My uncle turned 94 the other day and was given a (mostly) clean bill of health from his doctor. He has a little trouble hearing things now and then, and suffers a bit of wheezing when he breathes, but other than that, he shows no signs of slowing down (well, he’s slowed down some but his overall health is terrific). This is despite pretty near constant cigar-smoking for over fifty years and daily alcohol consumption for even longer.
In some ways it doesn’t seem fair for him to be in such great shape while others who have much healthier lifestyles die much younger.
But that’s the way it goes, I guess.
(and I’d be lying if I didn’t hope those same genes kept me hurtling toward triple digits too)
My dad and I went to visit my uncle last summer (the first time they’d seen each other in over 15 years). They don’t have a whole lot in common so the visit was relatively short.
But as a by-product of this visit, my wonderful cousin Meliss let me take this home:
This is the actual helmet my grandfather wore during his service in World War I. It’s just a big old hunk of heavy, molded steel.
I guess I’m writing about this now because I’ve been really far removed from any of my family’s history for a long, long time. Both my parents (before they met) moved from the east to the west coast in part, I think, to escape the lives they’d led and have the ability to create new lives from scratch. With all my other family members living on the east coast and my having almost no interactions with them while I was growing up, I never had a real sense of where my parents came from. I liked where I lived but I was disconnected from my roots.
My parents (especially my father) never talked about their past or what their lives had been like growing up. I’m still occasionally learning big things from him about his own military service, his experiences traveling the world as a soldier and a student, and even about some old dating stories before he met my mother (some of this stuff came up over the summer and it totally blew my mind).
This helmet is really the first connection I have to my grandfather. Turns out he died when my dad was only 12. I think his illness was a bit of a mystery, but there’s speculation that it might have come as a result from exposure to mustard gas during the war.
I’d think it’d be a big deal to lose your dad at age 12. Of course my father and I have never talked about it, so the helmet—without getting overly nostalgic about it—is a real, physical connection to that past.
As you can see, I’m taking it VERY seriously, as I’ve got the helmet in a special place on top of an old conga drum a friend recently gave me. And my kids are taking it seriously too. Here they are playing some kind of wargame with marshmallow guns—another gift from my cousin. (have you ever used a marshmallow gun before? It’s just PVC pipes connected together, then you shove mini marshmallows inside and blow them out at people like peashooters)
Anyway, a connection to the past is now present in my home. And it helps me feel a bit more grounded somehow. Even if it is just sitting on an old drum and has remnants of marshmallows and my kids’ spit on it.
