A Walker in the Suburbs

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.

If you click on the link you can read it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3478-2004May30.html

Or, you can read it below. Happy Memorial Day!

washingtonpost.com

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.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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!”

Yesterday I went for a walk in the suburbs of Lexington, Kentucky. Growing up I didn’t think of them as suburbs; we called them “subdivisions.” If pressed, we could walk downtown from our outlying area. But suburbs they are, with the wide lawns and good schools to prove it.

I squeezed in yesterday’s stroll before the rain, and the entire walk had a sense of fullness and portent that sharpened the sensations. I have a circle route I walk when I’m here, and it takes me through an older neighborhood, into a new one and then back into the older one again. I noticed the locust trees, their fallen petals dried in piles on the street. Phlox is blooming here, and roses in profusion.

A circle walk is a calming practice; it brings you back quite naturally to where you started. Not unlike a visit home.

The last two nights I have been watering the new plants as the last bit of light left the sky. It’s a pleasant way to see in the evening: the stilling dark, the birds with their last full trills of the day; the gentle sizzle of the water as it leaves the hose. I can feel my shoulders loosening, my jaw muscles, too. The cares of the day peel away. My heart is full; I’m ready to sleep.

If I’m lucky my day begins with daylight. But often it starts much earlier. For some reason I wake up at 4:14 or 3:35 or some other random, bleary number that’s seared into my sleep-deprived brain by that first glimpse of the digital clock.

It’s then that I wish for the soft landing of the analog timepiece. Yeah, it’s early, a little after 4, or half-past three. But just how early it’s difficult to say. Maybe I looked at the clock wrong. Maybe it’s almost 5. I like the fuzziness, the offhandedness of such a beginning. I’d rather not know exactly when I started my day.

My first home of memory was a two-bedroom house in a lot full of sunshine and two spindly trees. Our landscape was seared with light. The subdivision was called Idle Hour, named for a farm by that name. As the years have passed, Idle Hour (the neighborhood) has remained stolidly middle class, full of tidy little homes made of brick or fieldstone. The extra wide streets have kept the place perpetually young, looking wet behind the ears, just established, even though it has been around for years.

On my walk yesterday I passed the last stages of a new development in our neighborhood. Most of the houses are completed but the last few are still in process. One of those houses is just a frame and I spotted two workers balanced easily on its roof joists against the blue, blue sky.

The sight of a half-finished house reminds me of my childhood. The hammer and saw are the soundtrack of my youth. I will always associate that buzz and hum with life itself. With herds of children, like young deer running from yard to yard, pressing their noses against the screens of the cool houses next door (the house next door was always cooler, even though none of us had air conditioning) to recruit more members for a rag-tag game of spud. Everywhere we ran or skipped or pulled our wagon in those days we heard the sounds of new construction.

It’s good to hear them again.

Whether by plan or by accident, our brief stay in Indiana came during morel season. And Tom’s brother Phil is one of the most hawk-eyed morel-hunters around. We went for a hike with Phil on Saturday and came back with more than a quart of the wild mushrooms. We cleaned the morels, soaked them and sauteed them in butter. Then we served them with steak and salad.

The morels tasted musty and rich. Eating them was like eating the woods. Every time I took a bite I thought about how precious they were, how they took so much effort to find, but how rewarding it was to discover them tucked up under a pile of leaves or hiding next to an old decaying log. Wild food. It tastes good.

(Photo by Phil Gardner)

As I write this morning my eye is trained on a ceremony happening thousands of miles away. I listen to the men and boy’s choir sing a hymn. I marvel at the vivid reds of the robes and of the carpet that extends down the length of Westminster Abbey (different red carpet above but the best I can muster).

I remember visiting the place, the sacred ground, the poets and the leaders who are buried there, the ceremonies that sanctified the walls and windows and every inch of the air.

In the front of the altar stand a woman in a long white dress with tapering lace sleeves, and a man in a smart red jacket. They are special, these people, but their marriage, like any other, will rise and fall on their own efforts, on how much they can give, on how much they can receive. “Every wedding is a royal wedding,” they are told.

As the ceremony ends the congregation inside the Abbey and everyone outside it sing “Jerusalem,” a favorite of mine since I first saw the movie “Chariots of Fire” many years ago. I take that as a good omen!

In the last few months our dog, Copper, has become afraid of thunderstorms. He is a plucky little guy with strong shoulders and haunches and otherwise unfazed by the world around him. But now he trembles and races for the lowest, most protected ground when he hears a rumble of thunder.

Copper makes me think about fear, the irrationality of it, how it comes unbidden and unbound; how it makes us its own. When I see him like this I want to sit and hold him all day. But even if I could he would have none of it. Fear makes him restless, too.

These twin impulses, to fear and to comfort, they are buried deep down in all of us. So deep that they are often obscured. They dress up in other clothes, they parade around as silliness or ambition or pride or addiction. But they are there. I’m sure of it.

Yesterday was Earth Day; tomorrow is Easter. Today we are nicely tucked between earth and heaven. Which is where we are most comfortable, anyway.

“[It is a] a shabby genteel sentiment,” wrote the 19th-century British historian William Winwood Reade, “which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.”

I disagree. It is not a “shabby sentiment” that makes us feel uncomfortable in our human skin, that makes us believe there is something for us after this life is done. We may be wrong, of course. But hope is a choice. An informed choice.