Health & Fitness
Tuesdays with Louie
Dad's loss was my gain. When he gave up driving, I took over the wheel while my co-pilot reminisced. I was gifted a notebook full of stories from his colorful past.
Almost every Tuesday my father gives me a gift. It’s not the twenty bucks he insistently stuffs into my hand for gas, but the stories and anecdotes he sprinkles in during the couple of hours we visit each week.
About seven or eight years ago, my parents gave up their car and some of their independence. I’ve been donning the chauffeur’s cap ever since, taking them to and fro in my old Queens neighborhood. Payback time, I gratefully call it.
The gifts from dad come while we are chatting outside their local Key Food (Mom is inside carefully choosing her tomatoes.) or just as I’m about to leave and take the thirty-minute drive back east. If you ask dad what my mom cooked for him the night before, he may scratch his head. But in vivid detail, his memories of yesteryear spill out like a collage of telltale photos.
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One I treasure is from the short time he spent in Germany during the close of WWII. He was just 18 in 1945. Plucked from Manhattan’s Inwood section, he was a street savvy German-Irish kid turned U.S. Army private in the communications air-to-ground division. (How he got placed in that group is a whole separate story.)
He and his buddies were stationed in South Bremen barracks on occupation duty. Amidst the burned and bombed out buildings, there was a young girl about age 9 who came collecting laundry from the soldiers. They paid her with so many cigarettes, that war’s black market currency. She and her younger siblings took turns dragging the piled high wagon. When they returned with clean clothes, my dad was amazed at how perfectly folded it all was. He assumed their mother had taken pride in doing the work. It reminded him of Mary, his mom, who’d lovingly be doing that for him if he were home.
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One day the older girl didn’t join her brother and sister. The young soldiers asked about her in their broken German and figured out that she was sick. They asked the kids if they could follow them and go see her. They brought her some candy to help cheer her up. They were shocked to discover that home for them was a bombed out shell of a building, and that no parents were anywhere to be found. Not able to fully communicate with them and separated soon after, my dad was left wondering if they were orphans and what the future held for them after the war.
He has told me this story more than once and 60 plus years later he can still describe her face, but struggles to remember her name.
