POST SCRIPT to DAD, The Man Who Lied to Save the Planet
Families begin with a dream and a love story.
My father’s dream is spelled out in simple eloquence through one hundred loving letters from the World War Two battlefields of North Africa, Italy and military posts thousands of miles from Mom.
Being a “Dad” was going to be a big deal…the written details passed back and forth between Mom and Dad though separated for three of the War years. And, so it was, with the birth of each of nine children. Just as a parent watches his dream develop and the “letting go” of his sons to Vietnam, colleges, his daughters to other men, and his youth to old age, sons and daughters “let go” with great reluctance. This column shares some of that with you… But first the changes and the “passing of the baton” from one generation to another.
Dad died on April 2, 1994. It still seems like yesterday. He had earnestly looked into my eyes and tried to tell me something important. I can only say how grateful I am that the words were finally given him for me to hear and relay to family.
The world has changed much in 15 years. Of course the human turmoil, wars, plagues, diverse earthquakes, storms and floods that have so often beset mankind for millennia have carried on with tragic and historic consequences. Both momentous and insidious changes of foreboding and potential blessing for world societies have occurred since Dad left me with the words we all long to hear spoken to us.
The speed of light communications literally available to all, mesmerize us and enhance life; but also have attached the burden and legacy of new vices and addictions. Unheard of instantaneous gratifications are elicited from messages at the touch of “click” on the key board. People that wish us well and harm literally reach inside our homes to offer messages of love but also to tempt and try; the good we can do with these tools is equal to the power in our hearts to do so, but we must beware.
In a mere 15 years since Dad’s passing, 24/7 connectivity offers us a two-edged sword.
Parents today need more wisdom, care, and vigilance than ever before to protect and nurture the innocent minds of the news ones just arrived to our modern world. And, to have innocence is a treasure beyond most minds to comprehend. We need to get it back. We need to try to rescue those who have lost it. We need the simple ways of a generation gone by to mingle with the madness of life-at-light speed so that we might remember, and cope with all that comes at us each day.
The gentle and kind admonitions of a generation almost gone now; that generation whose parents, my grandparents, literally traveled at the speed of one horse power buggy – this generation still calls to us. I think that Dad’s words and those of men and women from his generation will call to us forever. I can only thank God I have the age to look back upon many decades to understand the qualities of life that existed in the slower ways, the wise ways of thoughtfulness before action.
Then… When a boy or girl could ride a bike or one of those new skate board things to visit a friend without any thought of harm. Hanging out in a tree house to read a book, or play a board game, or fight off the imaginary bad guys with sling shots. A man or woman took things not much faster than the top speed of 1956 Chevy, of 1965 Mustang. It was fast enough to get what really mattered done, and slow enough to say, “Let’s give that a second thought.”
KEEPING FAITH: Those days are gone, but not the all the people. It is up to us now; 70 million of us in America called the “baby boomers” to recall and glean from those still living and the memories of the dead, the attributes of what really makes life “great.”
NOW FOR THE REST OF THE STORY… With all this in mind, it is still hard letting go of Dad… and Mom who recently joined him.
A DREAM and A LOVE STORY
As a “Post Script” to DAD, The Man Who Lied to Save the Planet, (coming out in a version to be released in 2010) I’d like to share a story worth noting, and perhaps an “insight” to how we are still connected to loved ones who have gone on before us, was offered to me by my Mom. Readers of MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs may recall Mom was deaf from a surgery gone awry in 1967.
She had told me she didn’t dream often, but when she did it was vivid and seems to be a message of some kind.
About one week before Dad passed away she dreamt she got a phone call. Mom couldn’t talk on the phone to us because of the near complete deafness, but in this dream she said she saw who was calling, and so she answered the phone. It went like this:
“Hello, Virginia?” the pleasant man said.
“Why Linford. Is that you? Aren’t you dead?” she asked a dear church friend she and Dad dearly loved.
“Yes,” he answered, then added: “Virginia, I have called to ask you if we can come and get Grant?” Beside him, Mom saw Linford’s wife, who had just passed on not long before, and a daughter she had never met. (She did not know of a deceased daughter at that time.)
“Well, I guess that will be alright,” she recalled answering.
“Will it be alright if we come for him on April 2nd?” he asked.
“I suppose so,” she remembered saying, and the dream was over.
