Grandpa wasn’t always old

“Remember the days of old, consider the years long past;

ask your father and he will teach you.”

Deuteronomy 32:7

Dad never talked about the war.  I knew he served in the Navy because his old hat hung in his closet.  I knew he learned Morse code, because sometimes he would sneak upstairs and tap out his dot-and-dash messages to other veterans on a short wave radio he had built from scratch.  But, that’s all I knew.  He had packed up memories along with an old Japanese sword in his old sea bag that never made it home - lost somewhere between the Philippines and East Liverpool Ohio.  If you asked him about it he would just look away and whisper, “It was a long time ago.”

For fifty years that part of my father’s life was closed shut and sealed as in a safe. It turned out only his grandson could figure out combination. One day, fifty years after the Japanese surrendered Dad and I sat on the sofa and watched documentary on the “War in the South Pacific”.  Kyle, ten years old, was playing with his toy cars on the floor not interested in black and white newsreels of eighteen year old marines charging out of Higgins boats onto the beach and into enemy fire.  He had seen war movies before and knew we always won and that the actors got up when the director yelled “Cut”.

Then somewhere in the middle of the program my father was taken back through time and space by images that flickered across the screen.  Once again he was back there - “over there” where people were trying to kill him and there was no guarantee he’d see the next day.  I saw him swallow hard at the sound of gunfire and wince when he saw someone fall.

 When the narrator identified a particular island, Dad whispered to no one in particular, “I remember. I was there.”   Kyle immediately stopped his game, lifted his eyes and looked at Grandpa and then at the eighteen year old marines charging out of the Higgins boats on the beach and into enemy fire. He looked at Grandpa once more and then at the marines and suddenly his eyebrows raised and his jaw dropped and he realized that Grandpa was not always old.  Grandpa was once eighteen years old and in frightened in a faraway place called war.  Kyle understood this was not a movie and the soldiers would not be getting up when the scene was over.

Now the T.V. commanded Kyle’s attention. He got up off the floor and sat right next to Grandpa.  With each island invaded he would ask, “Where you there Grandpa, were you there?”  For fifty years my father had deflected my questions about his war years, but he could not refuse his grandson.  He could never refuse him. He told Kyle he usually went in with the second or third wave to establish to set up the radio so that they could communicate from the beach to the ships. He told him had been wounded in Saipan when an enemy mortar shell found its way to an ammo dump and blew up his jeep. I never knew he had been wounded.

Memories locked away are never far away.  No matter how deep we try to bury them, they find their way out. They can emerge at the slightest touch.  A sight, a sound, a smell can trigger the synapses that recorded those meaningful moments in our lives.  A date, place, a person can rekindle thoughts of days gone by.

Long before technology gave us instant replay memory allows us to relive the past. The great question though is whether we learn from it or not? Kyle learned a lesson that day and so did I.  Treasure those memories because they have shaped us into the people we have become.

Lord, in the end we are little more than a book of memories and they have so much to teach.  Remind us to listen to those who have come before us and learn and so honor their memories.  This we pray in the name of the one who said, “Do this in remembrance of me.”  Amen