Important Things

I would have liked my grandfather. Dad told me lots of stories about him and the farm where his family grew up outside Topeka. I came along late in my parents’ lives and never got to meet any of my grandparents. If I could pick only one to meet, it would be Grandpa Everett.

Today is a Ripples in the Pond day. It’s a metaphor that speaks to me. I used it in my eulogy for my father in 1999 and my mother in 2015. I believe we never know what the outcome will be of our smallest act, our slightest, briefest presence. Even after our pebbles have settled to the bottom of the pond, the ripples go on. We never see everything they touch.

I’m in the basement of my childhood home in Kansas, surrounded by the boxes I packed more than 20 years ago when I moved home from Northern Virginia in 1999. Life happened at a frantic pace for more than a decade after coming home. And after that first decade, I realized that whatever was in those boxes could wait another decade.

When I was a teen, I knew my destiny was already in cast in stone. In one day, two truths slapped me in the face with a wake-up call. First, one of my parents would die when I was still relatively young. And wherever I was in the world, I would have to move back to Kansas, because neither Dad nor Mom would be of an age or a heart to make it without the other. And with that would be my lifelong obligation to take care of my brother Alan, who had been disabled since childhood.

Second, except for his ripples in the pond, I was my father’s sole legacy. He was, in short, the most amazing man I ever knew. The son of an amazing family of six kids, a farmer, and his wife. And then there was me.

Dad passed away in July 1999. I moved home and got a job at the same university I graduated from. Three years later, Alan had a stroke. His leg, his arm, his speech were crippled, on top of what was known in the old days as “mental retardation.” Nothing fair ever happened to Alan. That’s how I learned the only fairness we can expect in this world is the fairness with which we treat others. That can be a hard truth to live by.

Today, in this Year of COVID, it’s time for me to do some unpacking.

I’ve let too many things go neglected. My boxes from Virginia can wait. Instead, I’m starting with Dad’s WWII Army footlocker. He said the contents were his “important things.” Dad never said “stuff.” Never cussed. Never put with anyone’s nonsense, except mine. I remember a time when Mom was mad at me and told him to unleash some corporal punishment on my backside. He told her, “I will never hit our children. The only thing that teaches them is that I’m bigger than they are.”

The lights in our basement weren’t meant for reading, but they’re good enough to spotlight the dust that’s shedding off the lid of the footlocker as I open it. The inside of this trove looks like a scene from a movie where someone finds the secret chest in the secret room behind the secret door. I swat at the dust, but it doesn’t settle. Each time I touch something, I awaken more sprites that reveal themselves in the incandescent light.

Here are letters from Grandpa to Dad and Mom. Grandpa wrote letters to his family in poetry. He shared stories of the life he had started after the war with his new wife Vivian in California, where all my other aunts and uncles decided to settle. When Dad came home after Normandy, he stayed in Kansas because of a girl. Her name was June and Mom. The more life I live, the more I know how many stories start with “There was this girl…”

Here are some children’s books, bound in ribbon, written and hand sketched by my Aunt Dororthy. The book on top is “The Hippity Hoppity Bunny with the Flippity Floppity Ears.” They are inscribed to me and Alan, and written in verse too.

Here is Dad’s Bronze Medal. For heroic service in combat against an armed enemy during the Battle of Bastogne. In his 20's, he led his company out of the Ardennes Forest at night when they were surrounded by Germans. He wasn’t even the one who told me the story. The war wasn’t what was important to him. Coming home was.

Here is “Six Kids on a Farm” a collection of stories he wrote for my cousins in 1994 and donated to the Kansas Historical Museum. Stories with titles like, “The Model T Ford,” “From the Udder to the Butter,” and “The School House Catches Fire.” One of the stories is about his sister Aurel winning a contest for best original story submitted to the Topeka Daily Capital newspaper. And the surprise ending -- when the reporter came to the farm to interview Aurel, he was surprised to meet not an adult, but a little girl with freckles and red hair.

Another story is about Grampa’s Band. He could play five musical instruments. Dad said Grandpa’s favorite instrument was his mandolin. When he decided to start a band at church, he taught the other men how to play. During the war, the band played at the nearby town hall to support the sales of Liberty Bonds.

These photos make me smile. My heart misses a beat or two when I realize some of these photos are a hundred years old. Grandpa looks like Will Rogers. Always with a fedora. Just like Dad, when I look at his photos after he came home from the war and married Mom. In the photos from the 40’s and 50’s, he looks like Jimmy Stewart. When people ask me what Dad was like, I say, “Have you seen “It’s a Wonderful Life”? My dad was George Bailey.”

