April Violets and October Anniversaries

Today my parents celebrate their forty-third wedding anniversary.  In 1966, one of the young men my dad was serving with in Vietnam mentioned in a letter to his kid sister back home that one of his Air Force buddies could use some extra mail.  My fourteen-year-old mom dutifully put pen to paper for her big brother, my dad soon wrote back, and four years of Air Mail later, it was their matchmaker, Dad's friend and Mom's brother, who served as Best Man at their October 24th wedding.  "Some of my best work," my uncle brags of their union.  In four more years, my parents would name their first child after dear Uncle Dan.  As I like to point out to my mom, who is still upset that they don't have better pictures from their wedding day, her marriage turned out even if her photographs didn't.  

 

Before the autumn wedding and baby Daniel, though, there were those four years of letters, care packages, and rare visits home on-leave.  "I would complete soak all my stationery and envelopes in Yardley's April Violets," Mom always mentions when she talks about their correspondence.  She wrote my dad a letter a day.  Dad, for his part, sent letter, pictures, and love poems--"And your dad was really a poet," Mom always adds at this point in her reminiscences.  I come by my love of letter-writing naturally, I can't help but think, just as so many of "[their] songs" from the mid-late 1960s--"Crimson and Clover," "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and "My Girl," to name just a few--had become my own favorites by the time I was eleven.  My parents finally saw each other in-person for the first time during one of my dad's visits home.  High school student Mom anxiously waited at her parents' window in New York while my dad made the drive up from Pennsylvania.  "When I saw him coming down the sidewalk in his dress uniform. . . !"  Mom still gushes at the memory, blushingly trailing off each time she shares it.  "And I'm telling you, Vally," she always goes on, "I knew right away that he was a keeper:  My brother Eric was just a baby then and was playing with his toy cars, and your dad got right down on the floor beside him and started racing the cars around with him."  (How a man treats the very young and very old tells you all you need to know about a man's character, my mother advised me ages ago.) 

Perfumed mail, The Big Chill soundtrack of their pen pal days, and matchbox car races can make it all seem much more lighthearted than it was, of course.  "Come home safe" is written in Mom's teenage penmanship across the backs of so many of her old photos to Dad.  The scene in Forrest Gump that shows a safely-home-from-Vietnam Forrest reunited with his beloved Jenny is the one that always gets my parents, and being in the room with them while they watch uniform-clad Forrest and long-haired Jenny embrace after his years in the service almost feels like too personal a Mom and Dad Moment to intrude upon.  Their own love story didn't have to turn out this well, and we all know it.  Dad doesn't decorate family members' graves on Memorial Day without remembering the classmate with whom he enlisted and without whom he made it home.  

Tonight my parents will exchange cards and maybe catch dinner and a movie, while two of their grandchildren daydream about next week's Halloween costumes and another grandchild waits a few more weeks to be born.  The letters that started it all, still tucked into their red and blue-bordered Air Mail envelopes, have been carefully packed away since 1970 in my parents' bedroom closet, faintly flower-scented testaments to the wonder of true love. 

♥

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

On Veterans Day, I am thinking of Dad, who served in Vietnam with my mom's big brother. Dad and Uncle Dan lived in the same Air Force barracks and became good friends. Uncle Dan mentioned to my mom in a letter home that a guy he was serving with was lonely and would appreciate some mail. Mom and Dad remained pen pals throughout Dad's entire time in the service. When Dad came home after his required four years, he and Mom got married--and celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary two weeks ago. Uncle Dan, who also made it home safely, still reminds them from time to time that they can thank him for their marriage. That is a happy Vietnam story, and yes, we can all thank Uncle Dan. There are other things to thank him and my dad for, as well, of course, although "thank you" is too little in comparison with years of sacrifice, lost friends, and the dark nights and nightmares. 

My grandmother once told me something her brother Al had recounted to his family about his experiences in the army in World War I, and it still gives me chills. Uncle Al and the men in his unit were lying in wait on a hillside, still in the silence and straining to hear any movement, when they suddenly saw a line of what Grandma described to me as plumes marching over the hill toward them. Uncle Al had explained that the German soldiers at that time wore helmets with a distinctive spike or plume on top and later told his family that he had never been as terrified as he was in that moment, seeing that line of helmet-tops appear. Uncle Al also came home safely. One of his daughters, likely now in her seventies, proudly sent me his army photo above when I asked years ago.

My grandfather's youngest brother's war was World War II, where he served in the Marine Corp. Amongst the lifetime of personal papers, photographs, and paper ephemera of my grandparents' that my parents and I long ago had to sort through was a yellowed wall calendar with a note written onto one day's square marking Uncle Mike's departure for boot camp. Uncle Mike lived into his 80s.

A favorite old Veterans Day comic strip from Lynn Johnston:
(click to enlarge)

  

Dad and Uncle Dan and Uncle Al and Uncle Mike--and Uncle Warren, who served in the Navy, and Great-Grandpa, who was an Italian POW during the first World War, and Papa Lee, who was one of the helmsmen of the USS Wasp--and veterans everywhere: Thank you and happy Veterans Day.  ♥