L’Chaim

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

 A couple of days ago, Daughter #2 called me and asked me to edit a letter she was writing for work. She’s a school nurse, and it was her job to inform a high school football team that three or more of the team members had been diagnosed positive for COVID-19; thus, the entire team was being quarantined for 14 days. Two of her sons play on that team. I’m pretty sure she wept as she wrote. I know that I shed a few tears.

Every generation is certain that our experience is more difficult that of those who have come before. The difference is that we know our own story. For us, the stories of generations past are only faded pictures in memory books on our mothers’ shelves.

When Bingham High was still a sturdy brick building in Copperton, almost a dozen members of one senior class didn’t graduate because they were boarding a train, headed for boot camp. Volunteers with the high enthusiasm of youth, they were certain that Hitler would be on the run as soon as they arrived at the European front in WWII. It was several long years before they returned; a few of them never came home. A half century later, I sat in a Veteran’s Day assembly at Bingham when the grandchildren of those young soldiers were presented the high school diplomas they never received, honoring those long deceased family members.

An elderly, widowed neighbor in Cedar City during the 1970’s told me stories of her family’s sheep ranch when she was a girl. The U. S. military conducted a whole series of above-ground nuclear tests in the Nevada desert as part of the country’s Cold War against a rising Communist agenda worldwide. One spring the lambs on her ranch were born with huge patches of raw skin where wool should have grown. Two-headed lambs and lambs with three or five legs died at birth. They lost almost 5,000 sheep. Clouds of radiation had been swept across the mountains into St. George and Cedar destroying her family’s livelihood. Some families are still feeling the effects of that horror almost three generations ago.

I wasn’t surprised by her words. As a child in kindergarten, I remember air raid sirens going off around the city of Las Vegas, and citizens abandoning cars along curbs all over town as they found shelter in the nearest buildings. We children were instructed to climb under our desks, pull our knees up to our chins and cover our eyes with our hands as those above the ground tests were conducted. I can remember at least two. First, there was a flash of light so brilliant that I could actually feel it on my eyes through my clenched fingers. Then a boom whose violence shook my desk until I cried in fear it would break over the top of me. Once the shaking died down, all we students were marched outside to watch the rising of an enormous mushroom cloud. Though it was more than two hundred miles away, we could see the fire as it became a giant monster on the horizon.

When I was in seventh grade my best friend at school contracted polio. The very word terrified parents across the world. I begged and begged until my mother finally agreed to take me to visit her in the hospital. That visit is seared into my memory. My friend lay on her back on a bed with a kind of metal tunnel atop her—an iron lung which pumped oxygen for her own collapsing tissue. There was a mirror mounted above her head similar to the rearview mirror in my car today. Because she could not move her head, the mirror was her only contact with the people around her; her range of vision was less than three or four feet on either side. Somewhere in the background a radio played. That was her entire world for the couple of months she had been sick. She was listless, but she smiled when she saw my face; I was only allowed to stay for a few minutes. Because my dad was transferred soon after, I never knew what happened to her. Since then though, I have two long-time friends who survived polio but have had degenerative complications their whole lives.

Every generation has its own stories to tell. This week I picked up my twin granddaughters at their elementary school. They came dashing across the playground, wearing masks and yelling good-by to their friends as they came. One of them insisted they couldn’t go home until they had waved good-bye to their principal, too. The weekend before, I have pictures of four or five antelope drinking from the sprinklers on the school’s front lawn. It reminded me of my kindergarten days—the mushroom cloud passing over as I climbed on the playground’s monkey bars. I looked up a time or two, but I didn’t stop playing–a toast to life!