LETTING GO
See, it was Mom’s child-like innocence that she carried in her heart that allowed such a dream; such spiritual awareness to take place. To others it might have meant nothing. But to Mom, God had answered a prayer to help calm her and prepare the “letting go of Dad”
I was there. It was just after 2:00 pm on the afternoon of April 2nd 1994 when Mom stroked his tired brow and kissing it said, “You can go now Grant darling.” And it was then after a half hour of struggle to try to tell me something important that he left for me, the rest of the family, and you my reader-friend, a final lesson found in those three cherished words, “I love you.”
I suppose Linford came. I suppose other friends, but also his brothers, and father and mother came to that tiny room in the farm house of Heyburn, Idaho to take him safely to another glorious home.
There were final lessons for me and I share them with you. The lesson of love, and of friends, and of family, and of connections that seem gone, but are just out of reach; yet still really there. These all occurred in a humble setting with a deaf woman, a dying man, and a son on April 2nd 1994.
MOM’S PASSING: Another Dream:
It was February 5, 2008 in the political world it is known as “Super Tuesday.” A little after 6:00 pm Janean, my older sister, called and said, “Jim, Mom just died.”
Just the day before, Mom had emailed me about another dream she had. It was a dream about her departure, meeting Dad, and a question she had been trying to make sense of. It went like this:
“I dreamed I was trying to catch a bus Dad had just left on, and was so disappointed that I missed it. I asked the bus driver when the next bus would be leaving so I could be with Dad. The bus driver the said, ‘5-12.’ Jim what do you think 5-12 means?”
I answered in an email that it probably meant the month and year the Mayan calendar ended and that she’d see Dad pulling up in that bus to get her in May 2012.
“Janean," I asked, as I tried to absorb the information about Mom’s passing I was receiving. “Do you know what time Mom died?” I questioned.
“Oh yes! I recall looking down at my watch. It was 5:12 pm.”
I invite you to read, DAD, The Made Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs and MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs to learn more about love and timeless values we all must keep faith with during these troubling times…
Go to www.jmpratt.com, order either one for $4.95 and I’ll simply send the other free.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
D DAY -- REMEMBERING THEM
D DAY June 6, 1944 SPECIAL REPORT & PRAYER
I first sent this report out as a member of the "Official US Press Pool" at Normandy, France on the 60th Anniversary of D-Day. Still relevant, I'm happy to say Howie Beach, is still alive, well, and just finished his memories soon to be available on AMAZON.COM: Titled: "THE PRIVATE WAR OF HOWIE BEACH." A "must read" for anyone interested in the soldier's eyewitness account of D-Day through VE Day.
REMEMBERING SOLDIERS WHO SAVED THE PLANET
James Michael Pratt – Official US Press Pool
Normandy June 6, 2004
As a member of the official US Press Pool to the multi-national sixtieth anniversary ceremonies commemorating the Allied D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, I had the privilege of witnessing a never-to-be-repeated celebration of honor and courage at the battlefield locations in Normandy, France.
The war was nearly five years old for our British and other allies by 1944. The gathering of old warriors in their eighties and nineties said it all. They came because they knew this would be the last time in their lives such a large congregation of nations and people would pay them and their fallen comrades homage. We, the sons and daughters, came for the same reason.
My father’s age of old-young men, are leaving us at more than 1000 veterans a day. They take their history of war, love, and bravery with them to a place their comrades who died in arms have preceded them to. I miss Dad, a man who entered Rome, Italy with the victorious Allies on June 4, 1944, 2 days before the famous Normandy landings. I am growing in awareness at how much I will miss all of them. So I stumble a bit at conveying the depth of reverence and awe I felt among the 10,000 crosses so elegantly and poignantly witnessing to us of young men's sacrifice.
Equally in awe were hundreds of the aged veterans, like Howie Beach, 79 years old, from La Habra, Cailifornia. I was privileged to receive an oral history lesson of his experience of coming ashore and then 11 months of fighting hell that followed. In childlike candor he seemed the young soldier asking me, the gray haired wise old man, this question: “Do you think I can find them?”
He teared up, and I got a lump in my throat as he added, "I lost seven good friends in France and Belgium and I want to find them. Do you think I can find where they are buried?"
“Yes,” I answered. "Your friends can be found, Howie.”
“Oh,” was his simple reply as he searched the meaning of sixty years having passed.
“You are 19 years old again, aren't you?” I asked.
“What?” he asked with moist eyes.
“You aren’t 79 today. You are 19.” I knew that the recognition of this first trip back to France - one totally done in peace, and not carrying a rifle - was slowly dawning on Howie, and confusion of 60 years of time so compressed now mixed with memories so startlingly fresh.
“How do you know that…how I feel?” he responded with surprise.
