Thank you Pat and Happy Holidays! Now I have a bit better understanding of why you attend the reunions as each encounter brings the opportunity of a new insight. Keep up your great effort as shedding light on your family helps us see ours in a new light. Best wishes to you to LIz. Dennis Fujii
I also will read anything you write! I grew up always hearing about the hardships "during the war," and while my parents weren't directly involved, three of my uncles and one aunt enlisted in various branches of the military. I was always fascinated by my aunt, who was a WAC.
As I was reading your first chapter, I kept thinking that it would make a great introduction. Just a thought. Looking forward to reading the entire book!
Your experience echoes my own with my parents. My Dad was a medical technician in the war. Mother and he had known each other as children, when his family lived next door for a time. She was 3 years older than him and he was the bratty little brother who annoyed her and his older sister when they played together. Then they met again when he was training outside Indianapolis and his parents told him to call her parents and say hello. They invited him to dinner and insisted she stay home from a planned date with an officer to help entertain him. They talked after dinner until he had to leave for base to get back by curfew, and he gave her a kiss goodbye on the cheek. They married before he left for North Africa. He was overseas for about 4 years, most of the time at a base hospital in Naples, Italy, after the D-Day invasion. To hear him talk you would have thought his time was mostly trips into Rome to see the city, climbing the side of Mt. Vesuvius while it was erupting--'The wind was blowing the other way!"--and meals made by the mother of a small boy the guys 'adopted' as their project to help clothe and feed the family in return for her good cooking. Only once, when I was in college and we were discussing Vietnam, did he tell me about a doctor who was always drunk when casualties came into their hospital. The med techs would have to pool their knowledge of what they had seen doctors do for the kind of injuries they were dealing with and try to handle it themselves because the doctor would be too drunk to operate or do any procedures. Daddy couldn't talk about it without his voice shaking and he still despised that doctor for putting them all in that position.
There were letters back to Mother, which she wanted destroyed. I tried to convince her not to do that, telling her one day in front of Daddy that I would like to read them to see what they were both like when they were young. Daddy never said anything, but after he died and my sister was clearing out things in his workshop in the basement she found the wooden box of letters pushed way back under his workbench. Mother would never have bothered anything there, and my sister and I both think he didn't agree with Mother about destroying them and wanted us to have them. I haven't read all of them yet, my sister has them. I'm grateful that my Dad heard my plea to be able to do so.
I especially like to read about your journey with your parents' lives.
Thank you Pat and Happy Holidays! Now I have a bit better understanding of why you attend the reunions as each encounter brings the opportunity of a new insight. Keep up your great effort as shedding light on your family helps us see ours in a new light. Best wishes to you to LIz. Dennis Fujii
I also will read anything you write! I grew up always hearing about the hardships "during the war," and while my parents weren't directly involved, three of my uncles and one aunt enlisted in various branches of the military. I was always fascinated by my aunt, who was a WAC.
As I was reading your first chapter, I kept thinking that it would make a great introduction. Just a thought. Looking forward to reading the entire book!
You write well; you research well; you have intellectual curiosity. This is what I am always looking for in my reading.
Your experience echoes my own with my parents. My Dad was a medical technician in the war. Mother and he had known each other as children, when his family lived next door for a time. She was 3 years older than him and he was the bratty little brother who annoyed her and his older sister when they played together. Then they met again when he was training outside Indianapolis and his parents told him to call her parents and say hello. They invited him to dinner and insisted she stay home from a planned date with an officer to help entertain him. They talked after dinner until he had to leave for base to get back by curfew, and he gave her a kiss goodbye on the cheek. They married before he left for North Africa. He was overseas for about 4 years, most of the time at a base hospital in Naples, Italy, after the D-Day invasion. To hear him talk you would have thought his time was mostly trips into Rome to see the city, climbing the side of Mt. Vesuvius while it was erupting--'The wind was blowing the other way!"--and meals made by the mother of a small boy the guys 'adopted' as their project to help clothe and feed the family in return for her good cooking. Only once, when I was in college and we were discussing Vietnam, did he tell me about a doctor who was always drunk when casualties came into their hospital. The med techs would have to pool their knowledge of what they had seen doctors do for the kind of injuries they were dealing with and try to handle it themselves because the doctor would be too drunk to operate or do any procedures. Daddy couldn't talk about it without his voice shaking and he still despised that doctor for putting them all in that position.
There were letters back to Mother, which she wanted destroyed. I tried to convince her not to do that, telling her one day in front of Daddy that I would like to read them to see what they were both like when they were young. Daddy never said anything, but after he died and my sister was clearing out things in his workshop in the basement she found the wooden box of letters pushed way back under his workbench. Mother would never have bothered anything there, and my sister and I both think he didn't agree with Mother about destroying them and wanted us to have them. I haven't read all of them yet, my sister has them. I'm grateful that my Dad heard my plea to be able to do so.
Our family enjoys everything you write, Hyde Park-related or not!
I enjoy everything you write! And always learn something. Too few curious, generous, reflective voices put there.