffle House

A man who flew 7,451 hours, commanded air divisions on three continents, and once dined in Taipei with the Chiangs spent the last winter of his life measuring his days by two very small questions: did he feel like going to the Waffle House, and could he bear to take a shower. This is one of those mornings, in his own hand.

Good Mornings and Bad

By December 2003 Bob was eighty-seven and tethered to oxygen. He couldn’t predict how he would feel from one day to the next, and he said so plainly — no self-pity, just an old aviator reporting conditions.

“I simply have no clue as to why some mornings I wake and sense that I have a feeling of better wellbeing and some mornings its just the opposite.”

On this particular morning, the report was good — and the evidence of it was humble enough to break your heart.

A Sensation of Wanting

“This morning I woke with a sensation of wanting to revisit the Waffle House. And normally, I dread getting a shower because it depletes my O2 level to almost suffering. But this morning, I realized that the prospects of a shower didn’t dismay me nearly as much as has been the case.”

That is the whole measure of a good day, late in his life: the appetite to go out for breakfast, and a shower that wouldn’t leave him gasping. He had spent a career where the stakes were Schweinfurt and Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now the stakes were a plate of eggs and a few minutes of warm water, and he met them with exactly the same clear-eyed attention he’d once given a bomb run.

To the End

He kept writing these Morning Reports nearly every day — to his children and grandchildren, signing off “Love to all, Bob” — right up to February 5, 2004, the day before he died. They are not a war memoir or an official record. They are something rarer: the daily voice of a man facing the end with curiosity, humor, and grace, finding in a Waffle House and a tolerable shower the same thing he’d found in eighty-one kinds of aircraft — a reason to be glad of the morning.