Dick and Jane, Sally and Spot, were real to me
in a way
that war was not. Even Puff
was more compelling than the strange figure
dressed in
red, white, and blue,
his finger pointing directly at me, his effort
to
incriminate those who refused
to save their pennies for war bonds.
I don't remember our teacher talking of war
or any of
my friends sobbing
for lost fathers. I
looked at the maps in the paper
not because
they represented definite places
but because they were the first maps I had ever seen.
My six-year-old
life was a Puff world. flimsy,
no real meaning beyond its ball of yarn.
I wonder now how scared my young mother
must have
been when my dad
boarded the bus for Leavenworth, the draft
looming like
the Hindenburg
on all that they could see.
Unable to drive,
living two
hours from family.
she must have felt her world in its final shift.
And when he returned, rejected, color blind,
what were
the emotions I never saw?
Her relief riding his sense of incompletion,
their
combined guilt, fingered
by communal patriotism and disguised
jealousy
that they had been released
from the journey they
need not make.
I would move on to second grade fictions
amid Spam
sandwiches on homemade
dinner rolls, cars and trucks with ration letters,
oblivious
to scarcity, emotions
just below the surface in other homes. The war
was an
olive green blur beyond
the rims of my unperceiving eyes, closed ears.
I had no idea that other children were herded
on box
cars, handled like the cattle we would
later own, steers we would ship to the packing
house on a
Sunday evening. for Monday
slaughter. Dresden, Aushwitz, Hiroshima were names
I'd wait a
decade to learn, a lifetime
to understand. Bodies to smoke. I'd never grasp.
