They eloped just in time for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and my grandfather enlisted. And at this point the story
quickens in my mind like one of those old movies that show a wall calendar's pages peeled back faster and faster by
invisible hands, the headlines of h***** and Churchill and Roosevelt and Normandy spinning wildly to the drone of
bombing attacks, the voice of Edward R. Murrow and the BBC. I watch as my mother is born at the army base where
Gramps is stationed; my grandmother is Rosie the Riveter, working on a bomber a**embly line; my grandfather sloshes
around in the mud of France, part of Patton's army.
Gramps returned from the war never having seen real combat, and the family headed to California, where he enrolled
at Berkeley under the GI bill. But the classroom couldn't contain his ambitions, his restlessness, and so the family
moved again, first back to Kansas, then through a series of small Texas towns, then finally to Seattle, where they stayed
long enough for my mother to finish high school. Gramps worked as a furniture salesman; they bought a house and
found themselves bridge partners. They were pleased that my mother proved bright in school, although when she was
offered early admission into the University of Chicago, my grandfather forbade her to go, deciding that she was still too
young to be living on her own.
And that's where the story might have stopped: a home, a family, a respectable life. Except something must have still
been gnawing at my grandfather's heart. I can imagine him standing at the edge of the Pacific, his hair prematurely
gray, his tall, lanky frame bulkier now, looking out at the horizon until he could see it curve and still smelling, deep in
his nostrils, the oil rigs and corn husks and hard-bitten lives that he thought he had left far behind. So that when the
manager of the furniture company where he worked happened to mention that a new store was about to open in
Honolulu, that business prospects seemed limitless there, what with statehood right around the corner, he would rush
home that same day and talk my grandmother into selling their house and packing up yet again, to embark on the final
leg of their journey, west, toward the setting sun....
He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the
familiar. By the time the family arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed, I think-the generosity
and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the rawness of emotion that could make
him at once tactless and easily bruised. His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who
embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose
enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were
both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men p***e, in the end, to
disappointment.
quickens in my mind like one of those old movies that show a wall calendar's pages peeled back faster and faster by
invisible hands, the headlines of h***** and Churchill and Roosevelt and Normandy spinning wildly to the drone of
bombing attacks, the voice of Edward R. Murrow and the BBC. I watch as my mother is born at the army base where
Gramps is stationed; my grandmother is Rosie the Riveter, working on a bomber a**embly line; my grandfather sloshes
around in the mud of France, part of Patton's army.
Gramps returned from the war never having seen real combat, and the family headed to California, where he enrolled
at Berkeley under the GI bill. But the classroom couldn't contain his ambitions, his restlessness, and so the family
moved again, first back to Kansas, then through a series of small Texas towns, then finally to Seattle, where they stayed
long enough for my mother to finish high school. Gramps worked as a furniture salesman; they bought a house and
found themselves bridge partners. They were pleased that my mother proved bright in school, although when she was
offered early admission into the University of Chicago, my grandfather forbade her to go, deciding that she was still too
young to be living on her own.
And that's where the story might have stopped: a home, a family, a respectable life. Except something must have still
been gnawing at my grandfather's heart. I can imagine him standing at the edge of the Pacific, his hair prematurely
gray, his tall, lanky frame bulkier now, looking out at the horizon until he could see it curve and still smelling, deep in
his nostrils, the oil rigs and corn husks and hard-bitten lives that he thought he had left far behind. So that when the
manager of the furniture company where he worked happened to mention that a new store was about to open in
Honolulu, that business prospects seemed limitless there, what with statehood right around the corner, he would rush
home that same day and talk my grandmother into selling their house and packing up yet again, to embark on the final
leg of their journey, west, toward the setting sun....
He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the
familiar. By the time the family arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed, I think-the generosity
and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the rawness of emotion that could make
him at once tactless and easily bruised. His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who
embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose
enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were
both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men p***e, in the end, to
disappointment.