When I was a child, we had parades. I walked with the Brownies, carrying a flag, my mother was our leader, she wore white gloves too. We walked in our brown uniforms between the green Girl Scouts and the blue Cub Scouts, from Glenwood Landing to the American Legion in Glen Head. It seemed a very long way then, and it was always warm and so sunny we burned our knees. We walked through town, past the A&P, the bank, J&J Jewelers, right in the middle of the street, and across the railroad tracks and down the hill toward the highway and gathered for taps and speeches under the maples on the Legion lawn. There were old soldiers in folding chairs, flags, and afterwards, barbecues, swimming, the Long Island clubs– golf, tennis, yacht, and beach– all opened and my parents played golf. We went swimming, I think. It was a long time ago, a lifetime really. Over hamburgers, or maybe a London broil on the grill, mac and cheese, dinner on the patio, the canvas awning up for the season, the tire swing in the cherry tree. A black Lab named Maggie. We heard the story of one grandfather, from western Pennsylvania who enlisted in WW I even though he was too young. He was tall enough to pass for 18 when he was in eighth grade. He joined the balloon corps. He never said anything about it. But when he came home he married his sweetheart, had two daughters, played the violin, sang bass in the church choir, and made a telescope out of milk cans, grinding the lenses himself, in order to see the stars more clearly. When he visited us he walked slowly on the beach, picking up pebbles that he brought home to polish in his tumbler. My other grandfather was French. He and my grandmother lived with us. The story we heard from him was how he joined the Army at the beginning of WW I with his youth soccer team in the fall, and by Christmas all of them were dead except my grandfather and one friend. His pals all fell in Flander’s fields. All those poppies are for them. For him too, don’t you think? He carried them with him every day of his life, I bet. That grandfather, and the same close friend, went on to live through more combat in WW II. What are the odds? All the time I knew him, he smoked a pipe at home and cigars in his buick, and he drank champagne, wore a beret, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his lapel. He grew roses. Laughed a lot and cried easily. I see him everyday when I walk down the stairs.
Today I will call my dad, and we will probably talk about Grandpa, and he will tell me again about how he escaped from a prison camp. Then my dad will say his regret in life is not being a soldier, but he failed the physical, because he had broken his back in a car wreck. My dad, the same man who, when we tell him we shot a moose, says, “what did that moose ever do to you?” He was lucky, I will tell him. War is hell, he will say. But we owe much to the greatest generation, don’t we? Yes, I will tell him. Then he will say he misses them, they were heroes, and the founding fathers, too. They were real leaders, and he’ll ask me if I have planted tomatoes in the greenhouse yet, and tell me about how my sister won’t let him have the car keys, and I will remind him, again, that he can’t drive anymore, and he will sigh.
Here’s what I think: that life is short, and it is mostly sweet, and I don’t want mine, or yours, or anyone I Iove’s to ever end. I love this world fiercely– the wind, the sky, the sea. Bicycles and tulips, and hummingbirds, too, and a cold beer and a hot cookie. My grandpas. My dad. My children. My grandchildren. Family pictures in the hall.
