Catching Up

Hi everyone! Sorry for the long wait for my next post, but work and three kids make for a busy lifestyle.

Yeah, the economy is crashing. Life goes on in our household, as it must in every other across America. Despite the fears for the future, moms continue to visit the grocery store every week and nag our children to do homework and practice their lessons.

Want to hear our cat yowl? Ask my 8-year-old to start playing his violin. He's darned good for his age, but the occasional sour note leaks out before he adjusts his fingering. We've succeeded in convincing Freddy that the cat LIKES his music. Otherwise she'd just go and hide, right? The fact that she yowls and jumps on his pantleg when he's playing is her way of wanting to join in. I'm not sure he believes it, but he laughs at the cat with the rest of us. Ya gotta love that about him.

I'll challenge the girls to videotape the cat some time and post it on YouTube. If they do it, I'll be sure to let you know.

My uncle Glen died this past month. I didn't go to his funeral since I couldn't afford the flight ticket at the time. Instead, I had a mini-eulogy with my family around the kitchen table one night. Glen was an incredible man, and I truly loved him. He was a natural-born story teller, and he also had the foresight to record the more amazing of his life stories.

My great-uncle Hugh was a different sort of guy. I suspect he was autistic, although it was never diagnosed. Glen sat down with him 40 years ago at a piano, started a tape recorder, and asked Hugh to start playing. The tape is amazing. Hugh couldn't read a note, but he could play almost any song that Glen requested. Sometimes Hugh tried to sing along, but he seldom remembered the words. So he'd fill in with "dum de dum" or make up his own words. You can hear him sing the names of his friends and family and then mumble unintelligbly, all while banging away confidently and accurately on that old piano. Hugh died when I was only five, but he was legend in my family. I'm so glad Glen recorded a piece of Hugh for our generation.

There's so much more to Glen's stories. He was a guard at the Nuremburg trials in Germany after World War II. He asked some of the Germans to sign an autograph book for him. I remember holding that book and although I knew it was a piece of history, I wasn't nearly as impressed by their signatures as I was by his words. Glen kept a diary in which he jotted down his impressions of each of the Germans that he guarded. He watched their actions closely, speculating on what drove these men to participate in such atrocities. His untrained assessments sound dead on, when compared to later psychological studies done by experts.

One of my favorite stories involves a time preceding the trials when Glen was a soldier overseas and was hospitalized with jaundice. I don't remember all the details of the story, but once he was released from the hospital, he and another man set out alone to rejoin their unit. There was a delay or some mix-up and by nightfall, they still hadn't caught up with their unit.

Imagine these two young boys, just released from hospital, all alone walking down a dusty road as the day fades away. They were exhausted, with no food or water or place to sleep. Oh yeah, they were in a foreign country during a WAR. Glen never said it outright, but I know it was one of the lowest points in his life.

In the fading light, Glen saw the outline of an old abandoned barn up ahead. At least they'd have a place to sleep for the night! And once they got in the barn, they noticed an old jar of cherries sitting on the windowsill. The two men speculated on how the jar had ended up in this barn and how long they'd been sitting on that ledge. Glen suddenly said, "I'm going to eat those cherries."

His companion let Glen take the first bite, but he eventually joined in. Once their stomachs were full, they went to sleep. The next morning they woke up and began walking again. They eventually caught up with their unit and life went on.

I think my Uncle Glen went into that barn on that night as a boy, and came out a man. No one was there to tell him whether those cherries were good to eat, or if a barn is a safe place to sleep for a night. Glen had to make those decisions on his own, and he survived.

Years later, someone gave Glen a book of photos from World War II. He found a shot of his old unit, encamped along a familiar road, with a familiar barn in the background. And there, faintly, in the window of the barn, you could see glass reflecting and a bit of red...a jar of cherries.