When I was eleven years old, my family was living in a tiny town in Minnesota called Dovray. My dad was the contractor on a Norwegian Lutheran church being built in that farming community of 100 people. The town was really behind the times in 1950. My younger siblings all went to school in the one-room school house down the hill. (I've often felt envy that they had that experience while I had to make a one-hour long bus ride over to Westbrook for 7th grade.)
There was a general store called Smestad's Mercantile a block away. I was sophisticated enough that I knew how old-fashioned the store was compared to other places we had lived. It was just like the general stores I saw in old cowboy movies. On one side of the store the old man and his wife sold "dry goods" like flannel shirts and four-buckle overshoes. On the other side they sold groceries from a counter just inside the door.
There were open cardboard boxes of cookies and sheets of saltine crackers standing by the counter. The customer could take a brown paper bag and fill the bag to be weighed and priced. With no air conditioning and sealed packaging, the cookies and crackers were often stale. I don't remember if I was in Smestad's for cookies that day but I remember standing by the counter as he told me that his boy had been at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed.
He was terribly sad and I was very confused. I'm not at all sure that I responded appropriately. Being a kid, with the off-kilter sense of time kids have, ten years seemed so very long ago that I wondered why he was talking about it.
Now that I am 73, I realize how very recent his loss was and how much he was still hurting from that dreadful day.
11 comments:
Indeed. I was only six month old then and really have no memories of the was at all.
We live...we learn.
Jane x
Pearl Harbor was three months before I was born. For some reason, Armistice Day and Memorial Day were the important days for my father.
I wonder what events will give my grandchildren a thrill of horror or pleasure when they are seventy years old.
A sad day, but that's a while now.
Pearl Harbor was before me but my parents talked about it as if it were yesterday. When hub and I lived in Hawaii, we attended the memorial service held on the construct near the Arizona, an extremely moving event made even more moving by the veterans in attendance from that fateful day. What bothers me somewhat is that Pearl Harbor did not occur a long time ago, not in the context of history, counter image to what a youth-centered culture thinks. Sad.
Wow, a touching story! I visited the Pearl Harbor site with my Mum back in '77 when we were in Hawaii. I still remember it well.
I was touched by your story and remember my parents and grandparents talking about that day. My grandfather was stationed there in the 20s and my mother attended school at Pearl Harbor. I remember a few years ago, when I traveled to Japan for work, how amazing it was that the United States and Japan have such a respect for one another now--Time does heal everything, XOXO
I'm just reading a book at the moment about time and how different ten years can feel to a child and to an adult, specially I'd guess in the case of a great tragedy that touched an adult personally but to the child is like something in the history books
Thanks for stopping by, Ms Sparrow. There's a small Norman Rockwell museum not far from Omaha that hub and I found by accident once and spent hours savoring the treasures. I sometimes wonder what he would paint today.
Had read a lot about it (especially in the Readers Digest) but the movie brought everything into a reality.
I miss those old stores , love when we find a nostalgic one of sorts up in Maine or New Hampshire.
That gentleman seemed to have made an impact on you so somewhere inside you understood his pain, even at that confused tender age.
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