The stories go on. Dad really was George Bailey. The family lost everything in the Depression. They lost even more when my Grandma Dora died from a mastoid infection. I wish I were a poet so I could paint a picture of words describing Grandpa on Christmas Eve, walking the streets of Topeka, alone in the snowfall and the dark and the silence, looking for a clothing store that was still open so he could buy a dress for Grandma’s funeral.

When everything else had been taken from them, my Uncle Chester was killed riding his motorcycle on a dirt road, hit by a car driven by a boy who could barely see over the dashboard. The newspapers called Chester “Red Hoss.” He was an artist. His cartoons ran in the newspaper. He was a pitcher for his high school baseball team. He was being scouted by Major League Teams. And then he was gone.

This is a real treasure chest. These stories are priceless. I pause for a silent prayer. “Dad, thank you for making the time to put these words on paper. On a manual typewriter.” He knew what was important.

Someone told me that Ernest Hemmingway said, “You’re not a writer until somebody pays you to do it.” I haven’t verified that quote on the internet, but according to Hemmingway’s possibly apocryphal measure, I am a writer of sorts. My job is writing grant applications for nonprofit organizations. I don’t feel like a writer though. Everything I write sounds like a college term paper. “What do you get when you cross a government econowonk with a nonprofit worker bee?” There’s a bad punch line for that, but I haven’t found it yet.

Life changed this year. My clients can’t pay me if they’ve cancelled their fundraising events to comply with social distancing. My beautiful wife works in the nonprofit world too, with people affected by mental illness and women who have survived trauma and are trying to start their lives anew. She earns the income that will get us through these times. We think of this as our ministry. We have faith.

Hemmingway also said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” Today, that sentence would be, “I have lived a life of neglect.” I’m not making any ripples. I’m not sure I ever have.

I used to dream about being a writer. Not college papers or grant applications, but someone who would speak from his heart instead of his paycheck. Back then, I was looking for something of substance to make of my life, and to put it in words on paper. Living a life in the real world can get in the way of that. And I know that’s a lousy excuse.

After a coffee break, I’m back to sorting through important things.

Here is the “Battlefield History of the 137th Infantry in WWII.” Dad wrote this too, one day at a time, as one of his assignments to Regimental HQ in Europe, but he couldn’t keep a copy for himself. No carbon paper on the battlefield. The first time Dad and Mom came to visit me in DC, he drove to the National Archives in College Park Maryland in search of this book. Every page of this half-inch-thick photocopy is stamped “Declassified,” with the date of his visit. Even though I’ve seen this book before, this gives me literally a reason for pause. Before he went to the National Archives, his work was “Classified.” When he and mom and I went to England in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of D-Day, he took a copy with him, and gave it to the school-age son of a friend of mine who had to do a class report on the history of WWII. I wish I could have been there when Dan turned in his project, with an appendix stamped “Declassified.”

Here is a small black notebook. Inside are more photos, a playbill from one of Grandpa’s band performances, and a manila envelope packed with papers. And another handwritten note from Grandpa to Dad. Not in verse. Just a few simple words about taking time to look ahead while cherishing the moments of every present day.

The manila envelope was never sealed. It's so thick with paper that someone never bothered to seal it. I let the contents spill out. I’m not sure what I’m looking at, even though the printing on these sheets clearly says, “War Savings Bond Series E.” Franklin Roosevelt is on the $200 bond. Grover Cleveland is on the $100 bond. Thomas Jefferson on the $50 bond. I wonder what Cleveland did that was so important that he got the $100 bond and Jefferson only got the $50.

I draw a breath and tell myself I’m not going to think about this. I’m thumbing through the stack, trying to do the mental math while convincing myself that these are old and worthless. But if they’re still redeemable at face value, there’s ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty thousand dollars or more worth of War Bonds here. If they accrued interest, even more. Wow.

And then I want to slap myself, because all I can think to say is Wow. Today deserves better than a Wow. I put the bonds back in the envelope, and the envelope back in the footlocker, and I sit back and scan the clutter in front of me. There are more than a dozen boxes in this corner of the basement, packed with neglected memories. Once upon a time, they were important things to me. I’ll bring myself to look at them someday. Today, the important things are papers in an Army chest, some a century old.

I never got to meet Grandpa Everett. But I got to know his son. That’s what’s important.