Post by whereiwant2b on Nov 14, 2015 15:35:13 GMT
When I put together a family album, I found two photos from the start of WWII. One was of my father in boot camp in early 1942 and the other was of my mother and older sister, age 9 at the time, that had writing on the back indicating it was sent to my father in camp. Both had been trimmed to wallet size.
My father, who my mother said rushed to volunteer for service right after Pearl Harbor even though he could have avoided the draft due to having a minor child, was sort of half sitting on a boulder. He was dressed in khakis with no insignia. He looked thin, tired- in fact exhausted as was to be expected in a 32 years old furniture salesman/interior decorator in competition with a bunch of 18 year olds.
My mother and sister were standing close, leaning on each other, in front of a two story house. A dimly seen face is looking out from a second story window behind and above their heads. My sister told me that she thought it was her grandmother.
All the people in the photos, even the dimly seen face, look stressed and distracted. My mother's writing on the back of her photo was an apology for not being able to find a picture of her smiling to send to him.
Later there were a many photos of my father towards the end of the war show him laughing with a bunch of other laughing soldiers in camps around various ruined buildings. The notes on the back give names of people in them and what they were doing. Notes of a person who thinks that he will soon be home and needs to remember the guys.
But the first pictures are haunting. They show people in the first throws of having their lives shifted about helplessly in ways that could be awful. No one has managed yet to reorganize their faces into the normal pretense in photos with their "now smile" expressions. They are scared and exhausted and have yet to muster the fiction that everything, at least in this picture, is ok.
My father, who my mother said rushed to volunteer for service right after Pearl Harbor even though he could have avoided the draft due to having a minor child, was sort of half sitting on a boulder. He was dressed in khakis with no insignia. He looked thin, tired- in fact exhausted as was to be expected in a 32 years old furniture salesman/interior decorator in competition with a bunch of 18 year olds.
My mother and sister were standing close, leaning on each other, in front of a two story house. A dimly seen face is looking out from a second story window behind and above their heads. My sister told me that she thought it was her grandmother.
All the people in the photos, even the dimly seen face, look stressed and distracted. My mother's writing on the back of her photo was an apology for not being able to find a picture of her smiling to send to him.
Later there were a many photos of my father towards the end of the war show him laughing with a bunch of other laughing soldiers in camps around various ruined buildings. The notes on the back give names of people in them and what they were doing. Notes of a person who thinks that he will soon be home and needs to remember the guys.
But the first pictures are haunting. They show people in the first throws of having their lives shifted about helplessly in ways that could be awful. No one has managed yet to reorganize their faces into the normal pretense in photos with their "now smile" expressions. They are scared and exhausted and have yet to muster the fiction that everything, at least in this picture, is ok.
