Treat Us Generously. June Everett

      Neither the distance nor the international border between St. Stephen and Calais (Canada and the US) made much difference to the guys. The first true excitement came in New York; the George Washington Bridge crossing. A magnificent structure that didn’t linger on the Hudson River at all, but wanted to rush to the other side. The other side, Jersey.

      Uncle Lou’s 92 year old grandmother lived there and he had this overwhelming wish to see her. She didn’t raise him. She just loved him. She was his undisputed champ. She lived a little too far away now, and she didn’t travel too well of late. Perhaps it was his boyhood memories of visits to New York, parks and tall buildings, wild rides on subways, just the two at the zoo or museums, with a blend of thoughtful gestures and understanding words. And now her move to Jersey, to a nursing home, after an accomplished life in America, a successful home-a wife, a mother, a grandmother of a grown man (unusual for the times).

      Mrs Kamarsky was tall . . . 5ft 7. And he, well over 6 foot, felt like a giant as he hugged her tightly. With pride, he introduced Skip.

      “Well, young man,” she looked at Lou, still a touch of a Lithuanian accent, never gone, through many years in the States. She had worked hard, from the moment she had arrived, to rid any disagreeable trace of the Old Country. She had gone to night school and learned to read, write and speak the new language. Learning bookkeeping, she had married Leonard, a photographer of local renown, and together they had prospered.

      She had struggled to arrive in America, using Hilda Schmidt’s borrowed papers by necessity. Traveling months, first by train, with many stops crossing unknown and unkind borders, then by wagon or even walking across half the continent to Rotterdam and a ship on which her cousin had purchased 2 important tickets. It was a harrowing cold winter trip across the Atlantic, but they had made it to New York and the home of Uncle Nathan, a sympathetic relative to her father, whom she had never met. She had escaped to a land without terrors; unlike the interminable troubles of tyrannical Russia, pograms, poverty, conscription, denial of education for women, for Jews, for the poor.

      And then it was Europe who wanted our young men to go overseas to fight in their Great War. She hated the sound of the word, war; but now far away. And still, Leonard, American-born in this peaceful place on the still quiet side of the Atlantic, thought that he should go. She had escaped to a land without terrors, unlike the never forgotten ones of the past. She should be safe from the many dreaded hostile backward motions of War. Leonard didn’t know Europe, was not frightened by strangers in uniforms with weapons. Had never seen cities and towns in foreign countries, with their very earth destroyed, and then left as someone else’s pain.

      He came home, even decorated, and to a glorious feeling of a proud America. The family now was filled with noisy children, even a dog, a business that grew, and no more fighting.

      But there was to be unhappiness ahead. For Mrs Kamarsky, too many decades spent alone. Too many years without Leonard, and then a grown family scattered to all parts of a large country which promised many rainbows and much success. It was such memories, even so, that gave her that unconquerable vitality.

      “I know you have to go,” she half-whispered to the young Lou, named for his grandfather, “and you’ll be so handsome in that uniform.

      “But why the Air Force? Those things aren’t safe!”