Old Love

 

North Island Naval Air Station, 1940

My grandparents had not one "our song," but two, both by Frank Sinatra.  Both were from when he was with the pre-war Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, "Polka Dots and Moonbeams," (a hit in 1940) and "Oh,  Look at Me Now" (a hit in 1941).
They were popular at the time Gramps and Gran were courting and just married.  Gramps was a young naval officer, an aviator, and Gran was a girl he knew in high

Favorite hang-out, the La Jolla Beach Club

school and ran into working at a cafe when he came back home on leave.
There was nothing special about their romance or their lives, really, though to me it seems the stuff of myth and legend.
They honeymooned at the Hotel del Coronado on a three-day pass Gramps was able to wrangle.
Gran found work at a cafe in San Diego and they rented an off-base apartment. She began attending San Diego County General Hospital Training School for Nurses as a nursing degree student.

Gramps flew F3Fs, then F2As, F4Fs

Sometimes Gramps would buzz the cafe and she would rush out to wave at him.  During breaks from class at school, she used to watch formations of Navy planes fly by and she learned to tell the various types so she could know if they were  the type he flew, and he might be in one.

Lexington at San Diego just before sailing for Pearl,1941

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Gramps went off to fight them and Gran never saw him again till after VJ Day. Where he was or what he was doing she did not know and could not find out.  The newspapers were full of rumors and lies, especially during the first year of the war, and she did not know what  to believe.  Where was the Coral Sea? 

Lexington on fire and sinking at Coral Sea

Why was it important?  Was there really an island called Midway where a titanic naval battle was fought?

Japanese dive bomber shot down while attacking Enterprise

Where was Guadalcanal and why were we fighting the Japs there?
The aircraft carrier Saratoga was torpedoed, the Lexington was sunk, then the Yorktown went down, then Wasp.  We only had five aircraft carriers in the Pacific,  and only Enterprise was left, and then it too was hit.  Fear and dread were shadows walking beside Gran wherever she went, whatever she did.

A division of F4Fs over Guadalcanal

She wrote letters daily to Gramp's FPO address, V-Mail on thin single pages that folded up into their own envelopes. Once in a while, she got a letter from him, printed from a microfilm copy of the original, weeks old, short, uninformative, censored.  But each was a treasure to her.  She knew he was still alive, or at least had been at the date the letter was sent.  She  carried the latest one with her until the next one came.  She read them all over and over until the paper almost wore out.
When the Tommy Dorsey/Frank Sinatra song "Just as Though You Were Here" began playing on the radio in 1942, it made her desperately sad.  In later years, she refused to

Enterprise exploding and burning after hit by Japanese bombers

listen to it.
When she finished school, Gran joined the Navy Nursing Corps.  She thought it might bring her closer to Gramps, maybe allow them to meet.  Instead, it meant his letters always chased her from posting to posting, and hers to him, too.  And his seldom and short leaves never coincided with hers.
She served in New Zealand, Australia, then aboard a hospital ship to the Marianas, including Guam and Saipan, and Okinawa. She ministered to survivors of disasters at sea, shot-down air crew with horrible burns and sailors with lungs full of fuel oil and sea water, marines inconceivably mutilated by the weapons of modern war employed with maddened fury by a foe that neither asked for nor gave quarter.  And each new patient she saw she feared might be Gramps, her beloved, dear husband.

On duty

After  what seemed lifetime after lifetime, the war ended and Gran and Gramps found each other again.  They had to become re-acquainted, it had been so long.  They were tentative with each other, yet constantly looking at each other and smiling.  You're here!  You're safe!  Where have you been?  What have you done?  Tell me everything!  Oh, but you can't.  Maybe sometime later you can.  Maybe you never can. That's all right.  It was all a bad dream.  It's over now.  Let's get on with our lives.  Let's have a family.  Let's have children and live a normal life of peace and quiet.
And so they did.

Finding a Box of Family Letters

By Dana Gioia 

The dead say little in their letters
they haven't said before.
We find no secrets, and yet
how different every sentence sounds
heard across the years.

My father breaks my heart
simply by being so young and handsome.
He's half my age, with jet-black hair.
Look at him in his navy uniform
grinning beside his dive bomber.

Come back, Dad! I want to shout.
He says he misses all of us
(though I haven't yet been born).
He writes from places I never knew he saw,
and everyone he mentions now is dead.

There is a large, long photograph
curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago.
My parents sit uncomfortably
among tables of dark-suited strangers.
The mildewed paper reeks of regret.

I wonder what song the band was playing,
just out of frame, as the photographer
arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot?
Get out there on the floor and dance!
You don't have forever.

What does it cost to send a postcard
to the underworld? I'll buy
a penny stamp from World War II
and mail it downtown at the old post office
just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.

Surely the ghost of some postal worker
still makes his nightly rounds, his routine
too tedious for him to notice when it ended.
He works so slowly he moves back in time
carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.

It's silly to get sentimental.
The dead have moved on. So should we.
But isn't it equally simpleminded to miss
the special expertise of the departed
in clarifying our long-term plans?

They never let us forget that the line
between them and us is only temporary.
Get out there and dance! the letters shout
adding, Love always. Can't wait to get home!
And soon we will be. See you there.