Let we forget …

… RT’s Reviews & Marginalia : Veterans Day.

I turned 4 a few weeks after World War II ended. But I have memories connected to it. We lived in North Philly then, at that time the city’s industrial heart. (They made American Flyer sleds just a few blocks from where we lived.) Across the street was a stretch of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line (not the classy stretch in the suburbs) and troop trains passed by regularly. I can remember the grownups whispering among themselves about the young man who had returned from the war shell-shocked. A guy who worked in the butcher shop had spent time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

On my fourth birthday, my Aunt Alice stopped by and gave me a present — a toy machine gun that fired sparks. We were sitting in the kitchen, and when she learned that I didn’t know how to tell time, she taught me how. God rest her soul.