On June 6 this year, I remembered D-day again.  I was going on 7 years old when it occurred.  I remember it well.  A child of 7 doesn't remember very much, but some things are important.  I saw the pictures of the landing when I went to the movie on Saturdays.  Nobody had a TV back then, just a radio.  We went to the movies to see the news in pictures.  Moving pictures.  Of course, the "Landing" pictures were edited.  And they were very heroic in nature.  The next few years of my life were filled with images of the war.  Every Saturday.  The movie news was what we had.

We supported the war by buying "War Bonds." (Which the government had no funds to pay back.) But everyone knew that this was a war that we couldn't lose.  The Nazi's would control all of Europe if we lost.  They would expand their ungodly pogrom through every country. That was unthinkable.

A few years ago, I went to the beach in Normandy where the landing occurred.  And I realized that those pictures at the movies had been completely, almost totally edited.  As I stood on the top of the cliff--the terribly high wall--that our boys had to cross the beach to climb, I couldn't stop crying.  It was so real.  I could close my eyes and almost see our 18 year old young men being mowed down by the guns from the concrete bunkers on top of the cliff.  I don't know how any of them got across the hundreds upon hundreds of yards of beach alive, much less up the wall of the cliff.  Where do such brave men come from? How did they have the strength to keep moving as soldier after soldier was mowed down beside them?  How did any of them survive crossing the beach to the cliff?

But cross it they did, and climbed the wall.  The day I went to Normandy there weren't any other people around.  The beach was empty, but still strewn with remains of the war--left there to show that it was a historical place.  I started crying when I stepped out of the car and saw the hundreds upon hundreds of crosses where our dead Americans had been buried.  I was still weeping when we got back in the car to go back to the train station.  It was an experience that broke your heart.  D-day.

Maybe it hit me so hard because it was the first time I had ever seen the remains of a war, and realized that it wasn't a cleaned up picture you go see at the movies.  That it was a horrible thing to face and try to do your job and survive--and Ken had done that in two wars and numerous deployments.  It became real to me, and it was so very tragic.  I understood my husband better.  He seldom talked about it.  You almost have to see it to believe it.  War.  The horrible remains of war.

I have learned a super respect for children's teachers.  I've been helping in Bible School all week with the kindergarten age group.  Chaos.  Utter chaos.  Why anyone would choose to work with children that age is a mystery to me.  They can't stop moving.  They can't pay attention.  Half the time they can't hear you.  Most of the time they don't listen.  And they never, never ever stop moving.  We had 12  six year olds in our class with four teachers.  Trying to get twelve of them going in the same direction at the same time is impossible.  It took all four of us working full force just to control them.

I can't imagine a single teacher managing a class of thirty.  What are we thinking!  What on earth are we thinking when we ask school teachers to manage a room full of 30 wigglers like that--much less teach them anything.  It is impossible.  They don't listen.  Period.  They make too much noise.  And someone has to go to the bathroom every ten minutes.  Sometimes they make it on time.

I guess that's why God made us all different.  Give me teenagers.  Any day of the week.

I am now a certified failure as a Kindergarten teacher.  If it hadn't been for the three other teachers in the room (of only 12 kids) I don't think I would have made it.  And it only lasted for four hours each morning.  I didn't have to do anything but corral them.  We changed rooms every thirty minutes--and there was a well prepared teacher in each of those rooms to engage them in something.  I didn't have to prepare anything.  Just point the kids to the right room and line them up to move down the hall.  Have you ever tried to line six year olds up?  It can't be done.

I don't have to do this again for another year.  And if it wasn't for my grandson, you couldn't pay me enough to do it.  My grandson is spending the week with me and he definitely fits in with the noisy, wiggling, not paying attention crowd.  I love him or I'd quit.  Give up.  Declare myself a kindergarten dropout.  I am going to trade time with someone next year.  If they will take my place with the younger kids, I'll do their time with Junior High, High School and anything else they signed up to do.  And I'll give them double time.  I'll do two weeks for their one.  And even then, I'll feel like I am getting a great deal.  I hate it when I fail at something.  I like to be competent.  Successful.

God bless elementary teachers.  Especially kindergarten through grade one. I salute them.

 Married at 18, first child (thirteen months later) at 19, second child at 21, third child at 23, and I was 25 when I had Scott.  I was drowning in children with no clue what to do with them.  I really wish I could go back and do a do-over with the first two.  I didn't have a hand book, and no family.  And few friends--really, I was on my own.  Ken was always up in the air somewhere.  Literally.

