September 9, 2016 Hello ,
These days the search for common ground seems a Herculean effort, and it's tempting to leave the task to someone
else.
But I am reminded by a friend that peace and understanding are achieved between people one-to-one. She inspires me to be open and willing to keep
trying. I'm delighted to share her story with you today.
My Dad, 9/11 and Common Ground |
Photo courtesy Robert J. Fisch
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11785564) By M. Hunt
My mom called about an hour after the towers fell. She said that when my father saw the news, he went to the kitchen and started sweeping the floor.
He told her he needed to clear debris, to try and create a safe passage.
My dad had, at that point, suffered a stroke along with the first handful of what would become innumerable brain-ravaging TIAs. Dad had been a career Army officer, a West Pointer who served in WWII and Korea.
He was stationed in Berlin when the wall went up and commanded a Special Forces unit in Vietnam. (Shown at left) He was inside the Brinks Hotel in
Saigon when it was bombed.
Dad was never a big teller of war stories and by the time the Twin Towers came down, he’d lost much of the ability to tell one even if he wanted to. Whatever memory was awakened that morning, whatever triggered his need to sweep the kitchen floor stayed locked inside him.
My dad had not been an easy guy for me to grow up with. He liked order and discipline and was not particularly
emotional.
He was gone for the births of several of his children and I never knew if that bothered him. He believed in sensible jobs that made definable contributions.
I wanted to be a dancer when I was growing up but he was dismissive of the
arts. He called artists navel gazers.
I believed that when the world seemed inhumane, a beautiful thing - music or dance or a good book - made it humane again. I believed my dad spent so much of his life in an ordered system of command and control that he didn’t understand the contribution beauty made to humanity.
However, in the aftermath of the
horror of September 11, society regained its collective humanity through the actions of police, firefighters and medical personnel - people with sensible jobs making definable contributions.
For most of my dad’s Army career, he carried a little Olympus camera in his pocket. He snapped pictures of his friends, of the scenery and architecture around him. He also had snaps he labeled, “Civilians.”
This photo came from a box marked, “Korea, 1954.” He took pictures of people shopping in village markets, working in fields, walking down city streets and country roads. People living their lives despite the presence of soldiers all around them. He captured
their humanity.
Dad’s photographs make me wonder if he and I wanted the same thing all along, we just couldn’t agree on the path.
M. Hunt's fiction and essays have appeared in a number of newspapers and magazines. She was a finalist for the 2012 Katherine Paterson prize, and a winner of the 2011 Pacific
Northwest Inlander short fiction award. Find out more about her at www.mhuntwrites.com. As always, thanks for sending in your book recommendations. Norm Haskett recomends Ronald Rosbottom's When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940-1944.
Norm
says, "Rosbottom’s description of the Nazi occupation and the Parisians’ response is wonderfully described, almost lyrically in language that practically doesn’t exist in historical literature."
On the topic of the Japanese Internment, LeeAnn Rizzuti mentioned two books for middle grade. Dear
Miss Breed by Joanne Oppenheim is true stories of Japanese children told through letters they wrote to a beloved San Diego Librarian.
Thin Wood Walls by David Patneaude, is a novel about 11-year-old basketball player Joe Hanada. LeeAnn also wrote me that
Italian-Americans also suffered relocation during WWII. So now I have a new research topic! Until next week... Have you read a great book? Tell me about it. Have a burning question? Let me know.
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