US World War II Era: Nearly Forgotten

    Last night I had the opportunity to listen to my father-in-law recall memories from his childhood. My son sat with me as we listened, and a window was opened for us into a world that now exists only in the hearts and memories of a dwindling number of elderly but fiercely proud Americans.

     Even as the post-modern academics and philosophers of the time were counting true value all but dead and buried, a nation awoke to a driving conviction that right makes might.  The fear of an evil force brutalizing innocent European villages, subjugating hapless nations, and bent on world domination, electrified the American people into a single minded, unified, brotherhood of righteous indignation and monolithic resolve.  The images of a cruel and immoral Nazi regime plundering Europe nettled the Christian conscience and provoked the American sense of fair play, even though this nation was still struggling in the quagmire of economic hardship.

     As evening gathers in the corners of my living room and the light in the windows fades toward purple, my father-in-law pauses, gazing up into a Kodachrome past only he can see, calming his emotions so he can continue.
     "I recall the day my older brother had to leave for basic training.  We'd eaten dinner together, Mom, Dad, Don and I.  At the time, I had a paper route, and do you know, we had to collect once a week! My, that made it hard on us paper boys.  The newspaper didn't take kindly to excuses, but people were never home, and often had excuses of their own."
     He pauses again, then continues, looking down into his cupped hands.
     "I didn't want to go to the bus station to say good bye, so I said I had to do some collecting.  I didn't want my brother to see me blubbering like a baby when he was going off to fight like a man and maybe lose his own life.  To me, a fifteen year old younger brother, Don was some kind of hero. We had dreaded the day he would be drafted, but when he was, there was no complaining. We knew it had to be done.  Everyone had to do their part for the war effort.
     Dad took on a second job.  Mom was a wonderful seamstress and made all our clothes.  We didn't have a rototiller, but Dad turned most of our double size lot over with a spading fork by hand and planted a Victory Garden, so we could feed ourselves as much as possible.  The farmers all over the country had to produce food for the soldiers, so the rest of us, who couldn't go to the trenches to fight, well, we had to grow our own food.  And we did.  No one complained. No, you didn't complain.
     Don didn't have to fight in the trenches, but served in a military hospital.  Of course there was always the possibility that his orders would change and he'd have to take his turn.  Anything could happen.
     During the summer, I was sent to my uncle's farm to work.  The farmers didn't have to fight either, but they were just as much a part of the war effort.  We all knew it.  I worked hard for my room and board and a salary of thirty five dollars for the whole summer's work.
     I remember the day we heard the news.  I was driving a tractor pulling an implement that turned the windrows of hay over to dry."
     His eyes fill with tears as he once again looks up into the beatific scene.  And now his voice comes rough with emotion and barely audible among the struggling breaths.
     "The war was over!  Even though it was a miserable hot day out in that field, I suddenly felt a joy that turned that dusty old field into a golden heaven.  Don would come home - alive!"

     I've often heard people talk about how war is used by governments to improve their economies. I find that hard to believe in most cases.  Think of the war ravaged third world of today.  Is it helping?
     While war may have been the trigger, it wasn't war that pulled the American economy out of the Great Depression. It was grit.  It was a people who believed in God, and who believed in the moral imperative of their fight.  It was the reality of a hammer in the hand, not an avatar on a screen. It was a people who knew that each shovel driven into the garden, each rivet welded onto the boat frame, each sweater completed in the knitting mills, was putting a bullet in Hitler's forces as much as the boys with their guns dying on foreign beaches.  And all that effort, all that labor, all those 'second jobs', walked America right out of the end of the Great Depression, and right into one of the most powerful economies the world has ever known.
     There are still many who remember that time.  But they are now the ones in the nursing homes and retirement centers.  They won't last much longer.  Don't wait.  Before they are all gone, go to them and ask them to tell you about the wonder of the Greatest Generation.

Is There a Glitch in the Matrix?

