esrosedotblog

INFAMY

I was only four years old but I remember that something terrible had happened.

My mother was crying and on the couch.

My dad was glued to the radio.

Not much more than that.

The attack on Pearl Harbor.

The War (as I still think of it) took a toll on us.

Later, in the winter of 1943, my father joined the Navy. He was too old to be drafted. Friends of his went. He thought that he should go too.

There are a lot of memories of that time. Not all of them bad, really.

On the home front, we dealt with gas and food rationing, saving tin cans, doing the air raid warning thing, blackouts.

My mother worked. She had to. I was alone a lot of the time.

It was a different way of life for sure.

I think that it was strengthening for me.

I certainly learned that change is constant. Hard times can be close by. You can get through them.

I remember when it was over. I remember when my dad came home.

The war wasn't over for him for a long time. If ever.

It got over for me pretty fast. I was eight years old. Pre-baby boom. Always young for my school class, through an accident of admissions policy, I was in fourth grade.

One of the benefits of the War was that my Mom and I went to Boston a couple of times to see my father. He was stationed on the North Atlantic on a destroyer.

I remember lots of things from those trips. I went back there for college and then to live for over forty years. A brief stay in Philadelphia doesn't count in my mind.

So you can go through some wrenching shit and still get a lot out of it in a positive way.

We were lucky. No one invaded the mainland. No one bombed us.

That came later.

Labels: history