I’ve sometimes argued with folks about the existence of this day. “May has 30 days,” they’ll say. “We’re sure of it.” And in the old days, when May 30 was Memorial Day, May 31 did seem like an afterthought. An inconspicuous date tucked between two showy months. A sliver of a possibility. An opening.
I know May 31 exists because it’s my birthday. But now that I’m older I wouldn’t mind if we skipped it every year. I would still be here, would still exist (non-existence being the chief reason to embrace the birthday when it comes, since it is ever so much better than the alternative), but I would be spared the reminder that I’m another year older.
It’s not that I’m a birthday dreader. I’ve always approached the day with an attitude of celebration. It’s just that time moves so quickly; there is so much to do and an ever-declining amount of time to do it in.
But May 31 is still on the calendar, and I’m still here, so there is nothing left to do but to greet the day and live the day and think about all that other stuff tomorrow.
This year Memorial Day falls on … Memorial Day. In its honor, today’s post is an article I wrote a few years ago, an essay about my father in World War II.
Fighting With Fear A Daughter Learns A New War Story
By Anne Cassidy Special to The Washington Post Monday, May 31, 2004; Page C10
In the spring of 1944, my father was a tail-gunner on a B-17 bomber. Sixty years later, he was present as the National World War II Memorial was dedicated on the Mall. As he watched I was thinking of a day in 1978 when the war came alive for me, the day my father and I drove to his old air base near the village of Horham, England.
Ever since I was old enough to listen, Dad had regaled me with war stories: meeting girls under the clock at Victoria Station in London or pedaling through the countryside on a bicycle to buy strawberries from local farmers. He would mix the berries with milk and take the concoction up in the unheated B-17 on missions, freezing it into a passable strawberry ice cream he would share later with friends. These were the happy war stories. Dad never talked about what it felt like to shoot and be shot at — until the day we visited Horham.
Like many of the old air bases scattered throughout East Anglia, Horham was no longer in use. And were it not for the aid of a friendly couple who ran the local post office, we would have missed it entirely. “It’s a mushroom farm now,” they told us. “But the owner won’t mind if you look around.”
I was disappointed, expecting something more than mushrooms — a museum, maybe, or a small plaque. Dad, on the other hand, was cheerful. He wanted to explore. At first we found nothing but an overgrown runway and some crumbled hardstands, where planes had awaited takeoff. But a few minutes later we spied a real treasure — a couple of Nissen huts. We couldn’t get inside but we walked around them.
“These are the primitive dwellings of a lost tribe of American GIs,” Dad joked, posing in front of one of the chipped, dirty doors. He jokingly held a bouquet of wan daisies. He seemed to honor a fallen comrade with those limp flowers. He had made it to a funeral everyone else had forgotten.
He told me then of friends who had left from this field and never come back. He talked about how terrified he was to be crammed into the tail-gunner’s seat at the rear of the aircraft. He was sure that one particular mission, the one he flew on his 21st birthday, May 12, 1944, would be his last. I guess he figured that fate would end his life evenly and ironically on the day it began. But he returned from that mission; returned to find empty seats and vacant cots left by those less fortunate; returned again to find battered huts and barren runways and mushrooms growing where so many lived their last days.
It’s been half a lifetime since we took that trip together. Since then Horham Airfield has been bought and preserved. Volunteers are restoring the Nissen huts and the hospital has become a small museum. But I’d rather imagine the place the way Dad and I saw it: sodden, abandoned, peopled with the ghosts of frightened young men. One of them was my father. He was not just the happy-go-lucky, ice-cream-making GI we’d always heard about. He had fought fear and won.
So when the World War II Memorial was dedicated, I first thanked God my father was alive to see it. Then I thought of Horham. I smelled the air there, with its hint of the sea. I imagined the roar of engines. And I remembered the day that I, a child of peacetime, received a taste, just a taste, of war.
This year I am determined to know their voices, these birds we live with early and late and which come to us without cost or solicitation. Up early today I hear the first sounds of morning and quickly visit the “bird jam” site I’ve found (“know the birds you hear”).
It is the cardinal who leads the way, at least today. It is the cardinal up early and singing his heart out. What wakes the first bird? What character of creation gives dawn this soundtrack, makes it so that — before we see, taste, smell or feel morning — we hear it?
I read that birds sing most during mating season and often from a high perch, that cardinals sing year round, and that some birds, larks for instance, sing while flying.
As for the larger question, I’ll turn to literature rather than science: “Why do birds sing in the morning?” said British author Enid Bagnold, author of National Velvet. “It’s the triumphant shout. We got through another night!”
