Elsewhere

Mike in Phan Thiết, Vietnam, 1968–69.

The photograph is nearly sixty years old.

Mike is sitting beside the water in Phan Thiết, Vietnam. He is probably about twenty-five. Shirtless. Dog tag around his neck. One knee pulled toward him. Behind him, a pier stretches across the water.

He looks thoughtful.

Or tired.

Or worried.

Or maybe he was wondering what was for lunch.

That’s the trouble with old photographs. They preserve the moment but rarely bother to tell us what was happening inside it.

I asked Mike.

He remembers the day.

He had worked the night shift, and the next morning he and a small group had some time off. They were allowed to go down to the water because there was a guard on duty. He remembers it being peaceful.

He remembers someone taking the photograph.

What he doesn’t remember is what he was thinking.

The photograph comes from a collection of pictures Mike and his friend Ron shared from their time in Vietnam, sometime in 1968–69. Mike eventually made them into a photo book and gave Ron a copy.

I hadn’t thought about painting the photograph until my friend Gloria suggested it. She remembered seeing it when I’d posted it on Facebook a year or so ago honoring Mike’s military service.

Once she mentioned it, I couldn’t stop looking at it.

There was something about his expression.

Twenty-five

When Mike was the young man in that photograph, I was in third grade.

Which is a somewhat unsettling thing to consider when looking at your husband.

But it wasn’t the eight-year-old version of me I kept thinking about while I painted him. It was myself at roughly the same age Mike was in the photograph.

At twenty-five, I was in my third year of medical school.

My Vietnam looked nothing like Mike’s Vietnam, of course. But I recognized something in his face.

Transition.

At that age I was still pretty green. Naive. I was beginning to discover that life wasn’t always fair or particularly kind. I was also learning that I was capable of saying and doing things I would later regret.

There are things younger Chuck did that older Chuck would very much like a do-over on.

Apparently, life doesn’t offer those.

Painting does.

So I started painting Mike.

The painting had other plans

I began, as I usually do, believing I had some idea where I was going.

That lasted a while.

There was briefly going to be a moon.

The moon was dismissed.

Mike’s skin was going to be skin-colored.

That didn’t last either.

Somewhere along the way, Mike stopped being skin-colored.

Turquoise wandered into his forehead. Rose and burgundy appeared in his face and chest. Ochre, yellow and blue followed.

I stopped trying to make the painting look exactly like the photograph and started paying attention to what was happening on the canvas.

The background became rough. There were brushstrokes and smudges and uneven patches that I initially regarded as things I would eventually need to fix.

Then I began to like them.

The figure was becoming more defined while the world around him remained uncertain.

That felt right.

At some point, I realized I was no longer directing the painting.

I was hanging onto its belt loops and trusting it knew the way.

One of us should.

Ron

While I painted, I listened to music in the shed. A lot of it came from Beatles radio. Mike has always loved the Beatles, and the music seemed to belong naturally in the room with this younger version of him.

And I thought about Ron.

Ron had served with Mike in Vietnam. Whatever began between those two young men there became a friendship of extraordinary depth that lasted for decades.

I understood something about that friendship even before Mike and I became a couple.

Back then, Mike and I were still good friends. I remember him writing Ron a letter. Mike was going to tell him he was gay, and he was worried about how Ron might respond.

He needn’t have worried.

Ron responded with love and kindness.

It was a non-issue.

That’s who Ron was.

Over the years, Ron and his wife Gayle became part of my life too. The four of us traveled together—to Turkey, Croatia, Italy, France, Scotland, California, Florida, New York and other places.

We had adventures.

Ron wasn’t simply Mike’s old Army buddy.

He was family.

We lost him a few years ago.

And while I was painting Mike, I found myself thinking about him quite a bit.

At one point, I had the very distinct feeling that Ron was there in the shed with me.

Smiling.

Encouraging me.

Maybe it was my imagination. I’m perfectly willing to allow for that.

It didn’t make the feeling matter any less.

I may even have talked to him. I know I did in my head. I might have said something out loud.

I knew he was there.

And somehow, I knew he knew I knew.

Then Elton John showed up

For several days I had been thoroughly enjoying myself.

Painting can do that to me. Hours disappear. There’s something comforting about concentrating on color and shape and solving one little problem after another.

Then, somewhere among all those Beatles songs, Elton John’s Daniel came on.

And I started crying.

I can’t tell you exactly why.

Maybe it was the music.

Maybe Ron.

Maybe Mike.

Maybe Vietnam.

Maybe looking for days at the face of someone I love as he appeared before I knew him.

Maybe it was all the years between that photograph and the man sitting in our life today.

I don’t know.

What surprised me more was what I realized afterward.

The emotion hadn’t arrived with the song.

It had been building for days.

I simply hadn’t noticed.

By the time I was nearing the end of the painting, I was exhausted. Emotionally, certainly, and to some extent physically.

And yet the experience had also been comforting, soothing and deeply rewarding.

Apparently those things can occupy the same room.

Elsewhere, Acrylic on canvas • 2026

Elsewhere

Eventually I finished the painting.

I called it Elsewhere.

At first, the title seemed to describe the obvious.

Mike was elsewhere.

A young American thousands of miles from home, sitting beside the water in Vietnam during one of the most tumultuous periods in our country’s history.

But the longer I lived with the word, the larger it became.

That young Mike is elsewhere in time now.

The person he would become was still elsewhere.

I was elsewhere too—quite literally in third grade.

Ron was there in Vietnam with him, and ahead of them were decades of friendship neither could yet see.

There were letters still to be written.

There were marriages and losses and mistakes and adventures.

There was an entire life waiting just beyond the edge of that photograph.

Including me.

Mike has seen the finished painting.

He likes it.

He told me I’m a good painter.

After several days of emotional upheaval, unexpected conversations with the dead, Elton John reducing me to tears, and considerable concern over whether a man’s forehead should be turquoise, this seemed a reasonably efficient review.

But when I finally stepped back from the finished canvas, I wasn’t thinking about whether it was a good painting.

I looked at that young man sitting beside the water.

I knew his beauty.

I knew his gentleness.

I knew his essence.

He didn’t know me yet.

But I knew him.

And I knew I loved him.