Bridging the Generation Gap

by iampunha

At his memorial service in March of 1999, my grandfather’s oldest daughter Marsha had this to say about her father: “He used to say ‘The smartest thing I ever did was ask Nancy Stookey to marry me.’” At the time I didn’t understand this comment or its origin, given his prestigious military career as well as some of his research undertakings, not to mention his intelligence regarding the chain of command underneath him. It would not be a large leap to say I thought he must have been on his seventh martini of the day (and for a man who averaged, I am told, six, this isn’t much of a stretch from the norm) when he said that.

My relationship with him was a very strange one. On the one hand I held him in extreme awe … he was the sort of grandfather any kid loved to have. My maternal grandparents had a boat (they took us on rides in it when we came to visit), a dock, caught and ate lobster and crab, kept a pool with a really fun deep end (it didn’t get gradually deep. It was about four and a half feet deep for about three quarters the length of the pool, and then it took about a 45 degree dive to the end), had fig trees and all manner of games, cards, trinkets from foreign countries and a big map showing where in the world they had visited.

And then there was, of course, the fact that not only had he served a tour or two in the Pacific Theater, he had seen significant action in combat (three wars. As a child I doubted anyone was so lucky as my grandfather, who survived three) and played the grizzled veteran to a T. I remember on one visit I asked to see his gun. I didn’t get to see it because he spent the next half hour or so lecturing me on how it was important to be careful with guns and knives and such things and to recognize the awesome power you could have behind you with one. He didn’t scold me at all. Rather, he himself exuded a sense of reverence for a weapon that, unloaded, was just a big hunk of metal and wood, but loaded could take a man’s life and then some. I would not, as far as I can remember, see any metal weapon of his until after his death, when my Uncle Jimmy and I were cleaning out a chest of drawers and found a few pistols with empty magazines around them. Maybe it is overly romantic of me to say that his spirit guided me to treat them with the same reverence that flowed from him toward them, even though I strongly suspect they were all unloaded. We had my grandmother come and take those away, individually, in plastic bags. That might have been my first experience handling a firearm of any sort.

Until his death he defied life itself. He had drunk a great deal; my mother grew into her twenties believing that it was common for a man to drink five martinis in a day. How he didn’t turn green (from cirrhosis, not envy) is something I will have to ask God should I ever meet Him. He smoked, he drank, he had a rather sedentary lifestyle, he drove in foul weather with poor vision. He visited West Point on the fourth Tuesday of every month, a day arrived at through his graduation year 1942: 4th 2sday. I remember on at least one occasion how he commented that it seemed gradually each time he visited fewer of his classmates were there.

Doctors had told him that with his lifestyle he would not live past his mid 70s. Obviously they hadn’t consulted him about this, because he was still going strong in the early 90s, and even the mid 90s, though by that time we could all see that his time was near. But on he plugged, somehow, with his drinking and his smoking. Maybe that is due in part to a rebirth of sorts combined with a sense of mortality; he spent much of his final ten years researching both former West Point graduates (MIA- and POW-status veterans) and a group of black Union soldiers who had pooled their land after the Civil War and founded a city. I do not remember seeing him more proud or more emotional than on that day when he talked to us about the honor they would be bestowed with, albeit-post-mortem: the city they founded, with land grants purchased at $1 per month each, would be recognized as an historical landmark by the State of Maryland.

I do not know if there was anything specific that drove him to record accounts of his fellow veterans who had been POWs. I do know (or at least I have been told so by his immediate family members and by him) that he was never in such a camp. Perhaps it was a sense of the mortality of those involved, wanting to record their plights so that others would know that war is much more than anything that can be shown in two and a half hours in a theater. For all that movies like “Saving Private Ryan” were accurate in their depictions of war, it is not always so romantic. My grandfather was serving when his son was born, and it was two and a half years before he saw that son for the first time. That separation, and the resulting strained relationship the two of them had, may have something to do with my Uncle Tom’s troubled times as a teenager and his homelessness for, I think (as it started long before I was born), the better part of three decades. We had assumed he was dead for many years when a family friend stumbled onto him panhandling in Baltimore around seven years ago.

