Standing at attention in a pouring Georgia rain for mail call at o-dark-thirty in a sea of mud on a parade ground, the recruit heard the drill sergeant bark out his name.
He double-timed it to the front of the formation, but not fast enough to please the sergeant. Disgusted, he tossed the letters in the general direction of the space the young man was to have occupied.
The mail landed in the water and mud.
“Pick it up,” the sergeant snarled.
“Pick it up yourself,” the private growled back.
An officer standing nearby witnessed the proceedings.
“Sergeant, pick up the mail and hand it to him.”
With a look that could peel potatoes – which is what the smiling triumphantly private would end up doing – the sergeant’s eyes communicated the threat.
The look became reality, and after pulling extensive KP the young soldier put in his transfer to Texas.
It was on a train to the Lone Star state that the young soldier who would one day be my father met the young woman who would one day be my mother.
Their eyes met. It was a look that could peel away any resistance to falling in love. With a smile that brought the soldier to stock-still attention, she motioned to the seat next to her and said, “This space is not occupied.”
She was as beautiful as a bouquet of flowers in full blossom; her lips were as striking as a single red tulip; and her eyes shone blue as a summer sky.
My mom and dad are long since gone. But their just-so-happened love that began on a train headed to Texas, which had been preceded in a just-so-happened incident on a rainy morning in Georgia, gave life to a legacy of three children, eight grandchildren, and ten greatgrandchildren.
Happy Mother’s Day.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
David Anderson,
While you and I are now over 2,800 miles apart, we are still connected as friends by your writing and my reading your Mother’s Day letter column today.
During my now almost 78 years on the planet, I crossed paths with your mother and father in the late 1990s as Lakewood became a city.
Oh ya, I can see and actually, I can hear your father, as a private, saying, ““Pick it up yourself”. He was a proud and a strong man who always knew how to stand up for himself based on what he felt was right.
We need more like him.
Oh David, like your father I spent time with a drill instructor in Texas. I have my own stories to tell which supports the concept that your father and I had more in common than we ever knew. I even have a train story. Someday let’s swap some stories.
Joseph Boyle
Thank you Joe for sharing your memories about my father on this Mother’s Day weekend.
Two years ago, my truck was four mattresses and one box springs lighter, and I’m leaving Lakewood’s free dumpster-days weekend but not before City Manager John Caulfield leaned on the open driver’s window and said he’d recently returned from the Pentagon and there had occasion to reminisce with a fellow soldier with whom he had been stationed during their Army days at Ft. Lewis.
“He mentioned your father,” Caulfield said. “He thought very highly of your dad. Thought you should know that.”
I did need to know that. And though the compliment comes all the way from the nation’s capital, it doesn’t surprise me.
Locally, dad – and my mother too – was all about community.
For them, community mattered.
Sometimes I admit, as one of my favorite authors Louis L’Amour writes, I “r’ar up all teeth an’ talon.”
And sometimes I’m “about as friendly as a grizzly bear with a sore tooth” (L’Amour’s novel “Tucker”, pp.9, 46 respectively).
And I can thank my dad for that.
Beautiful story. I appreciate your sharing and that your parents shared the story with you.
Thank you Nan.
I too of course am thankful for this story of home, and so many like them, that my father shared with me.
This one I distinctly remember hearing from my father as just the two of us sat by a fireside drinking hot Jell-O high in the mountains of the Olympics looking down from our campsite into Enchanted Valley from which we had just climbed 2,000 vertical feet of switch-back trail.
Not surprisingly, the place where we pitched our tent in that beautiful meadow at the top of O’Neill Pass had a signpost marking not only the location but the memories my father shared there:
“Home Sweet Home.”
i loved this story. My parents also met by accident and they married 6 months later. A year later I was born and my father left for WWII and missed walking and talking. Six years later my brother was born and shortly before he was 9 months old, he left for the Korean War and again missed the walking and talking. He stayed in the Army and retired when I was a sophomore in High School and turned in his retirement papers so I could go to High School without moving again. It was my 13th school when we got her to Lakewood. During his absence for WWII, my mother lived in Tillicum close to the school. Ironically after living all over the county and two foreign countries, I ended up graduating with the children from my first and second grade classes. ironically, they remembered me and I made “Old” ‘lNew” friends. It was wonderful. My parents made it to 6 months of their 50th anniversary with a wonderful marriage, loving parents, and a good life for my brother and I. They were good people and great parents. I was lucky. I made sure I told them so during my lifetime.
After death, I found a letter I had written to them when I was away in college thanking them for my wonderful life and for being the loving parents they had been to me. During my days in a sorority at the U of W I learned that many of my sorority sisters did not have the kind of life I had lived, so I wanted to let them know how lucky I felt. Obviously, my mother saved that letter all the rest of her life and it set there in her dresser drawer on display so she could re-read it whenever she chose. That gives me so much pleasure and gratitude.
What a wonderful story Pat! So good for you to tell your parents how much they meant to you. The fact that the letter was forever kept, no doubt to be read and reread and perhaps tear-stained with happiness, is such a sweet return on their investment in you!
sweet of you. I have so many cherished memories. They were older when they married so they have been gone for years and I still miss them every day. They gave me a wonderful life and showed their love to me every day;