Sunday, April 18, 2010

That War

Cologne, 1945
These past weeks my son has been reading me stories about that war. The book we are using, Jennifer Armstrong's The American Story, only has two: one on the Manhattan Project, and a second story on the Navajo code talkers.

"Only two stories on World War II?" said Simon, browsing through the index. "But, Mom, it lasted a long time." He knows a lot about that war from Susan Wise Bauer's The Story of the World, Vol. IV.

And he knows about it from me. Every so often, I walk by his room and hear him telling a friend of his: "My mom doesn't like war." Sometimes he adds: "My grandma and grandpa were in a war--a real war." These words are meant to explain his foreign mom's odd behavior: why she doesn't allow violent video games, why she asks that all play involving war sounds--the tuck-tuck-tuck-tuck-tuck of submachine gunfire, the whistling of bombs dropping, the kah-boom of them hitting the ground, the barking commands of officers--be kept to a minimum, or be relegated to the garden or rooms with doors.

Like Simon, I was for a moment surprised by how tangentially Armstrong treats that war. But then I remembered that she is writing for middle schoolers--kids. Furthermore, the war was not fought here, on this continent, in American cities. It was fought across at least one ocean. Too many American soldiers gave their lives, and too many families suffered the loss of fathers, sons, brothers, even sisters and daughters. But civilians, the rest of the American population, the vast majority that was not fighting, they were here, safely on the American continent. Events other than World War II are more central to the story of this country than its brief but defining engagement in stopping Hitler, and Armstrong is right in devoting the bulk of her book to them.

* * *
My first sustained contact with Americans happened when I came to college in this country. It was a good school into which I was accepted because I spoke a handful of foreign languages and had the AP scores to prove it--neither my grades nor my SATs were anything but average.

I arrived at college feeling a bit like an impostor. The other students were not eccentric but deeply accomplished; furthermore, so many seemed to come from happy-go-lucky American families that skied and played tennis. The fathers wore golf jackets or polo shirts and shook your hand with vigor, flashing teeth: "And where are you from, young lady?" The mothers were athletic and friendly and seemingly uncomplicated: "Must be hard to be so far from home." For most of them home had been one place for decades, centuries. Everything about them said that all was well with the world, that they knew deep in their hearts that all would always be just fine.

For football games in the blustery New England fall, many of the parents returned to campus with the trunks of their cars full of wine and food, which they consumed on expensive fold-out chairs in the parking lot of the football field. These were alien rituals for me. Why would you want to picnic in a parking lot in the cold? But these strange creatures, full of joy and self-assurance, wrapped in L.L. Bean, pearls and baseball caps, sat in the chairs on the gravel of the parking lot, swirled wine in plastic cups and talked about their sail-boats.

I envied them. I envied the students, the parents, the whole lot of them. It wasn't their privilege and their fancy fold-out chairs--my parents had done well for themselves, and I never lacked anything money could buy. What I envied was their happiness, their innocence, their self-satisfaction, their fearlessness--the predictability of their lives.

* * *
I'm almost fifty now and from this vantage point it seems like that war has always been with me. It was there when I was a child because it was hardly mentioned, although from time to time, especially when my grandmother came to visit, suddenly nightmarish stories would emerge en masse: air attacks, waiting in the cellar in the dark, people praying, buildings crumbling, blindness, injuries, death of fathers, hunger, more hunger, stealing food and eating rotten potatoes, more bombs, displacement to Bavaria, abuse by other kids, by teachers, by inconsolable mothers, walking to school for three hours through the rubble, soldiers doing terrible things to women, more hunger, playing in the rubble and finding hand-grenades, or the bodies of the dead, burned, or bloated, etc, etc, etc.

My parents were eleven when the war ended. Both of their fathers had died. Two stories always stood out. At eleven my father walked mostly alone from the south of Bavaria back to Berlin through occupied Germany. My mother was trapped in a collapsed building in Cologne at age nine for three days. Afterwards, she was blind for six months..

The tone when these stories were told was always utterly and completely wrong. My mother would insist when pressed as to how she had felt about any of it that it hadn't been a big deal. Nicht so schlimm. Not so bad. Lackadaisical. Tough as nails. She said that because it had been a "communal experience" she hadn't suffered much--my mother who is flooded by her own feelings almost every minute of every day, and the only thing predictable about her is that she lives trapped like a squirrel in a snare, unpredictable from constant pain. As for my father, he was always the hero in the adventures of his own making. That war was just another backdrop for the tale of his life, a grand mixture of luck and cunning. Of course, that was when he was happy. When he was not, he lay in bed and smoked cigarettes by the pack and roamed the house in the middle of the night. When he was neither very happy nor very sad, he worried his children and his wife were stealing his scissors, his ruler, his paper clips, his socks, his money, and that nothing worth while would ever be achieved by any of us. I loved them both fiercely and spent my childhood trying to anticipate their every mood and need.

* * *
I don't like living in Florida, but for Simon this house--not far from where OJ came to live when he ran out of money and moved to Miami--is the center of his universe. I might daydream of moving back to Boston and having a fireplace and neighbors who own books instead of motorcycles and boats, but there are days when I wonder if that will ever happen. I wish for Simon that mythical happy American childhood: an address that does not change, a life that is reliable, full of pleasurable rituals and a family of friends, a life he perceives as safe, a minimum of fear.

For all our reading of history, replete with mass murders and vicious iniquities, the day to day of our lives is peaceful, joyous. It is, I think, my crowning achievement: how hard I work at making every day a day so happy, a day in which we entertain the realities of war but do not live them.

On a more mundane note: we're thinking of building a sailboat. And a folding chair is a brilliant invention.

No comments:

Reading List

100 True Tales From American History by Jennifer Armstrong.

Getting to Know the U.S. Presidents by Mike Venezia. This is a series. Also check out all of Mike Venezia's other incredible books at his web-site.

Simon loves The Story of the World, Vol. I- IV, by Susan Wise Bauer. He listens to the audiobooks for many hours every day. They play in the background while he fiddles with Legos or does math.


www.theexaminedlife.org

Together with Toni Deveson, Claudia was one of the founding members of www.theexaminedlife.org , a net-based home-education support group for families teaching a secular curriculum in the Miami area. Claudia remains a very active participant. The group is inclusive, welcoming families of all faiths—or lack thereof, and all life-styles. The Examined Life runs a small enrichment co-op for children in grades 4-6. This year, the co-op is covering biology, art appreciation (nine painters), music appreciation (seven composers), history—the Renaissance and beyond, and Latin. All the portfolio-ready materials that Claudia and Toni have developed themselves are available for free at www.theexaminedlife.org , including a comprehensive 36-week enrichment curriculum for the above named topics, as well as the American history project covered in this blog. The website also has a bookstore that carries all the books necessary to teach the curriculum.