 Reflecting on Terror |
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An old and treasured American flag
waves again in memory of so many
of TheColumnists.com
MY FATHER died 42 years
ago at the age of 60. I was 27. I have kept him in my heart ever
since.
As he lay dying in the Brooklyn Veterans Hospital after a long
battle with cancer he whispered one final request to me, “Get
a flag.”
The next day after he passed away, I called the local American
Legion post. He had been a Legion member for many years after
serving in the Navy during World War I.
He had dropped out of college to enlist as a 17-year-old. He
was training as a signalman when the war ended on November 11,
1918. He came back home to live with his parents, immigrants
from Eastern Europe who had come to the Promised Land of America
as teenagers.
My father spent all of his Navy time at a camp in the Bronx off
Pelham Bay. For years his brothers and sisters kidded him about
fighting “The Battle of Pelham Bay” during the war
while an older brother saw action in the trenches of France.
My father, Harry, and mother, Frances, married in 1926. They
made it through the depression years, my father quietly proud
of never missing a day of work even if it meant selling buttons
for a penny in the garment district.
They raised two sons, my older brother and myself, often watching
him parade with his Legion post in July 4th events, sharing stories
of his skills at semaphore, watching him put on his Legion cap
for meetings and holidays.
On December 7, 1941, my brother took me to the local movie house
near our home in Brooklyn for two films, three shorts, coming
attractions and tons of popcorn. All for a dime.
We arrived home to see our parents sitting in the living room
listening to our floor radio. We heard somber voices from the
radio and from our parents. We were history and geography buffs
in our house and the world map was opened to the island of Hawaii.
My parents laughed later when my brother and I would stand in
front of our Brooklyn home singing “Let’s remember
Pearl Harbor.” We collected cans for the war effort, bought
bonds and planted victory gardens. The tomatoes actually took
hold first in a cheese box filled with dirt.
I danced in front of my house with a pretty classmate on VE Day
and actually walked a few blocks to celebrate even louder on
VJ Day.
We didn’t talk patriotism in my house. We just lived it.
My father wrote often as I served in the Army in Korea and Japan
during the Korean War. He enjoyed my articles in Stars and
Stripes. He advised me just to do my duty when we were put
on alert in 1954 for some rumblings around islands near Formosa
(now Taiwan) known as Quemoy and Matsu.
My father died in 1959. The huge flag with 48 stars and 13 stripes,
nine feet long and five feet wide, draped his casket when we
arrived at the funeral parlor the next day after his death.
At the cemetery, a worker folded it in the proscribed three-corner
way and handed it to the rabbi. He gave it to my mother to clutch
to her chest as the casket was lowered into the ground.
My mother put the flag in her closet. It was never out of there
until the day she died in 1969. We cleaned out her apartment
and saw the flag. My brother agreed I could have it and my wife,
Janet, and I took it back to our Dobbs Ferry home in Westchester
County, New York.
It stayed in our downstairs closet where the sports stuff is
stored, the baseball bats, the tennis rackets, the balls, the
gloves, even some of the games my kids, Ted and Jennifer, used
as they grew up. A couple of the toys of grandchildren, Amanda
and Matthew, even made it into that closet. The flag remained
untouched, unused, unfolded.
On the Wednesday after the Sept. 11 pain, my wife, Janet, walked
slowly down to the closet. She wrestled some of the old stuff
away and pulled out the shining flag. She walked upstairs.
I stared at the televison set with tears welling up every so
often with a phrase, a scene, a thought. I heard hammering from
the front of the house. Janet had unfurled the flag out the window
from the second floor of our Northfield Avenue house. She braced
it with nails against the wind and the rain. It fluttered majestically.
I could see almost all of the 48 stars as I drove past our house.
It will stay there now, a memory of my father, a bond with America,
a symbol of all that is good on this shattered earth.
© 2001 by Maury Allen. The illustration is © 2001 by
Jim Hummel.
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