By the time I had Scott, I kinda knew what I was doing.  But nothing I had learned on the others applied to Scott.  He didn't play with toys--ever.  He threw them.  Into planters, light fixtures, vases, etc., etc.  I would buy him puzzles with cars, trucks, animals, I tried them all.  He threw the pieces.  When the girls and I would play Monopoly--Scott threw the hotels, motels, game pieces and anything else he could get his hands on.  He didn't throw randomly.  He threw to hit something that was empty.

He wouldn't let me read to him.  The girls loved to read or have me read to them.  Not Scott.  He wanted out.  OUT.  I kept trying, and failing.  But his accuracy in his tosses got better.  He could stand in the yard and hit the chimney--inside the chimney.  One day I heard something splatting, checked, and he was throwing tomatoes towards the roof.  Thank God it wasn't eggs.

When he got a little older and found out that there were games that had names (!!) that at he could throw stuff in--he was ecstatic.  Names like football, fooz-ball, baseball, kick ball, any-kind-of-ball.   Then it was just a game of bribery to get him to read, and in school, to do his work.  It was a tradeoff to him.  If he made good grades, he got to go out for recess.  If he made good grades, he could play ball all year round.  So he made excellent grades.  No problem.

I never had to bribe the girls.  They did what they were supposed to do because they loved to read.  Loved school.  Loved to learn new stuff.  Scott endured it all to play ball.  And by the time he was nine or ten, he would tell me that the other guys on his baseball team didn't try--that they weren't any good.  I explained to him that it was their first year--that he had been throwing a ball since before he was two and had a head start on them.  It didn't convince him.  He just thought they just didn't work hard enough.  Raising Scott stretched me to the limit.  He was a fantastic ball player.  A true natural.  He still plays.  Referring, or Umping, running up and down the field like he was still ten years old.  Loving every minute of it.  Doing what he has to do to get out there on the field.

I made drapes for every house we ever lived in.  Nothing I made would do at the next one, so I was constantly sewing every time we moved.  The drapes got progressively more intricate as I learned how to fit them to odd shaped windows.  I had known how to sew since I was 10 or 11 when I told my mom the dress she made me was ugly.  She handed me the dress, pattern, thread, scissors and said, "When you know what you like and don't like, you can sew for yourself.  She never sewed for me again.  I learned two things.  1. To sew.  2.  To keep my mouth shut when she did something for me.

I made intricate little dresses for my girls.  Smocking, embroidered trim, etc.  I learned how to make a pattern from scratch.  The other day Becky called and said, "Mom do you want to put that dress you made for the Marine Corps Ball  in 1964 in the Estate Sale?  I know I can get three or four hundred dollars for it."  "No," I said.  "I don't.  I like to look at it every now and then and touch the fabric."  I had designed the dress pattern to fit me like skin with a fishtail bottom.   It had painted silk on the edges.  I can't remember where I found the fabric--just that it inspired me. (It is gorgeous, if I do say so myself.  No brag, just fact.)

I had put one of the dresses I made in the Antique shop not too long ago.  It sold for a lot of money, but I regretted it.  I don't sew anymore.  And it's nice to look at something intricate that I once made and know that once I was really good at something.  I doubt I could sew a strait stitch now.  We get sentimental about dumb things as we grow older.  We also lose our skills and feel expendable.

But Becky said that an expert in retro-design wanted me to teach her how to make an invisible stitch. So maybe I still have some of the touch.  At least Becky thinks I do.

Long after I quit sewing, I became a math professor for twenty years.  Now, I am a writer.  A complete surprise to me.  It makes me happy.  I hope it makes you happy as well.

I still haven't decided what I am going to be when I grow up.

During the time that Ken was in Viet Nam, I started college.  The girls were in school, and Scott was in Pre-school.  In 1967, I was no longer the girl I was in 1956.  As they say, I had seen the elephant.  I had spent 11 years holding us together--I got to be a stay-at-home mom if you could call it that.  I was more like the director of a traveling circus.  Trying to keep on juggling and keeping all the balls in the air.  We never were in one place long enough to think about college.  Or a job I would just have to quit after a few months.  I couldn't make enough to cover child care for three kids anyway.

When we got married, Ken had asked me if I wanted to go to college, or start a family.  He was concerned that by the time I finished college, he would be an "older" father.  And I didn't have any desire at all to go to school.  I was sick of school.  We started the family.  It was an easy decision.

But eleven years later, I had a different perspective on that.  I could see that if we were to send our kids to college, I was going to have to work.  I figured that if Ken made it home, I could be half way through if I applied myself.  And if he didn't make it home, I was going to have to find a job.

