I WISH I COULD ASK...

The weeks leading to my mother’s death were hard. She was an active woman hit with an aneurysm and died six weeks later.

Soon after her funeral I found myself looking through an old trunk where she kept special things. I had looked through it several times growing up, but that day everything in the old box looked different. It just seemed that everything that meant anything to my mother had ended up in that old trunk.

It was the trunk that my dad brought home when World War II ended. He was at Pearl Harbor when the war started…Dec. 7, 1941. I was born exactly 21 years later. I guess it was a sign to him that a baby born on Pearl Harbor Day needed a Hawaiian name. He loved the name but it took me a few years to appreciate it.

Mama and Daddy knew each other as kids but started dating in 1937. Letters were the only form of communication and Mama kept each one that Daddy wrote…filing them away in a little metal box. That little metal box was eventually tucked away in the old trunk. My sister and I begged to read them but she would never let us.

As I looked through the trunk that day I saw the letters. I sat there staring at the overstuffed box but somehow I just couldn’t invade her private world.

My kids, all grown, have started asking me questions lately that I don’t have the answers to. They want to know details about my family tree.

I was the youngest of six children birthed over the course of two decades. I either wasn’t listening when my father was telling stories or he simply tired of telling them. I know plenty about my family’s history – I just don’t know the order in which it happened. So…I’m planning to put the puzzle together.

My mother died 10 years ago and Daddy’s been gone 15. I have taken the letters out of the box and put each in a plastic sleeve and filed them in chronological order. I am now transcribing them. The letters begin in 1937 when nobody had anything and he was moving around trying to find work. The letters are constant through the end of 1945 and then are sporadic through 1956 if he was traveling. It’s like reading a book – exciting to see what happens next.

I am now transcribing in December of 1940. Daddy was working before the war with the Navy Construction Camp on Midway Island. He said, “Milk is $1.75 a quart here. There ain’t but one cow here so we don’t drink milk. Honey, me and Tommy went out speckle fishing Thanksgiving and like to got caught by a shark. The shark was 9 feet long.”

In a letter a few weeks later he wrote, “Tommy got his hand crushed. They will have to take it off. I just wrote his girl a letter for him. It’s 7am here and that makes it 12 or 1 there at night. Will write more tonight.”

It is simply amazing to see life through the eyes of the man in his 20s who had his whole life in front of him.

He was a man who had no clue that he was about to fight in a war and witness horrible things or that he’d father six children who would bring him joy or that he’d die of cancer.

Or that he’d have a daughter, born 21 years later on the anniversary of that horrible day, who would read his letters and have tons of questions to ask him…but it’d be too late.