Connections

With today a whirlwind of blistering change, a chimera of magical technology laced with an underlying horror story full of nightmares, I find myself thinking about how many other changes my generation has seen and our connections with all that ancient history. 

I walk my ten-thousand steps a day listening to W.E.B. Griffin's Corps series in audio book form for the second time through...I read the paper versions too, a while ago. I was not born until two years after the Korean War began and was a baby when the armistice was declared but I am still connected to those days. My uncles must have served in occupying forces because I remember being awed when they came home on holiday leave...Christmas I think...in starched and pressed khakis, (remember starch and ironing boards?) bearing gifts from the other side of the world. My mother had a jewelry box that sported mythical dragons if I remember rightly and we were always warned to be extra careful when we pawed through the paste gems admiring it madly.

And even farther back to the Day that will Live in Infamy, Peal Harbor. Once again I was not born yet, but my parents were. Mom was 8 and remembered the day well. She and her siblings were playing upstairs at the house that grandpa built with his hands, in many cases of used lumber with nails he straightened before using them. There was a landing at the top of the stairs there, with not much of a railing at all and kids could perch over the edge near the kitchen listening to all that went on below. There must have been a radio....or maybe someone came by and told them...but she remembered the hushed tones of shock and horror that rose from below with the warm scent of dinner cooking and the oily air from the kerosene stove, on that fateful day.

And so I am connected to these world events and others, even if I didn't experience them myself. Listening to the books, remembering the stories told at family gatherings before everyone had a cell phone and no one told stories any more, makes me think of historical events like these as closer than the passing years would make them in real life.

I still find it a challenge to throw away a good cardboard box, a battered tee shirt or a still functional length of string, because my grandparents lived through the Great Depression and knew the pangs of hard poverty and loss. They saved everything until it was truly past any possible use and even long after that. I try to be more sensible, but our house is cluttered with things we might use someday.

As I listen, I see Ken McCoy, the main character in the books, as looking like one of my handsome twin uncles in grinning photos from their military days when their visits home were worthy of the utmost joy imaginable. I still feel the energy of Grandma and Grandpa Montgomery's kitchen when all the brothers and sisters and their kids gathered to eat good food and love one another.

I guess that makes me old, but I treasure the connections. I remember the people, the houses, one that exists only in memory, and the tales of times before mine, and the plentitude of years between, and feel connected.