At the age of 18 when I married Ken, I had never even thought of the future.  It never occurred to me.  I had no plans for myself at all.  I just married him and lived one day at a time.  Everything was so chaotic that I could hardly function in the day to day.  Eleven years later, I functioned very well.  I was an expert at functioning.  I was no longer under any illusions about the future.  One way or another, I had to get an education, or end up in a low wage bracket trying to make ends meet.  College looked like the thing to do.  As it turned out, I loved being in school.  I loved the classes.  I always took six classes each semester to maximize the time, so I could finish in three years.

My girls say I never write about myself, that I always write about their dad, or someone else.  Well, I've been writing about myself for a week now.  I find it boring.  I find Ken's life interesting.

I guess we all think other people have exotic lives compared to our own.  I covet each day now.  I can read books, work cross-word puzzles and do anything I want.  I lead a calm life now.  I love it and I thank God for it.  I've seen the other side and made it through.

The men and women who serve in the military pledge to serve at the pleasure of the President--whoever that happens to be.  He is the Commander in Chief.  Period.  Over 21 years, Ken served under a number of Presidents.  Some wise, some not so wise.  But whoever it is, those men and women serve.  Those of us who stay home, have no idea what they are called upon to do.  Sometimes it is good.  But sometimes it isn't.

When Ken left for Viet Nam, the protests of the young people in America were just starting against the war.  Those in the service who were serving in Viet Nam served at the mercy of the President.  Actually they had served at the mercy of a number of Presidents.  No one in leadership could figure out how to get out of Viet Nam, and our young men kept dying.  Same as today in Asia.

I never heard Ken say anything derogatory about anyone except Jane Fonda and Robert McNamera--who was Secretary of Defense from 1961-68.  You have to read up on your history to understand why.  But he continued to serve at the pleasure of the President.  That's what Marines signed up for, and died for.  But it was difficult.  And when they came home, people would wait at debarking and spit on them as they got off the boats.  It was a sad time in American history.

And those of us who waited on them to come home were caught between a rock and a hard place.  We didn't ask for support from anyone.  You didn't know who was on which side of the issue.  I was on the side that just wished it was over and Ken could come home.

And when he did, he said very little to me.  I only remember one thing he said:  "God willing, I will never again kill anyone or anything."  And he didn't.  Even if there was a bug in the house, he would get a newspaper, scoop it up and carry it outside.

He had a few months to do on 21 years, so we moved again to California, El Toro, and Scott would go to the end of the runway and watch his dad take off.  Ken would call home, tell me when his lift off time was, and I would walk Scott to the runway--which was a few blocks from our house on base.  I didn't watch.  I never saw him fly.  I just counted days until it was over.  Until he was completely out of harm's way.  He was a heroic figure.  I was his wife.  It was difficult.  For both of us.

Although life for me was wonderful, 1963-1966 was smack dab in the middle of difficulties in America.  Beaufort was 72% Negro, and their conditions were deplorable.  I had never been exposed to such poverty and hopelessness.  There were no jobs.  A white mob burned down their school while I was in Beaufort--I think it was to send a message that "they" better not get any ideas?  Martin Luther King was trying to rectify conditions for black people, but it wasn't helping them in Beaufort.

Many of the black people lived across the bridge in Frogmore, an island where some of the people still spoke a dialect--that supposedly came from Africa--called "Gullah." The going wage at the time for blacks was fifty cents an hour.  $4.00 a day.  Deplorable.

I drove to Oklahoma a couple of times with my three kids when Ken was deployed.  One time I stayed all night in Montgomery, Alabama with a friend.  The next day as I was leaving was the day of the Montgomery march.   I learned first hand--those three years I was in Beaufort--exactly what black people were marching and dying for.  It was so sad.  It was awful, and if I hadn't had my three kids, I would have marched with them.  There was a bad cloud over the South.

Another  cloud that loomed over my life was the fact that Ken was practicing delivering A-bombs.  America wasn't supposed to know that.  The government placed a verbal restriction on the squadron--but I couldn't help but know, from the way they did, and said, things "differently."  And the places they went.  Cuba had just been a big deal: we had lost a landing force, the Russians had just backed down from delivering nuclear launching pads to Cuba, we were in the middle of a cold war with Russia, and the guys kept going down to Roosevelt Roads to practice maneuvers.  Duh.

I asked Ken one day, "Say that you had to deliver an Atom Bomb--just saying...how would you deliver it and how would you get out of it.  "Well," he answered, "If a fella had to do such a thing, he would go in fast and low to keep from getting hit by ground fire, and at the last minute, he would jack it straight up as fast as he could fly.  And when he had almost stalled out, fire the thing straight up, do a flip and head home."  I asked, "And what are the chances a person would make it," I asked?  "Well, if he was lucky and everything went as it should, it would be about fifty fifty."  I didn't ask anything else.  What was the point.  So even though it was good for me in Beaufort, it was really bad as well.