Family & Friends

I was buttering a piece of store-bought white bread when suddenly nostalgia had me gasping for air. I remember eating slice after slice of sandwich white or butter-top wheat at Grandma’s house, thickly coating it with the creamy, pale white butter. In those days, we ate margarine at our house–on dense whole wheat bread. Grandma’s bread was an unlikely feast for the senses. Pale butter against pale bread, so different from the garishly tinted margarine that covered our dark bread. I loved spreading the smooth, counter-warmed butter over the bread. I still can find nothing to compare it to. No friction, no resistance, no struggle to scrape the butter across. Just whisk your knife over the top and the butter magically follows, leaving behind an even path of silken scrumptiousness. It’s an ordinary sort of memory, but it took me back almost 20 years.

I sat on the kitchen floor with my bread and butter, waiting for my soup to heat up in the microwave, reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter. That in itself invokes memories of days long past. The Long Winter was one of my favorite books growing up, and one of my favorite games to play was “Making hay while the sun shines”–pretending I was hoarding for a long winter of my own.

But I just happened to be reading the 22nd chapter, when Pa is reading to the family and Laura interrupts to ask for a song on the fiddle. Pa tried to oblige, “but every note from the fiddle was a very little wrong. Pa’s fingers were clumsy….’My fingers are too stiff and thick from being out in the cold so much, I can’t play,’ Pa spoke as if he were ashamed.” They put away the fiddle and Ma quietly asked her husband to help her with grinding some wheat in the coffee mill. At least that he could do. When Pa went out to finish the chores, Laura reflected, “The worst thing that had happened was that Pa could not play the fiddle. If she had not asked him to play it, he might not have known that he could not do it.”

In many ways, Pa was defined by his fiddling. Every book is filled with the songs that he played on his fiddle. He used the fiddle to cheer his family, to entertain his guests, and to worship his God. In the same way, my grandpa has been defined by his farming. He told me, not so long ago, that he doesn’t know how a man can farm and not know God. He said he couldn’t think of any chapel better than a field–looking up, knowing that you were completely dependent on God for the soil and the sun and the rain. My grandpa’s a farmer. I remember crawling between the wires of a barbed wire fence while my aunts struggled to pull the wires apart further. My grandpa always stretched the tightest fence in Northeastern Nebraska.

Within the last year, my grandpa’s many health problems have conspired to keep him from farming. Arthritis has stiffened his joints and made them uncooperative. Diabetes has made him dependent on insulin and caused him to lose most feeling in his feet. Heart disease means that he can’t keep up the pace he used to be able to. A stroke means that his body no longer immediately obeys his mind’s commands. Like Pa’s fingers, clumsy from the hard winter, my grandpa’s body can no longer do what it wants so much to do.

I think of it all, and I wish I could could go back and freeze time, for Grandpa at least. I wish that my grandpa could be forever worshiping from the middle of a field–a 7 day a week Christian who stretched tighter fences than anyone. I wish that my own children could see Grandpa taking joy in his work and in his family most of all. It’s not that he’s any less of a great man, or a great grandpa than he ever was–it’s just that he doesn’t seem to realize it. He’s discouraged, depressed, cast down by the weakness of his body. It’s not so much that I miss the fiddle, I just wish he didn’t know he couldn’t play. ‘Cause it’s so hard to see him weak.

One of the things I love best about going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house is the stories I know will greet me there. Some I will have heard before–Many, in fact. But with each retelling, I hear another detail, another glimpse at the history of my grandparents. I’ve learned to keep a notebook handy so I can jot down pertinent details of the stories so I won’t forget them.

This trip was rich in history–both because of the stories Grandpa told, and because of the mementos and photos I found in the basement. Grandpa talked quite a deal about his time in Korea–and this time I got most of it down on paper.

Grandpa was drafted not long after he and Grandma were married. He went away to Basic training, then to mountain school in Colorado. After that, he was sent away to Japan to be a Mountain climbing instructor.

When there were a whole mass of casualties on the front line, Grandma says, they needed more cannon fodder. And Grandpa was sent to the front to be that cannon fodder.

Grandma was at home, teaching school and listening for every report on the war. When she heard that the 25th Division Baker Company had been annihilated–it was the worst news of her life. Grandpa was in the Baker Company of the 27th Regiment, 25th Division. There was no way of knowing whether he had been among those killed. It was the end of the school year, with only the end of the year picnic to go, and Grandpa’s mom had heard the same report. Great-Grandma rushed up to comfort Grandma–or maybe to grieve with her. It took 13 days, 13 long days of uncertainty before a letter reached Grandma–a letter dated after the report.

Grandpa talks of how the war was mismanaged by Harry Truman–how they had no bulletproof vests, and several groups of Korean troops were assembled but had no equipment with which to fight. He says that when “Ike” became president, the first thing he did was get the troops bulletproof vests and equip the Korean troops. Grandpa says that he remembers pulling shrapnel out of his bulletproof vest–and not even wanting to think of how deep that same shrapnel might have gone if it hadn’t have been for that vest.

Perhaps the saddest story of all of Grandpa’s war time stories is how he describes the North Koreans. Grandpa said that there was a valley that was no man’s land–it was good rice land–and while truce talks were going on, North Koreans came down into that valley and started planting. The government said that was a Chinese trick–that they were trying to advance their soldiers by masquerading them as farmers. But Grandpa spent an afternoon watching one old man through his scope–and that was no soldier. It was an old farmer–and he was hungry. Grandpa almost always tears up when he tells this story–and when he speaks of the condition of the North Korean’s even today. The North Korean’s were hungry–and they still are, to this day.

The soldiers got “points” for their service–one point for a safe place like Colorado, one and a half points for Japan (if they were married), and four points for combat zones. There were two and three point zones too–but Grandpa says he couldn’t find a three point zone. Apparently, if you accumulated a certain number of points, you had fulfilled your service and could go home early. Grandpa accumulated quite a few in his stint as “cannon fodder.” And he had the additional advantage that several men in line in front of him had to stay in Korea for treatment of venereal diseases.

Grandpa wrote a postcard–one that I foolishly failed to take a picture of this time. In large block letters, he wrote on the back of the card: “Darling, ON MY WAY HOME. MORE LATER, MAYBE. Ron” He said he wrote it big enough that his mother, who was the postmistress, couldn’t help but hear the news too. It was the happiest news they’d received in a long time. He was on his way.

A few years back, at the 50th anniversary of the end of the Korean conflict, Grandpa received a collection of medals that he shows us grandkids every so often. One from the US with three bronze stars for meritorious conduct. One that indicates that he came under fire–served in active combat. One from the UN that acknowledges his service. One from South Korea that thanks him for his service.

He didn’t talk much about Korea for many years. Wounds from there and wounds from those here who took his service lightly while they played politics to get out of serving themselves took their toll on him. Grandpa was an angry man for many years over some of the experiences there–and from the response of his countrymen here. But God has been gracious, and has allowed that anger to soften a bit–and we hear in Grandpa’s stories the compassion of a man who did his duty. He fought in a war that he considered unjust, that he felt was mismanaged, that ultimately accomplished very little. But, even as he longed for his own home and his own farm, he looked through the scope of his gun and saw the person he was told was his enemy–farming in no man’s land because he was hungry–and Grandpa had compassion on him. The same compassion that I see every time he tells his stories.