This last week we drove by a house that I lived in with my grandparents when I was ten and eleven. I was flooded with memories of these two special people. As we drove home, I pondered what made them so special to me. Besides the love expressed in so many ways, it was the time, freely given, that made them remarkable.

I was born during World War II, a war that saw the death of my father in combat. As I was growing up these two facts made me feel that I had special relationship with that war and everything to do with it.

As a small girl, one of my joys was going to my paternal grandmother’s for adventures in the city of Washington followed by reading in her apartment until bedtime. One of the places that we often ate while out was a now long-gone place near the White House called the Allied Inn. This was a favorite of hers since she had served in the Red Cross in World War I.

One of the advantages of living for over three-quarters of a century is that one now has a long view of life. Rather than using it to complain about how much better things used to be, we are now in a position to see how well some of the stories we have lived with have turned out.

This week I am honoring the South Korean government and its people who are the very best of rememberers. There is a whole office of the government entitled the Korean Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs, and part of their outreach is honoring the American service members who served in the Korean War.

One of the great interests of many as they age is their family tree and heritage. In the midst of child rearing, challenging jobs, bills, car repairs, family activities and general chaos there is not much chance to ruminate over where our antecedents came from or indeed their history.

I can picture my grandmother in her late eighties, sitting in her apartment looking out the window at the green trees that surrounded her retirement home. 

Not in my lifetime, including the tumultuous sixties which I lived through, have I seen such division in the country. I am certainly not alone in noticing this as it is spoken of on an almost daily basis. Have we become a Tower of Babel, fragmented into many languages and cultures by the overreach of thinking we have become gods?

Everyone knows that Beethoven, one of the greatest composers of all time, was increasingly deaf over the last years of his life. 

I am learning that my cultural references are no longer relevant in today’s world. 

I grew up with a grandmother who always used shall and will correctly, and expected me to do the same.  I never quite lived up to her expectations, however, and I now live in a time when very few people could live up to them either. 

Canes are cropping up in my age group like crab grass in a green lawn. And I have discovered there are as many ways to use a cane as there are people using them. I always think first of my vibrant friend who had to use a cane a result of an injury she sustained while serving in the Red Cross in World War II.

Over the years I have always wondered why older women needed to draw on their eyebrows, with one remembered great aunt in particular getting the drawn-on masterpieces nowhere near where her original eyebrows had once resided.  Now it has all become clear to me in one of the continuing surprises of old age.  This is a spoiler alert for those under sixty, so read on at your peril. 

By and large customs stand very high in everyone’s life experience. For instance, ‘This is where we always place the Christmas tree; or we never fail to have ham at Easter; or we buy nothing but Ford cars; or our children all play softball.’

Recently, while lunching with a friend who is the same age as I am, we discussed growing older. He commented that it felt like turning pages in a book.

This week I attended a band concert in which my grandson was playing. It was a district level band for which the players had competed for a spot. The guest conductor was a distinguished college professor of music. What was interesting about the evening, in addition to the excellent performance, were the comments made by the conductor before each piece.

The other day while out, I happened to end up walking behind a young woman in a pair of jeans that were more holes than pants. In my younger years the assumption would have been that this was a homeless person, down on her luck whose only attire involved these ripped and torn items of clothing. But this was not the case.

     I read an article recently in which the poet W. H. Auden was paraphrased as saying that paying attention was a form of love.  This struck me as being a really important concept for those of us who now have a younger generation of family members in our midst. 

In 2022 I am introducing my memoir entitled The Smallest Tree in the Forest. As is often the case, a memoir may not be so much about the person who wrote it, as it is about those people who were important to the writer. This memoir seems appropriate for Dispatches from the Front as it really is a celebration of my grandparents.

Years ago, under circumstances I do not remember, I was walking down a hall to meet an older gentleman who was approaching me slowly on a walker.  With a grin on his face he said to me, “In my mind I am running.”