This is America’s Memorial Day weekend, similar to Canada’s Remembrance Day in September. I DO have a timely consideration to offer.

It’s not timely in regards to this weekend, but because of it. I’m not thinking of a history lesson, but about real people that may be in your family.

I am at a point in my life that I have witnessed enough changes to understand how they accumulate, without awareness, to create a completely different time and place. We often can not say the important things we feel, to the people we want, because it is too late.

Many of us, from many countries, have fathers, grandfathers or perhaps even great grandfathers who was called to arms in WWII. The time to think about, to talk to, to thank, is very short. I ask you consider more than the time they may have left. Consider the time they had.

The frail and feeble person you see today came from a different time….. a very different world. A MUCH larger world and with MUCH less knowledge about it. The generation grew and matured during the time of the great depression. A time when the first concern of the average parent was truly if they would have food for these children tomorrow or even today. The “middle class” education was the 8th grade IF they truly were not pressed to work for honest survival of the family. The fastest means of “chatting” with someone in your country was only a day or two by telegram or a few weeks by mail. Telephones were NOT a matter for the private home. Electricity was common in the metropolitan areas, but not in many rural.

That person you may have in your family became aware of a threat to HIS future of something better, (you!) that was on the other side of a VERY BIG world. Men and materials moved by sea in days and weeks. Not in hours by air. The jet engine had not yet been invented.

That person went to a land as far and foreign as the moon is to us. My father and three uncles went. He went with many and came back with few. My father and one uncle came back. They met an enemy they only knew would kill them. It was at a time before antibiotics and many other things we have always had. It was when you buried your friend and brother where they fell. There are 93,000 American soldiers, in hundreds of rows of hundreds of grave still in Europe.

You may want to take another look at the old person in your life, if you are lucky enough to still have them. Even if you don’t thank them out loud, just remember you read this in English, not German, because of them.

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