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My Dad served in the Pacific during the war. His brother-in-law, my Uncle El, served there also. One of the photos that I had restored is a picture of Dad and Uncle El smoking cigars on an island after V-J Day. You can tell by the look on Dad’s face that the canteens did not have water in them.  What are the odds that they ended up on the same island?

After the war Dad had a hard time adjusting to civilian life.  One Saturday Dad and Uncle El ended up having a few too many “beer and a bump” and they went into a recruiting station in St. Cloud.  Dad enlisted in the Army and a few years later our family ended up in Vienna, Austria. For some reason Uncle El didn’t have to go back in.

One of the items that Ma brought back from Vienna in 1953 was a very old statue.  A warrior with a breast plate and a sword on his hip. In 1965 she had her neighbor Harold convert it into a lamp and gave it to Marcia and myself as a wedding gift. It ended up broken and in three pieces in a box in the basement of The Parsonage in Upsala. Ickler Company in St. Cloud soldered it back together and through my connections at The Paramount Center for the Arts, I found a “bronzer” in Howard Lake, INNOCAST Execuline. They refinished it. It turned out that the tip of the shaft and the feather on the cap were gold leaf.

When I was in Germany a few years ago I purchased a BMW model car to add to the collection of Vienna items.  The monkey in a top hat was a 25^th anniversary gift dated 1923.  The inscription, which is in German, states “What a monkey my lover is, like an illness or a fever”.   Who gives such a gift?

“Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What other say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinion and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.”   This is the second agreement from “The Four Agreements” by don Miguel Ruiz