Late spring in the suburbs is a season of bounty. Not only the bounty of flowering shrubs and gonzo grass. But the bounty of activities, too. When the children were young we were nearly mowed down by the recitals and school plays, honors ceremonies and volunteer teas. At this point in our lives the bounty takes a different form. Our driveway is clogged with cars, our washing machine is filled with laundry.
The suburbs seem built for bounty. Our garages groan with bicycles and rollerblades, helmets and bats. Our pantries are clogged with canned goods, bags of rice, boxes of cereal. We live a charmed life; I know that. My worries loom large sometime, but they are not the worries that plague many of the world’s people: What will I eat? Where will I live? On this May morning I pause for a moment to remember that.
An evening drive through a close-by place I’d never seen before: Clark’s Crossing is a little park that adjoins the Washington and Old Dominion rail trail. To get there from our house you go all the way into the town of Vienna and most of the way out again. It is difficult to find — but worth it once you do.
For most of the drive we could have been out in the country and in another century: narrow lanes lined with vines and hedges, open fields, houses set back off the road, twists and turns and sudden hilltop vistas. The air was fragrant with honeysuckle and had a heaviness that meant summer was here. We couldn’t believe we had never been this way before. And now that we know about it, I hope we come this way again.
He was graceful on his feet, a runner, a tennis player. He loved to sing Linda Ronstadt songs in a funny falsetto — “I’ve been cheated. Been mistreated. When will I be loved?” He was funny and he was smart. The map of Ireland was on his face.
He was the boyfriend I broke up with two years out of college. The one-sentence reason was that I wanted children and he didn’t. But there was a longer story, the sort of painful lesson you learn in early adulthood, that love is not enough.
When I heard Monday that Gerry passed away, I felt, after the initial shock and sadness, a sort of reflective remorse. We’d only communicated via Christmas cards for decades; could I have been a better friend?
So I pulled out my old journals and read about those days. I laughed and I cried. I learned some things about Gerry that I had forgotten, and I realized that I had worried about him for years. I had done all I could. He was one of those people who never really found himself, a lover of life with skin too thin for this world. I wish him eternal peace.
Is it a matter of omission, the simple act of not mowing? Or is there something else involved, some sowing of seeds? I’m wondering about meadows and what makes the one I visit so kind on the eyes.
It is not the regularity of the plantings. There are no rows of tulips, no artful arranging of azalea and dogwood. No, it’s the very randomness that appeals to me, I think. The buttercups, the chicory, the tall grasses gone to seed, the flat blades and thin blades, even the occasional cat tail — all mixed up together. Like a bouquet of wildflowers that draws its beauty not from any one blossom but from all of them mixed together.
Yesterday, when I was on a woods walk, an unleashed shelty ran by me. I’ve seen this dog before and thought he might be allowed to run along the paths unsupervised. But when I saw him 20 minutes later trotting down the main street of our neighborhood, I knew I had an escapee on my hands. The little guy wouldn’t let me close enough to read his tags, so I followed him until he darted into a house at the end of a cul-de-sac. He was safely home.
What impressed me about this dog was his self-possession. He seemed to know where he was going. He was never lost. He was just out exploring. He was the perfect illustration of what self-defense experts tell us: Always act like you know where you’re going, even when you don’t.
Today — on the date some Christians predict the Rapture will happen, believers will enter heaven and non-believers will be left behind until the world officially ends October 21 — we decide to hammer out the dates for a family vacation. Which puts us in the ranks of the nonbelievers, or at least nonbelievers based on the predictions of Christian author Harold Camping.
When I was a kid I worried a lot about the end of the world, a result of strict Catholic schooling and an overactive imagination. But since then I’ve fretted about all sorts of other things — from finishing my homework and finding a job (when I was younger) to the myriad concerns of raising children, which if you’re looking for things to worry about, are pretty much unlimited.
What keeps us sane, what keeps us going, is making plans anyway. Lighting the candle in the darkness, that sort of thing. It’s the only way to go.
The cars are unloaded, the bags unpacked, the laundry, well let’s just say it’s “in process.” The young adults are back, sort of. And it is a culmination, is it not? A glorious jumble of conversations and cooking styles and inside jokes. It is like surfing a very big wave, though I have never surfed. It is, I should say, like that drawn-out pause at the top of the roller coaster, catching the breath before the fun begins.
On these mornings-after I tiptoe quietly through the vanishing darkness. I turn off movies, put away cereal boxes, even (supreme pleasure) tuck blankets around sleeping children.
And then I claim the early morning. It is still mine.
