June 1, 2023
Next Tuesday is the 79th anniversary of “D Day”. If you have seen the movie “Saving Private Ryan”, you have some idea of how bad it was. It is hard to imagine that anyone who lived through that experience would ever be the same. If you survived, the many years of living with those memories had to be tough ones.
Aymer Nelson, a farm boy from Upsala, was there. Aymer was also at “The Battle of the Bulge”, one of the bloodiest of the war. I asked him if he had been wounded in the war and he told me that a 88 mil shell landed next to him in his fox hole, but it was a dud. He lived to the ripe old age of 104. He was truly one of “The Greatest Generation”.
It will also be the 34th anniversary of the day that my son packed all of his worldly goods into his rust free 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme and headed back to Minnesota from Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1988 I had taken a position as General Manager of an office furniture dealership in Charlotte and it turned out to be a not so fun experience for my family. Erik had worked many late evenings with an office cleaning service, owned by a woman from Minnesota, to save the $1,000 needed to purchase the vintage Olds. School was out at 2:30 in the afternoon and he headed north at 5 PM. The battery was weak, so I told him to not shut the engine off if he expected to start it up soon after stopping.
Early the next morning he ran over a dead deer and when he was pulling the carcass out from under the car, he heard a knock in the engine. He made it to the Big Foot Gas Station in Shelbyville, Indiana and called me at 6 AM. He ended up finding a backyard mechanic who changed the timing gear for $400. It was the one and only time I have had to use Western Union to wire money. The mechanic fed him supper and allowed him to sleep on the couch. If I remember correctly, he went fishing with the mechanic’s son. They fed him breakfast the next morning and sent him on his way to Chicago to have lunch at Denny’s with my brother Geoff and his wife Susan. Quite the experience.
“Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known is private.” Allen Ginsberg
Category : General 