Memorial Day
Yesterday was Memorial Day here in the U.S., but today is special, too. On Wednesday, six days back, I called Bethania Cemetery outside of Chicago and ordered grave decorations for my gramma, her mom, and her son, my Uncle Danny, who died in WW II and whom I never got to meet. Gramma gets a flowered sign which says "grandmother" and her mom gets one which says "mother" and Uncle Danny gets a new flag.
My dearest savant_da_rat and I brought him one last August, but it was probably removed in the cemetery's spring clean-up and if not, cannot have come through a Chicago winter very well.
The woman there, Patricia, is very nice. How someone can put up with a constant parade of grief and pain for a living is beyond me. When Ace died last month, I said as much to the vet tech who was helping Savant and the vet wrangle his remains into the back of the Element. She shrugged. "You get used to it. It's every day."
And I'm sure it is, and they do, and most of them still manage to maintain their compassion and kindness nonetheless (or at least, a very good imitation thereof). Me, I can barely get through a phone call ordering a flag for an uncle I never met.
I feel very close to Danny, though. While I should be telling you about Gramma - her birthday is today, and she would have been 110 years old, and I loved her beyond measure - I want to talk about Danny although the U.S. Memorial Day was yesterda. His widowed mother's eldest son, he had worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps way out in the West, living in a barracks and sending money home to help support her and his four siblings. He had red hair, a remarkable voice, and a girlfriend - whom I found in 2007, and who told me Gramma had to wait for several years to bring his body home from Britain, something my generation didn't know but which was easy to check. He's in Bethania now, with his mother and father, his gramma and grandpa, a sister, a brother, and a brother-in-law.
When he was 22, Danny joined the Air Force and they made him a radioman. He was trained out in the West in a B-24 with the deadly "NMF" - natural metal finish - instead of the camo paint used on planes earlier in the war. The kill rate among NMF planes was much higher than among the camo planes, because (according to contemporaneous reports) the Germans considered the lack of camo an insult and took a particular pleasure in shooting down the gleaming silver bodies.
With an unpainted plane and abbreviated training, Danny and his squadron were rushed to the European theater where they were damaged during one of their earliest missions. They limped back to the airbase in England, where the air traffic controllers were trying to deal with two damaged planes trying to land at once, on one runway. Danny's pilot landed on the tail of the preceding plane.
All the crew but Danny were killed instantly. The voice which led the Air Force to turn him into a radio operator meant he was assigned to the center of the fuselage, the most protected spot. With courage that inspires as much horror as awe, a bystander rushed into the flaming wreck and pulled him out. He lived only two days, just long enough for his entire squadron to be disbanded and reassigned, including Danny himself, though he lay in a hospital bed in what I devoutly hope was a state of unconsciousness. He crashed the eve of his twenty-second birthday.
Which is why I never got to meet him, and why I am proud to keep a flag at his grave, even if I can't be there to do it myself. I love my Uncle Danny, who loved his mother. And I love Savant, for taking me home last year to visit the dead as well as the living. It was important to Gramma. It's important to me. And it's almost the only reason I would like to live back in Chicago, so that I could care for the family plot as she did, every Sunday. Happy Birthday, Gramma. Love never dies.
My dearest savant_da_rat and I brought him one last August, but it was probably removed in the cemetery's spring clean-up and if not, cannot have come through a Chicago winter very well.
The woman there, Patricia, is very nice. How someone can put up with a constant parade of grief and pain for a living is beyond me. When Ace died last month, I said as much to the vet tech who was helping Savant and the vet wrangle his remains into the back of the Element. She shrugged. "You get used to it. It's every day."
And I'm sure it is, and they do, and most of them still manage to maintain their compassion and kindness nonetheless (or at least, a very good imitation thereof). Me, I can barely get through a phone call ordering a flag for an uncle I never met.
I feel very close to Danny, though. While I should be telling you about Gramma - her birthday is today, and she would have been 110 years old, and I loved her beyond measure - I want to talk about Danny although the U.S. Memorial Day was yesterda. His widowed mother's eldest son, he had worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps way out in the West, living in a barracks and sending money home to help support her and his four siblings. He had red hair, a remarkable voice, and a girlfriend - whom I found in 2007, and who told me Gramma had to wait for several years to bring his body home from Britain, something my generation didn't know but which was easy to check. He's in Bethania now, with his mother and father, his gramma and grandpa, a sister, a brother, and a brother-in-law.
When he was 22, Danny joined the Air Force and they made him a radioman. He was trained out in the West in a B-24 with the deadly "NMF" - natural metal finish - instead of the camo paint used on planes earlier in the war. The kill rate among NMF planes was much higher than among the camo planes, because (according to contemporaneous reports) the Germans considered the lack of camo an insult and took a particular pleasure in shooting down the gleaming silver bodies.
With an unpainted plane and abbreviated training, Danny and his squadron were rushed to the European theater where they were damaged during one of their earliest missions. They limped back to the airbase in England, where the air traffic controllers were trying to deal with two damaged planes trying to land at once, on one runway. Danny's pilot landed on the tail of the preceding plane.
All the crew but Danny were killed instantly. The voice which led the Air Force to turn him into a radio operator meant he was assigned to the center of the fuselage, the most protected spot. With courage that inspires as much horror as awe, a bystander rushed into the flaming wreck and pulled him out. He lived only two days, just long enough for his entire squadron to be disbanded and reassigned, including Danny himself, though he lay in a hospital bed in what I devoutly hope was a state of unconsciousness. He crashed the eve of his twenty-second birthday.
Which is why I never got to meet him, and why I am proud to keep a flag at his grave, even if I can't be there to do it myself. I love my Uncle Danny, who loved his mother. And I love Savant, for taking me home last year to visit the dead as well as the living. It was important to Gramma. It's important to me. And it's almost the only reason I would like to live back in Chicago, so that I could care for the family plot as she did, every Sunday. Happy Birthday, Gramma. Love never dies.