TheBanyanTree: Nostalgic Day

[Sharon Mack]

Today is a nostalgic day.  There is no reason.  No trigger, no special
memory attached to the date...nothing!

I have a disk.  It is the family photo album that my niece put together
for us two Christmases ago after my father, the least of the three major
people who helped to raise me...my mom, her sister and my dad, had
passed away.  I couldn't look at those photos for the first year and
then after that only for short periods of time....I always ended up
crying my head off.

The sweetness of my parents love is portrayed in those photos.  Some
were taken in Germany right after the war when they first met.  My Aunt
is in them, too.  Young and beautiful and full of hope...the three of
them.  It's amazing to see them that way.

I printed out a photo of my Mom.  She is standing with her legs
together holding out the skirt of her dress.  Her head is slightly
cocked to one side and she's smiling....smiling with her lips and with
her eyes.  I know my father happened to take that photo.  It's in the
Officers' Club in Germany.  My mother, a German citizen, was the maid of
my father's CO.   My father was a First Lieutenant at the time.  They
didn't much like my mother being there but they liked my Dad and so
grudgingly allowed it.  They brought my Aunt with them, too.  Double
sniffs from the upper echelon on that one!

My mother told me that when she and Daddy met, they kissed so long and
so much that their lips were sore.  Later, when my father told everyone
he planned to marry my mother and take her back to the states, his
fellow officers and my mother's boss and his wife tried to talk him out
of it.  She remembers coming down the stairs of her boss's house and
seeing them all grouped around my father talking intensely, and though
she couldn't hear their words, sensed that it was bad.  When they saw
her they moved away from my father and as her eyes met my father's, he
was weeping.  He took her from that house that day.  He never told her
what they said.

Their love never skipped a beat.  Not in the bad times and especially
never in the good times.  The had five children and lived and died
loving one another.

I printed out a photo of my Dad in his uniform, hatless.  I have to
stop now.  I can't stop sniveling and I have to work.  It's been three
years and still, it's all I can stand....only a bit of remembering at a
time.  It is still too poignant for me...still a bit too sad...the
losing of them.