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Beyond Their Times
Feb. 20th, 2012 12:23 pmIt takes me forever, these days, to find the right words for even a short entry like this one. And it's not like I'm crafting lines destined for the hallowed canons of American literature. More like a simple story or two that might happen to survive, on a remote server somewhere, a few days or weeks beyond my own last breath.
Even so, I sometimes wonder if my own father aspired to that, the sort of immortality conferred through the telling of a story. His long life had spanned the decades between the rutted, unpaved roads of a rural childhood and, near the end of his accounting career, the earliest, unmarked miles of the information superhighway.
In between, he had helped man the hand-cranked adding machines, considered a lucky find during a critical campaign, for the Allied planning section that he served with during the Second World War.
He would tell that story, and others like it, over and over, perhaps hoping that I would remember the names that went with the faces that only he could see, against the backdrop of a history that was uniquely his.
I'm pretty sure that I could remember a few of them, if I really tried. But I could never tell the stories as he once told them, with the terrifying pulse of Hitler's V-1 "buzz bombs" cruising low over London followed by the ominous silence and the ground-shaking concussion and the apocalyptic vision of falling buildings, alive behind his eyes.
I sometimes think about those names and wonder if I should try. Or if I should simply leave them to their rest, those kept alive beyond their times by the words of an old, old man...
LPK
LiveJournal
2.20.2012 (b)
Even so, I sometimes wonder if my own father aspired to that, the sort of immortality conferred through the telling of a story. His long life had spanned the decades between the rutted, unpaved roads of a rural childhood and, near the end of his accounting career, the earliest, unmarked miles of the information superhighway.
In between, he had helped man the hand-cranked adding machines, considered a lucky find during a critical campaign, for the Allied planning section that he served with during the Second World War.
He would tell that story, and others like it, over and over, perhaps hoping that I would remember the names that went with the faces that only he could see, against the backdrop of a history that was uniquely his.
I'm pretty sure that I could remember a few of them, if I really tried. But I could never tell the stories as he once told them, with the terrifying pulse of Hitler's V-1 "buzz bombs" cruising low over London followed by the ominous silence and the ground-shaking concussion and the apocalyptic vision of falling buildings, alive behind his eyes.
I sometimes think about those names and wonder if I should try. Or if I should simply leave them to their rest, those kept alive beyond their times by the words of an old, old man...
LPK
LiveJournal
2.20.2012 (b)