“Everyone feels the same way. We are eternally young inside, like the young soldier friends of yours. They haven’t aged, and in some ways, neither have you,” I replied.
“That’s right! It is just like it was all yesterday. I don’t understand it. I shut it out for so many years and now it’s as if I am there again and it is all fresh; fresh in my mind, I mean.”
This was Howie’s moment to teach and my opportunity to learn. Howie opened up and I took notes on the spontaneous oral history lesson. I didn't need a movie screen; his eyes shared the scenes of comradeship and horror of battle as if it played out just days ago.
Howie Beach was one of many men, American, British, French, and Canadian who I met on travels for one week in June to honor on film and in the written word American Dads who stormed on to these beaches in an effort to save the planet from self-created demons and evil. These men had a call, and all recounted how they felt quite ordinary then, but part of something bigger.
“It was a mission,” Howie reminded us. “We were part of millions in uniform. Most of us figured it was a matter of time before we were dead men anyway, so we fought like mad.”
Norman Akers, a British soldier traveling to Normandy to be at a reunion of fellow British D-Day survivors was with his daughter, when I met him. He showed us an original photo of his brother’s shrapnel torn helmet lying upon a fresh mound of earth where he lay buried. The custom of the British was to immediately bury their soldiers where they fell. Later he was crossing into Belgium and then Holland during Operation Market Garden and came upon a bridge named “Akers Bridge.” He inquired and found out from a British officer, “Oh yes. That would be named for your brother. He was quite the hero, you know.”
Norman Akers looked proud, wistful, and sad all at the same time as his 83 year-old eyes strained at the graying photo of the bridge he was sharing with us; the sign posted as “Akers Bridge,” and what it meant to him to “carry on” as the surviving Akers brother of a war that consumed so many hundreds of thousands of British sons. “It seems like yesterday now,” he whispered. “I can’t understand why, but it is all so clear again.”
I thanked him for his service for us. Our British allies lost nearly one million sons beside our American forces in bringing victory to the cause. These two men both testified that they were not uncommon of other men of their time. They think of their dead brothers and comrades as the true heroes. But they survived to remind us of the cost; that FREEDOM WASN'T FREE. And now those “common men” of yesterday remind us of just how much one good man can do to make a difference in the world.
Our French hosts were generous in their regard for their American friends who gave their lives to liberate their country. American flags hung from the windows of Normandy countryside homes along with French, British, and Canadian flags.
A proud people, sometimes with disputes regarding American foreign policy, they lacked no gratitude for their hero “soldats Americain” who waded from chest deep water into withering enemy fire on D- Day beaches. More than 50,000 French civilians would also end up surrendering their lives to bombs made by Germans, and the Allies as they lived in the midst of warfare during those first terrible summer months of 1944.
The city I stayed in, Caen, France, is as charitable today in her regard for American, British, and Canadian sacrifice as it was 60 years before when nearly 95% of the buildings were destroyed and thousands of inhabitants were killed or wounded during the several weeks of fighting there between Allied and German forces.
Somehow everyone gathering during the week ending June 6th 2004 to honor our dead and living veterans of the great conflict understood that with the sacrifice, with something given up and lost, the pendulum of justice swung fully to the opposite direction offering a precious but sacred blood-stained gain in return.
In Howie Beach’s life the loss was friends and the innocence he had known as a teenager when he was called upon to become a killer of men. What he gained was a profound depth of appreciation for freedom, a love beyond measure for comrades, and a decency he would live the remainder of his life in spite of carnage and terror he experienced.
In Norman Aker’s life it was the same, plus the sacrifice of his beloved older brother. For French men and woman it was often their homes being destroyed along with family members being sacrificed for their final freedom.
One week earlier I had the honor of speaking to thirty wounded Marine’s at the invitation of personal friend at Camp Lejeune, NC. Now home from Iraq and Afghanistan’s battle fields, these men had gathered to listen to the Chaplain’s instructions on how to transform from warrior to peace-time dad and husband.
The Marines wondered aloud if we, the American citizen, appreciated them; if we cared. Many are husbands and dads, doing simply what they know their fathers and grandfathers did in World War Two, Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts.
“Will the American people be grateful?” one asked. “Will they let us finish our job?” another questioned. “I used to take my family for granted,” added a young staff sergeant. “I used to act like a drill sergeant to my young son. But when I got back from Iraq, and some of my friends didn’t, I just looked into his eyes and when he said ‘Daddy…and I…’” His throat closed tight on his own words. He wiped at the tears. “I’m not the same man,” he began once more. “I’ll never be the same man. I will never take my family or this country for granted again.”
