I didn’t know my grandfather very well. In fact, I can only remember visiting him and my grandmother once. It was the summer of the sixth grade, and they paid for me to fly to Ohio by myself and stay for a whole week. The invitation alone kept me smiling for a month.
His picture hung in our hallway: a huge man in full his Naval captain’s dress uniform. He had huge broad shoulders, a formidable chin and a gleam in his eye. Every year, for my birthday, he sent a handwritten note-nothing monumental, but a paragraph or two of wit and charm whose collective message was, “I love you.”
After he retired from the navy, he bought a Coca-Cola plant in a small Ohio town, sold it a few years later, and then bought a Pepsi plant. I arrived at his home in Ohio, nervous and weird, and in the amount of time it takes to tell a good knock-knock joke, I felt at home. I laughed and enjoyed the company of two wonderful people, and drank enough Pepsi products out of real glass bottles to ruin several sets of teeth. My most vivid memory of the trip is when my grandparents took me to an old time pizza parlor, where they served pizza I can still smell and where I drank an actual vanilla Coke.
My imposing gentle grandfather spent the majority of the week attempting to teach me golf. I was going into the sixth grade, and was wiry and small and uncoordinated (read: left-handed) in the extreme, and he was strong and patient and kind. As my grandmother smiled silently and worked in the yard, he stood behind me over and over (and over) correcting my form. And then, I would swing the club and miss the ball entirely. “Rhonda,” he said, smiling, “I don’t know if I told you this, but the object of game is to hit the ball.” We laughed, and my grandmother made us Pepsi floats. For me, it was a magical week.
Grandpa never spoke of the war. All I know is that he was a Captain in the Navy who served in the Pacific Theater and that he was decorated for his service. The silence of warriors is a wall, I think, a wall they build to protect their loved ones, and themselves. Some stories can’t be told without killing the main characters, and so they are buried forever, and the heroism of great men stays hidden because they can’t bear to relive their own valor. The life my grandfather lived after the war displayed his love of his country: he built businesses, employed his neighbors, loved his family, and enjoyed his life. I ached when he died. His ashes now rest in Arlington National Cemetery, next to those of my grandmother.
From the Android App ANC Explorer: the yellow dot indicates the location of my grandparents’ ashes.
Because of circumstances I could not control, I was not able to attend his funeral. I had never seen his final resting place. But, last week, I found a wonderful Android app called ANC Explorer. Using it, I found my grandparents. Technology, for all of its irksome and irritating side effects, sometimes really provides a wonderful service. Someday, I will stand on that hallowed ground to say what I say today, both to him and to the thousands of others who fought as he did:
Thank you.