This morning feels like a summer morning. Outside is hot, but the house holds a bit of the cooler night. The rooms are dark. Out my window, I can nothing is moving in the still air. The sky is blue, and the sky is cloudy. The high today will be 74°.

My father graduated from high school when he was sixteen. It was 1943. He wanted to enlist right away, but his mother wouldn’t sign the papers. He had to wait until his seventeenth December birthday when he didn’t need permission. My father went into the navy. In the pictures of him after bootcamp, he looks so young, a baby, metaphorically. He was assigned to a ship which plied the North Sea. In 1944, his ship was sunk, broken in half. My father was in the cold water a long time before he was rescued. He was brought to a hospital in England. The doctors worried about saving his legs, but they did. My dad told us he was still in the hospital when casualties from D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge were admitted. They all said U.S. forces were being overwhelmed. That was the only memory my father had of D-Day.

My mother once had a D-Day party. In the living room she had The Longest Day playing on the TV. In the kitchen the music of World War II played, and everyone sang along. Around the house were maps of the Normandy coast with the landing points highlighting. She had found decorations, cardboard soldiers, lots of American flags and even smaller flags sticking from the food on the table. The party was perfect.

Now that I have a car, I don’t mind staying home.

This entry was posted on June 6, 2025 at 11:23 am and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.