Memories of My Father
Memories of My Father
The first time I saw my father I was a year and eight months old. He had returned home for a short respite before shipping out to England to prepare for the invasion. It was the early spring of 1944. World War II was raging and my father was caught up in the effort to literally save the free world. How sad he would be to see that the very liberty he and his comrades fought and died for being squandered by an ignorant populace, in the name of some corruption of equality. What is more sacred than the right to live one's life unimpeded by the desires of some faceless majority?
I sat on a sea blue linoleum floor with a red stripe border. I was in the hall of my mom's parent's house. The two very special grandparents I was fortunate to have thru to adulthood. I spent many of my early days there during the liberation of Europe. My mom worked full time to support the two of us.
In front of me was a door to the bathroom. The door behind me lead downstairs to a lower flat and then to the outside. On my left were doors to the two bedrooms and on my right archways to the living room and the kitchen. Two women, my mom, and my aunt were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. I heard one of them say, “why don't you lay down for a while Chevy!” I'm not sure what his given name was. Carmen or Francisco depending on which of his brothers or sisters you asked. He didn't seem to care either way. He signed his name “Frank F. Grasso” and that is the way we buried him. Everyone called him Chevy, from his original nickname “The Little Shaver” and “Shavey”, his two older brothers had given him growing up.
I heard him walk up behind me and stop. I have no memory of where he came from. I turned my head to look over my shoulder and saw his two feet with laced brown shoes. Two leather spats that covered his ankles ended above my head, just below his knees. I had to bend my head back as far as I could to see what to me looked like a monstrous man, and I saw his face looking back and smiling down at me. He didn't say anything. He just turned and walked into a bedroom and stretched out on the bed. I could see his brown shoes and spats hanging off to one side.
The next time I remember seeing him was at his mother's wake. (His father passed years before I was born.) He was granted an early discharge when she became sick in 1945. He had made it past the assault onto Omaha Beach, landing as part of the eighth wave, the hedgerows in France, through the battles in Belgium and Holland and all the way to Hitler's Bunker in Germany and Germany's surrender. He was an artillery spotter through the campaign. He commanded an early radar system, a huge drop bed trailer truck with a giant radar antenna mounted on it. His unit straddled the front lines to give early warning of enemy air attacks. He carried shrapnel in his leg from a hand grenade to his death and suffered cracked vertebrae in his neck from an artillery blast. He was hospitalized and returned to action after each injury. He never received medals for either injury and I don't ever remember hearing him complain about that. Had his mother not taken ill he would have been on his way to the Pacific to fight the Japanese.
I remember standing in my grandmother's driveway. The wake was in the parlor of her home, which was the custom in those days. I was too young to view her. Just 4 years old. I was looking out into the street thinking about death when my father came out of the house. He walked down the driveway to where I was standing. I turned and looked up into his face. He looked down at me smiling and never said a word.
The memories are still vivid.
Francis J Grasso ©2016.06.16
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