      The morning started out the way you'd expect, 4:30am 3 block walk to the office, two hours of writing, 7am walk home, breakfast and coffee with my wife, cleaning up the breakfast dishes while Anne took her shower.
     The odd thing happened after my shower.  Of course, that's because I'm the one this blog is about.
     Why did it happen?  What possible buffoonery was God playing at, perhaps enjoying a moment of random entertainment?  Could there actually be glitches in the fundamental fabric of the universe?  I will make you doubt, and wonder, and perhaps consider that odd thing which happened to you once, but which you dismissed as irrelevant.  Here's what happened:

     Okay, first for the embarrassing avowal of my early morning toilette.  After I shower each morning, I spend around five minutes drying my hair with a blow dryer.  I have, ever since I was in Junior High School.  Pretty much every day. Yeah.  I'm that guy.  But I look like such a dork if I don't.  I know you don't really care, 'just get on with it.'
     So I'm drying my hair, holding it in place with a plastic brush, which, by the way, is never where I left it the day before, even though I have explained the issue to every single person in the household.  Multiple times.  Drying my hair, I say, when I begin to feel a little annoying tickle on my nose.  I brush at it several times with the back of my brush hand to dislodge the irritant.  It continues to tickle, and in fact is escalating to unbearable proportions. So I set the brush down and look at my face in the mirror, very carefully, to ascertain the source of the irritation.  And there it is, a hair, stuck in the crease of my left eyelid, above my eye, behind my eyelashes.  The end of it is hanging down at just the place where it is dragging on my nose, and tickling like a son-of-a-gun.
     I deftly take the hair between my thumb and forefinger, and pull it out from the grip my eyelid has on it with a satisfying slith.  I drop the hair on the floor. (Don't get upset honey, it was just one hair).
     This may not seem like anything miraculous or worthy of a blog post until you understand that no sooner had I put brush back to hair, and resumed my coiffure, than my nose began to tickle again in exactly the same way.  Instantly, I performed the precise same assessment and removal of the hair from the crease in my eyelid, slith.  The sequence was so completely replicated that it awed me.
     I was immediately reminded of the scene from the Matrix when Neo sees the black cat shake itself - twice in exactly the same manner. You know the one I mean.  The one that portends imminent danger, and the death of most of the team.
     I realize that this could have been a coincidence.  But I've gone over and over it in my mind.  I've never had a hair get stuck in my eyelid before.  And there just wasn't time for a second hair to get stuck in my eyelid.  And I know that I pulled the first one out completely and dropped it on the floor, which I did with the second one, in complete reiteration as if I was in some kind of Outer Limits late night re-run.  (I know, even mentioning the idea of 're-runs' dates me)
     There is no doubt in my mind that this event was simply impossible.
     Very much the way the next story I'm about to relay was impossible.

     Several years ago, still working at the University, in the same capacity I now inhabit, I had an occasion to visit the receptionist's area on the second floor of our building.  The secretary was looking something up for me, I can't recall now what it was, but I'm sure it was mission critical. Anyway, I'm standing there waiting for her, tipping back on my heals, whistling a little Irish ditty, tucking my hands in my back pockets, when I begin to notice something at the tips of the fingers on my right hand.  I scissor it between middle and forefinger, and draw it out of my hip pocket.
     At first it seems inconsequential, a bit of card paper, a strip about a quarter inch in width and an inch and a half in length, edges showing evidence of being originally perforated.  I continue whistling my ditty, waiting for the secretary, and casually looking over the little piece of minutiae. The first hint that something is amiss comes when I begin to notice how old the paper looks.  It's a pinkish beige, partially because of oxidation I believe.  Then I read the words printed in a very old fashion courier typeface.

George M. Fulton
DExter 78-3266
Ballard, Wash.

What the...???
     I felt like my head was zooming out to the edge of the galaxy and then rubberbanding right back into the office within an inch of the crazy artifact, and snapping back out past the spiral arms again.  
     To put a fine point on it, I had taken the jeans I was wearing at the time, right out of the hot dryer that morning, and put them on in the laundry room.  I don't wear super tight jeans as they tend not to be flattering on me.  But these were tight enough that there was no loose gap in the back pockets that could have caught something falling from the... what? the sky? the edge of an eighty year old luggage desk at a hotel I'd never been to?  What was that thing doing in my pocket?!  It showed no sign of having gone through the wash, in fact, except for a little bit of oxidation, it was in pristine condition, as if it had just been torn off the end of a sheet of labels which had been typed that very morning.

*the hush of wind whistling through ancient branches in the night*

These stories, I swear, are relayed exactly as they happened.  You can even ask Dorothy, the hapless secretary who had to endure my ranting about the little piece of paper in my pocket.  She was forced to look at it several times while I accused her of pranking me by slipping it into my pocket when I wasn't looking.  I am now convinced that she did no such thing.  And no one else had been anywhere near me that morning.

Now it's your turn.  Have you ever had something happen to you that was completely impossible?  If so, please describe it in detail in a comment - I will read every one, and maybe even put them into a book if I get enough of them.

Thanks for reading -

Rob the Voyager