The last time I visited him the first thing I did was walk over to him and ask to see the latest thing he was writing. I shudder now that I think back to it … I was, as I see it now, trying to tell him how to write. He had been mostly a methodical man in his job (as is, I would assume, the best thing to do from a point of view of military strategy). For him to switch gears entirely after so many years of that mindset was probably a fantastic undertaking on his part, and yet, considering this was his first venture at storytelling that I know of (he had written other pieces, but they had been more from careful research and looking at historic documents), it was better than I would be able to do had I been in his position.

My grandmother and I had had a falling out of sorts the year before when she believed I had told him that his writing was boring. She had always defended him fiercely, and I understand where that perception had taken its roots. What I had actually said was something to the effect of “put your reader in the passenger’s seat and take’m for a ride.” My guess is that she took that as a not-so-subtle way of saying “you’re going 5 in a 55. Step on the gas, old man.”

It was not surprising, then, that when she walked into the room we were in and saw us looking at an account he had written from a fellow veteran’s notes on a plane burning up and crashing (substantial, but not fatal, injuries resulted), she thought he had cajoled me into looking at it, or that I was otherwise not there of my own accord. I immediately assured her, while my grandfather combined looks of “You know better than that, Nancy” and “Hell if I know why he came over here to look at what I’ve been writing”, that I had taken the initiative in finding him (because I wanted to assure him, in my own subtle way, that I didn’t think his writing was dull, I just knew of ways to make it more lively).

And of those projects, of his 30 years in the military, all he had ever done that was good and right, he said the smartest thing he ever did was ask Nancy Stookey to marry him.

Up until November of last year, I thought he was a bit short on gray matter in the head. That is when I asked my beloved to marry me, and the very next time I thought about that thought of his I realized how beyond doubt he was, and how beyond doubt that same statement is for me. Asking Bailie to marry me was the combination of a lot of things … some rooted firmly in luck, others in coincidence, and others in me being able to see and think. Recognizing all she is, and all I will be able to be because of her, and seeing both challenge and victory in that woman, is the smartest thing I have done, and saying yes next year will be the second smartest thing I ever do.

The smartest, of course, was to assure that yes last year. Occasionally, when I am having an especially unlucky day, I ask her “You sure you want to marry me?” I am always joking. She is more than my rock; rocks get cold and hard and not much can live off one. I guess it’s unromantic of me to say that she is my home because it doesn’t evoke any pictures of Greek Goddesses or Helen of Troy or anything like that, but to understand this analogy you have to understand that I have called many uncomfortable, miserable places home, and wanted to be far away from them for a long time indeed.

I would not leave her for anything in the world or outside it. If I had to choose between my legs and her I’d be using a wheelchair until I died.

Through Bailie I am beginning to see the wisdom of a man I had written off as hopelessly old-fashioned, rooted in the way things were thirty years ago. And from that point of view I see more of him in me.

There is a great artistic bone in the body of many people in my father’s family. His grandfather, Joyce Kilmer, was a well-known and oft-published poet, and his grandfather, Frederick Frieseke, while not as well known, was heavily involved in the Impressionist movement in the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries. Several of my father’s siblings have successfully pursued and enjoyed careers in the arts, including photography, art (management and the creation of it), journalism, teaching and the writing of fiction, essays and poetry.

And in my poetry I can see shades of my heritage sometimes. I see many of my father’s stories in the characters I write, though I do not envision any manner of success either in fiction or in poetry. But it is elsewhere I look to find a genetic source for this drive I have to immortalize life in these written words.

I look to my grandfather, and I see that source. I write poetry because I want to try to describe something. When I wrote fiction it was to live through the characters I created. When I write narratives of this sort down, it is because what I am writing needs to be recorded. Not for every living soul, not even for most or many. But for some it needs to be known. There are too many things that happen to me that are important to too many people for me to leave 2 and 2 alone and wonder if I will ever see 4.

For my grandfather, it was, I think, a sense of mortality. His fellow classmates were dying and their travails were, in some cases, being lost to the cold earth. And he knew the sufferings of war and of life and would not let all of those days spent in POW camps, or in triage with burns covering limbs and faces, go for nothing. The unexamined life, as the saying by Socrates goes, is not worth living. He examined those lives with those men. I do not know how reluctant they had been to share those stories, if perhaps their families had begged to know what happened when their father or grandfather was station in Nam, or why he had a rough patch of skin covering most of his left arm. Perhaps my grandfather’s perspective as a long-time veteran was what enabled them to tell those stories. Maybe that factor had nothing to do with it. I have never met, to my knowledge, any of the men my grandfather wrote about, or whose accounts he rewrote when the original handwriting was illegible to almost everyone.

