WWI (the war to end all wars)

This is a picture of my grandparents right before he shipped out to fight in the trenches of WW I. Fortunately the only trenches he saw during the war were of the latrine type on the island of Hawaii where he lived as part of a contingent stationed in the South Pacific to protect our western flank. I have often wished I was older when he died, so that I could have heard the story on that one. As our boys were dying in the cold muddy trenches of Europe’s western front, he and his mates were keeping Hawaii safe for democracy.

By the time I knew my grandparents they had already moved from Missouri Valley, Iowa to Chicago during the depression. Grandpa was retired from the railroad where he had worked as a boxcar painter and my grandma had gotten very heavy. They lived in a red brick duplex in Bellwood that had a cement stoop and a fence in the back where I threw rocks at my sister to knock her off and she broke her arm and a small yard where the fireflies came out at night.

The Christmas of 1968 my brother and I received two battery powered, handset controlled, dinosaurs. I don’t remember if my grandparents gave them to us but my only memory of playing with them was on Christmas over at their house. One was a T-Rex and the other, a Triceratops. Come to think of it when I was a kid, there were only three types of dinosaurs, those two and the Brontosaurus. There were no “Raptors” or venom spewing lizards. I have a vague memory of the kind with the sails on their backs, but that’s it. I also have a vague memory of pitching a fit to get the T-rex ‘cause even at the age of three it was pretty obvious that he was the bad ass. He had a mouth that opened and closed and though his front arms were small they had fierce claws. My brother and I went out on the front cement stoop in the cold to do battle and somehow, inexplicably, my dino got its ass kicked every time. Though my T-rex looked mean he stood balanced on two legs and a tail and therefore was easy to tip over. What was worse, I couldn’t even complain that my older brother had cheated. It’s the only time I remember playing with that toy. I’ve asked my brother about this and though he to remembers that day well, he also can’t think of another battle-royal we had with them.

As my grandparents got older, my grandmother became too heavy to climb the stairs up to bed so they moved the bedroom into the dinning room. She continued to bake bread in the adjoining kitchen and I have a clear memory of her in her muumuu kneading the dough for rolls. She had soft, round, nearly transparent skin and kept her freezer stocked with fudge-sickles and orange push-ups. My Grampa was always the one sent on ice-cream reconnaissance missions to the corner grocery.

She died before he did. In my Grandpas old age he would get lost coming home from that same store and my Uncle Bill would have to go find him. Somehow I have a sneaking suspicion that when I am old and confused and most memories have faded away, I’ll get lost on my way home as well and my son will find me wandering the streets in search of a stoop that doesn’t even exist anymore.

(I found out just this last year why my grandfather was in Hawaii during WWI.  We had a small garrison stationed near Pearl Harbor and the day we declared war there was a German warship in port hiding from the Japanese submarines rumored to be patrolling about.  We seized the ship and realized we would need a bigger army to protect our interests in case Germany came and demanded it back.  They never did.)