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Show My father was born at the beginning of World War II, a difficult time in some ways-a moment in our history when the possibility of total annihilation became reality-but also maybe an ordinary time, at least as experienced on a small farm in the middle of the country. While Emperor Hirohito and Italy's Army Chief made the covers of Life magazine and Hitler toured Paris having just signed an armistice with France, my grandmother gave birth to her third son at home in Hershey, Nebraska, a tiny town of 500 people on the western side of the state. I can't think the reaches of war touched my father and his family in any real way. His own father stayed home, raising the food for an army. The corn needed to be harvested, the cows milked, goods trucked to town. Having made it through the Great Depression, they were already rationing, leaving no excess to cut for the sake of a war. I imagine within days of giving birth, my grandmother was back in the kitchen, the baby, my father, left to suck sugar water from a rag teat in his crib. Within a few years, not long after he learned to walk, he went to work as well, crossing rattlesnake-infested fields to retrieve the milk cow each night by the age of four. In the same way some children are born with perfect pitch or a gift for color, my father was born capable, born with the ability to run machinery, explain the physics of a combine, know the arc of a plow, the feel of well-turned soil, the sound an augur makes before it takes your arm. My father lived in Hershey-a town that as a child I imagined paved in chocolate bars and cocoa- only a few short years, up until he was three. Then his family moved east to Cozad, Nebraska, where they remained, where my father's parents died and were buried, and where my father returns each year for his high school reunion. 15 |