I do know where I get a very strong sense of the need to impart some detail of what I learn to whoever is willing to read. I do not have stories of flying a plane, taking heavy fire and going down in the jungles of Southeast Asia. I do not believe I will ever be in a position to be taken as a POW. I doubt anything I write will ever make for a good war movie. But I see, in the occasional experience (or those experiences spread over a number of years), something important enough to me to record.

I did not think, when I was in my teens, that I would be much like my grandfather. I did not want to be in the military (and I do not know that it would be possible anymore), I took pride in thinking I would not focus my entire life around my career at the expense of my family, and I certainly didn’t think I would treat my body as he did his. Knowing things about him made me want to be the opposite to separate myself from him because I saw things about him that were utterly odious to me.

He was brilliant as a military officer, both in terms of strategy and his desire to put good men below him (his theory was that if you have good men serving under you, your collective group will move much better and more efficiently than a man who puts incompetents below him to look better by comparison. Putting idiots to work under you makes your job harder). I believe, and share this belief with at least one other person, that he sacrificed another part of his life for that career. That part of his life is his family. One of the main reasons we didn’t visit my mother’s parents when I was growing up is that she saw how her parents were and wanted nothing to do with them as soon as such was feasible. I don’t think it was exactly their fault, but they didn’t know how to show her they loved her. They did know how to be devoid of tact. “Well, Melissa, you’re really very plain.” That came out of my grandmother’s mouth on more than one occasion, and beyond that I’m not going to quote her. You’ve got an imagination, you can think for yourself.

He was, to be blunt, not a family man. Nancy knew, when she said yes, that his career would come above much of the rest of life because his parents were living vicariously through him. My brother, at ten years old, had more schooling than my grandfather’s father received. They had not planned to have a son at that point, and his mother’s wedding dress is evidence of that. His parents wanted very badly for him to be what they could not be, and I think he carried that burden well for many years. He was a Brigadier (one star) General when he retired after thirty years in the US Army, and his retirement was not his decision. As my mother tells it, he felt at a loss for what to do in his retirement. Initially he hired himself out as a defense consultant (30 years in the military, he knew a thing or two about defense) for companies at $100 a day, but that business did not go well for him. My mother was 16 when he retired, and I think a few years later they started traveling a good deal. Much of it was to places they had already been (Germany, various Pacific islands), but much of it was not. I think they basically went where they wanted, helped by their savings and his pension. Interestingly enough, Bailie covers that aspect of our relationship; when I met her, she wanted to spend time in Italy before she got a boyfriend.

She has graciously allowed me to come before Italy, though I know what she wants to be ordering at a restaurant the day after we’re married, and I don’t think it’s a hamburger.

I have wanted a family since I was a very young child. When I think about it empirically, it’s just one of those things, as the saying goes. I can’t identify anything as being the ultimate reason other than I just want it.

I do not, however, want a family for show. I don’t want something that is a social tool or something I use as a conversation starter. I want children because I am fond of them, and my fondness for the one I am hoping will make one or two for me certainly helps.

He was not a family man, and I want to be one.

He wanted to be an educated man with a good job and money. He wanted to be unlike his father just as I wanted to be unlike him. His father, like him, was proud, worked hard and knew who he was.

As I look back at certain aspects of my life, I see a great desire to be unlike him. Where he failed, I want to succeed. Where he succeeded … I do not place such an undying importance. I do not need to be the best teacher ever. Ultimately I will be happy if people remember me fondly. I will, in all likelihood, not be forced to retire after 30 years, and given today’s teacher salaries that is certainly for the best.

We are not completely alike. But in trying to be unlike him I have done just the opposite, and through some seemingly random chain of events I have grown to see how some parts of him were not so bad after all. And it is in that light that I am starting to understand him … now that I do not need to demonize him any time I speak about him. I am not afraid of becoming what he was. In more than one way I would not mind that very thing happening.