Gratitude, love, honor. I witnessed these with our current crop of heroes, some Marines who want nothing from us but understanding and respect. And then on June 6th 2004, in an overflowing abundance of appreciation on French soil, hallowed and made sacred by men who died and also lived to tell their tales, I understood what soldiers of every time and conflict may have wondered when they asked themselves, “Will they remember me back home?”
I imagined in my mind’s eye a beneficent Creator offering an approval for a collective gathering of the spirits of the fallen whose bodies lay buried in the Normandy sod. Dads, sons, brothers, heroes all – I imagined another cerebration taking place near us; the dead among the ten thousand crosses, witnessing an earnest heartfelt homage being paid to them.
“Do they remember me back home?” I thought I heard whispered.
I knew the answer and whispered back: “Yes soldier, we do remember. We haven’t forgotten you. And we never will.”
THE D-DAY PRAYER by FDR:
James Michael Pratt - June 6, 2004
www.jmpratt.com
I first sent this report out as a member of the "Official US Press Pool" at Normandy, France on the 60th Anniversary of D-Day. Still relevant, I'm happy to say Howie Beach, is still alive, well, and just finished his memories soon to be available on AMAZON.COM: Titled: "THE PRIVATE WAR OF HOWIE BEACH." A "must read" for anyone interested in the soldier's eyewitness account of D-Day through VE Day.
REMEMBERING SOLDIERS WHO SAVED THE PLANET
James Michael Pratt – Official US Press Pool
Normandy June 6, 2004
As a member of the official US Press Pool to the multi-national sixtieth anniversary ceremonies commemorating the Allied D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, I had the privilege of witnessing a never-to-be-repeated celebration of honor and courage at the battlefield locations in Normandy, France.
The war was nearly five years old for our British and other allies by 1944. The gathering of old warriors in their eighties and nineties said it all. They came because they knew this would be the last time in their lives such a large congregation of nations and people would pay them and their fallen comrades homage. We, the sons and daughters, came for the same reason.
My father’s age of old-young men, are leaving us at more than 1000 veterans a day. They take their history of war, love, and bravery with them to a place their comrades who died in arms have preceded them to. I miss Dad, a man who entered Rome, Italy with the victorious Allies on June 4, 1944, 2 days before the famous Normandy landings. I am growing in awareness at how much I will miss all of them. So I stumble a bit at conveying the depth of reverence and awe I felt among the 10,000 crosses so elegantly and poignantly witnessing to us of young men's sacrifice.
Equally in awe were hundreds of the aged veterans, like Howie Beach, 79 years old, from La Habra, Cailifornia. I was privileged to receive an oral history lesson of his experience of coming ashore and then 11 months of fighting hell that followed. In childlike candor he seemed the young soldier asking me, the gray haired wise old man, this question: “Do you think I can find them?”
He teared up, and I got a lump in my throat as he added, "I lost seven good friends in France and Belgium and I want to find them. Do you think I can find where they are buried?"
“Yes,” I answered. "Your friends can be found, Howie.”
“Oh,” was his simple reply as he searched the meaning of sixty years having passed.
“You are 19 years old again, aren't you?” I asked.
“What?” he asked with moist eyes.
“You aren’t 79 today. You are 19.” I knew that the recognition of this first trip back to France - one totally done in peace, and not carrying a rifle - was slowly dawning on Howie, and confusion of 60 years of time so compressed now mixed with memories so startlingly fresh.
“How do you know that…how I feel?” he responded with surprise.
“Everyone feels the same way. We are eternally young inside, like the young soldier friends of yours. They haven’t aged, and in some ways, neither have you,” I replied.
“That’s right! It is just like it was all yesterday. I don’t understand it. I shut it out for so many years and now it’s as if I am there again and it is all fresh; fresh in my mind, I mean.”
This was Howie’s moment to teach and my opportunity to learn. Howie opened up and I took notes on the spontaneous oral history lesson. I didn't need a movie screen; his eyes shared the scenes of comradeship and horror of battle as if it played out just days ago.
Howie Beach was one of many men, American, British, French, and Canadian who I met on travels for one week in June to honor on film and in the written word American Dads who stormed on to these beaches in an effort to save the planet from self-created demons and evil. These men had a call, and all recounted how they felt quite ordinary then, but part of something bigger.
“It was a mission,” Howie reminded us. “We were part of millions in uniform. Most of us figured it was a matter of time before we were dead men anyway, so we fought like mad.”
