FRACTURED MEMORIES

             The floorboards creaked and the twenty year old linoleum crackled under foot when you walked across it.  The patterns were quaint – gray feathers in the living room and dining room, splashy roses in the bedroom, and bright colored confetti flecks in a mottle of gray in the shotgun kitchen.  Acquired in the flush twenties, scuffed survivors of the Great Depression, the rugs continued to do service through the “make-do” time of the war years.  The tiny, chubby fingers had traced the intricate patterns when learning to crawl and caressed them when laying down for an impromptu nap.  They were the underpinnings of home, the base of her small world.  Right now her eye was tracing the scrolling feathers as she hunkered in her castle.  The curved cross pieces of the dining table were a magic bridge spanning the sea of feathers.  The four richly carved legs of the dining table were mighty oaks, and the legs of the eight dining chairs the rest of the forest that protectively encircled her secret world.

            Just then a cluster of trees was swept aside and a smiling face intruded upon the secret world.  Grandmother said, “Granddaddy brought up the mail.  Want to help me with the map?”  “The map” was a magic window into another world, just as unreal and just as mysterious as the one under the table. 

Grandmother lifted the chubby little girl from the floor to the top of the old oak library table.  They were so unalike, yet alike, these two boon companions.  On the wall above the table was a large map of the world.  Beneath it were three framed black and white photographs of two soldiers and a sailor.  Grandmother had two sons and five sons-in-law.  These three were the only ones the little girl didn’t know in flesh and blood.  To her they were the enigmatic heroes represented in a two dimensional black and white world she couldn’t enter.  They were her daddy and her two uncles.

            Grandmother scanned the newspaper, but what she found there wasn’t news.  The newspaper arrived at the farm a day late through the mail, and the news it contained was not fresh when it arrived on the printed page.  They had heard when Granddaddy tuned the radio.  “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea.”  Today was June ninth.  Two days before they had heard about the invasion of Normandy.  Still Grandmother scanned the news, perhaps from habit, before moving the pins that represented Daddy and Uncle W. C. from Italy to France.  There was no specific news from the Pacific so Uncle Speedy’s pin still floated in the Pacific, no known destination.  With that business tended to, Grandmother lifted the little girl down from the table and they engaged in another favorite activity.  She loved to stand on the backs of the rockers while Grandmother sat in the rocking chair.  Grandmother would let down her long salt and pepper hair and the little girl would brush it lovingly.  Then Grandmother would confine it once again in its daily braids which arched across the top of her head like a tiara.

            The little girl would continue to grow.  The three men in the photographs would return home in time.  Uncle Speedy wasn’t the jaunty young man in the photograph.  He was a nervous, skinny wraith.  Pounded across the Pacific by the thundering of the huge guns on board his battleship, he had a condition called “shell shock.”  Any unexpected or loud sound would make him jump.  He didn’t handle emotions or problems well.  Eventually, he and his marriage disintegrated.  Uncle W. C., who had been a shy, but mischievous and good humored young man, became quieter and quieter as the years passed.  Daddy, who had been handsome and outgoing, was aged beyond his years.  He had a hard shell that no one penetrated.  The little girl didn’t know why.  Life moved on, as it will.  Time worked its magic on some, its voodoo on others.  The men became old men.  The Grandmother became very old and frail.  And the little girl became a woman who married and had children.

            Then another and different war intruded into her world.  In the late fifties her family had acquired a black and white television.  The news of the world arrived no more quickly than it had via the radio of the forties, but it didn’t intrude deep into her world.  It was just sort of there, taken for granted.  Korea happened, it came and it went, and she knew of a few young men who had fought there, but no one she was close to.  By the time her children were born, the girl and her husband had acquired the latest electronic fad, a color television.  Two things happened.  A favorite cousin was sent to fight in Vietnam.  This bright, hopeful young man began to write letters home that were filled with bitter disillusionment.  And that electronic wonder box began depositing the war, blow by blow, into her living room.  All the blood and horror and gore that these young men were experiencing was right there in her living room, accompanying the dinner hour.  How could one countenance that?  How could they keep sending our brightest and best to the slaughter?  Why hadn’t anyone known sooner about the horrors experienced by the men of World War Two, and of all the wars gone before?  By 1974 the girl had a new concern.  Her two sons were teens.  Would they soon be fodder for this never ending war?  Before 1974 ended America was out of Vietnam, poorer but probably not any wiser.

            Time passed and once again Americans had a war deposited blow by blow in their living rooms, at least for a week or two.  CNN broadcast every moment of that two week “war.”  It was there for whomever cared to tune in, the shining green of night vision cameras etching every bullet and shell on a black sky.  Americans rode this one high.  It was as though this quick and stunning victory erased the “shame” of the withdrawal, the “unwon war.”  Patriotism burgeoned and it acquired a blatant cockiness that hadn’t existed in World War Two.  This too quick, too easy victory was like picking a scab off the top of a deep suppurating cancer.  The scab quickly healed, but the cancer festered beneath.  The President who engaged in that war wrote a book warning that to continue any further or to open that wound would result in a civil war that would disrupt the entire region and possibly start World War Three.  Ironically, the President who ignored that warning was his own son.

            In World War Two no sacrifice was too great.  People willingly did without butter, sugar, cloth, gasoline, and rubber tires to provide for the troops.  People who were just emerging from the worst economic depression of history were willing to spend the few dollars they had on bonds to support the war effort.  There was no doubt industrial profiteering in World War Two, but it wasn’t blatant.  Now no one gives up anything.  Teens and adult gorge themselves on all the latest electronic gadgets and stylish clothing.  Cars, especially big SUV’s, suck up gas and oil like it isn’t rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth.  CEO’s of major corporations live like sultans of oil, as do the sultans of oil.  Our government spends and spends and spends, borrowing money it doesn’t have and can’t repay from governments who have never really had our best interests at heart.  We have mortgaged our grandchildren’s future to pay for a madman’s war.

            The old woman rocks and the toe of her shoe traces an imaginary scrolled feather pattern on the hardwood floor.  She’s the grandmother now, no longer a little girl, a girl, or even a young woman.  Her salt and pepper hair is short, mannish, no crown of braids.  Time has worked its magic on her life, weaving it through with threads of pain and sorrow and joy and love.  Now time works its voodoo on her aging body and she wonders if her bitter thoughts, the summation of a lifetime of experience, are but the mad ramblings of an ineffective old woman whom time is passing by.

Karen Rice © 2008