Wordless Wednesday: November 20, 2013

my father with Indian feathers, circa 1924

Flashback Friday: It Was His Birthday

I am not one who makes a big deal of the birthday of a deceased person or the date of their death. Most of the time, those dates come and go with barely a recollection. I think some of it is that my own parents didn't mention those times and they themselves died at relatively young ages. My father died at age 53 of ALS and my mother died at age 61 of cancer.  By age 35, I no longer had living parents, and I am an only child. Family ties were mostly gone.

Here is my father in 1944, the year I was born, looking so very very young out in Washington State. Until his Army training he had never been outside of Pennsylvania. So much changed in a year when he went to Europe in the mop up after Normandy. I wish I had had a chance to know that happier young man.

Today would have been my father's 92nd birthday. It comes to mind more often now as I see the obituary of one more of his fellow WWII veterans.  Bit by bit they are leaving us, and even my father's records were destroyed in the fire at the VA records center in St. Louis. On our recent trip to CA, a priest mentioned that he was at the wake of one of these men, and very very few of his peers were still living.  This is almost 40 years since my father died. He missed so much of his life and I missed so much of him.

Flashback Friday

String...aka Maurice, my father. Look at the length of those legs! He was born in 1920 and grew to be 6'5. I imagine that these high school years were when he had a lot of that growth. He was always slim and had trouble finding clothes and shoes. I am told that his mother was 6' which is a remarkable height for a woman of those days. He had that same beautiful penmanship until his death at 53 of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).

Flashback Friday

Ft. Lewis, Washington June 1944

My father was a SGT. in the US Army and stationed out in Washington state, far far from his home in the coal mining regions of Pennsylvania. He really spoke of Washington with fondness and wanted to move out there after the war. I don't recall the conversations but my mother wanted nothing to do with that idea as far as I know, and neither of them ever went out there for even a visit. It's funny now that so so many years later I have a son living in Seattle, and dh has family in Washington state also. Life comes full circle.

my father aged 24