Norman Akers, a British soldier traveling to Normandy to be at a reunion of fellow British D-Day survivors was with his daughter, when I met him. He showed us an original photo of his brother’s shrapnel torn helmet lying upon a fresh mound of earth where he lay buried. The custom of the British was to immediately bury their soldiers where they fell. Later he was crossing into Belgium and then Holland during Operation Market Garden and came upon a bridge named “Akers Bridge.” He inquired and found out from a British officer, “Oh yes. That would be named for your brother. He was quite the hero, you know.”
Norman Akers looked proud, wistful, and sad all at the same time as his 83 year-old eyes strained at the graying photo of the bridge he was sharing with us; the sign posted as “Akers Bridge,” and what it meant to him to “carry on” as the surviving Akers brother of a war that consumed so many hundreds of thousands of British sons. “It seems like yesterday now,” he whispered. “I can’t understand why, but it is all so clear again.”
I thanked him for his service for us. Our British allies lost nearly one million sons beside our American forces in bringing victory to the cause. These two men both testified that they were not uncommon of other men of their time. They think of their dead brothers and comrades as the true heroes. But they survived to remind us of the cost; that FREEDOM WASN'T FREE. And now those “common men” of yesterday remind us of just how much one good man can do to make a difference in the world.
Our French hosts were generous in their regard for their American friends who gave their lives to liberate their country. American flags hung from the windows of Normandy countryside homes along with French, British, and Canadian flags.
A proud people, sometimes with disputes regarding American foreign policy, they lacked no gratitude for their hero “soldats Americain” who waded from chest deep water into withering enemy fire on D- Day beaches. More than 50,000 French civilians would also end up surrendering their lives to bombs made by Germans, and the Allies as they lived in the midst of warfare during those first terrible summer months of 1944.
The city I stayed in, Caen, France, is as charitable today in her regard for American, British, and Canadian sacrifice as it was 60 years before when nearly 95% of the buildings were destroyed and thousands of inhabitants were killed or wounded during the several weeks of fighting there between Allied and German forces.
Somehow everyone gathering during the week ending June 6th 2004 to honor our dead and living veterans of the great conflict understood that with the sacrifice, with something given up and lost, the pendulum of justice swung fully to the opposite direction offering a precious but sacred blood-stained gain in return.
In Howie Beach’s life the loss was friends and the innocence he had known as a teenager when he was called upon to become a killer of men. What he gained was a profound depth of appreciation for freedom, a love beyond measure for comrades, and a decency he would live the remainder of his life in spite of carnage and terror he experienced.
In Norman Aker’s life it was the same, plus the sacrifice of his beloved older brother. For French men and woman it was often their homes being destroyed along with family members being sacrificed for their final freedom.
One week earlier I had the honor of speaking to thirty wounded Marine’s at the invitation of personal friend at Camp Lejeune, NC. Now home from Iraq and Afghanistan’s battle fields, these men had gathered to listen to the Chaplain’s instructions on how to transform from warrior to peace-time dad and husband.
The Marines wondered aloud if we, the American citizen, appreciated them; if we cared. Many are husbands and dads, doing simply what they know their fathers and grandfathers did in World War Two, Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts.
“Will the American people be grateful?” one asked. “Will they let us finish our job?” another questioned. “I used to take my family for granted,” added a young staff sergeant. “I used to act like a drill sergeant to my young son. But when I got back from Iraq, and some of my friends didn’t, I just looked into his eyes and when he said ‘Daddy…and I…’” His throat closed tight on his own words. He wiped at the tears. “I’m not the same man,” he began once more. “I’ll never be the same man. I will never take my family or this country for granted again.”
Gratitude, love, honor. I witnessed these with our current crop of heroes, some Marines who want nothing from us but understanding and respect. And then on June 6th 2004, in an overflowing abundance of appreciation on French soil, hallowed and made sacred by men who died and also lived to tell their tales, I understood what soldiers of every time and conflict may have wondered when they asked themselves, “Will they remember me back home?”
I imagined in my mind’s eye a beneficent Creator offering an approval for a collective gathering of the spirits of the fallen whose bodies lay buried in the Normandy sod. Dads, sons, brothers, heroes all – I imagined another cerebration taking place near us; the dead among the ten thousand crosses, witnessing an earnest heartfelt homage being paid to them.
“Do they remember me back home?” I thought I heard whispered.
I knew the answer and whispered back: “Yes soldier, we do remember. We haven’t forgotten you. And we never will.”
THE D-DAY PRAYER by FDR:
James Michael Pratt - June 6, 2004
www.jmpratt.com
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