Jane Arnold sent five sons to war and prayed them all back home, safe again. Although two of her sons were still awaiting transportation from the European Theater of Operations, the family gatherings for Sunday dinner were again noisy, joyous affairs that filled her home. Eleven children, together with spouses and grandchildren stretched the seams of their modest dining room.

On one such Sunday in November, 1945, the dishes were cleared, washed and stacked away. Everyone agreed that it was Jane’s best roast and potatoes ever tasting of the love with which she cooked. Her husband Harry was dozing in the living room, and all but one son, Charles, had headed home. Charles’ wife went ahead because, somehow, she knew that he needed time with his mother.

Elly looked exhausted sitting alone at her husband Brad's beside in the ICU.

“No, I haven't eaten yet.”
​
I had left Elly the night before after Brad had been wheeled in from the OR

Imagine my surprise when, early in my sixth decade, I discovered that I had an aunt and twelve cousins of whom I had never even heard. I found a faded black and white photograph of two boys about seven or eight years of age, one who grew up to be a Nazi-sympathizer, my father. Before you condemn him, remember that he was in good company with people like Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy, father of President Kennedy. On the back of the photo someone had inscribed that the other boy was his nephew. I never really put it together that my father's nephew would be my cousin.  

Several years ago I was speaking with an aged aunt, my father's sister. “Speaking with” does not quite describe it. Conversations with Anna were more like being spoken to. Sometime during the telephone call she mentioned that she had been talking to her sister's daughter. It took me about fifteen minutes to stop her and guide her back to that point.

“Your sister's daughter? I didn't know you had a sister.”

“Of course,” she explained, obviously perplexed that I didn't know. “Your Aunt Mary.”

I had never heard of Mary.

When I asked my father, he merely flipped his hand dismissively and said, “Oh her, she married a drunk and we never talked about her.”
​
Being a Nazi-sympathizer was the least of my father's failings.

Dick Latham is a United States Marine whose story is missing a chapter. Members of every branch of the United States military wear their story upon their chest. Each chapter is written in a language of ribbons colloquially known as brag rags. In addition to tales of valor, meritorious service and achievement, almost every war, battle, campaign, and victory has its own distinctly color encoded ribbon. Almost, but not quite, and therein lies the gap in Dick's tale.

Dick has a collection of brag rags that one might expect of a veteran Marine of his age with more than 11 years of active duty. World War II Victory Medal: American Theater. China Service Medal. Good Conduct Medal with two bars. National Defense Service Medal. Korean Service Ribbon. United Nations Service Ribbon, Navy Operation. Marine Corps Security Guard Ribbon. Each tells a story. However, one chapter transcends all the others. Dick is an Atomic Veteran, one of nearly 300,000 who were witnesses, some would say guinea pigs, at atmospheric tests of nuclear devices. His close encounter with an atomic bomb occurred somewhere in the deserts of Nevada, but no acknowledgment was ever forthcoming, no award recognizing it ever existed.

He didn't want to go to school. 

Nope. No way. No how.

He wasn't afraid of school. That wasn't his problem, but maybe he should have been.

Somehow he knew intuitively that he wouldn't be welcome there.

He was voracious. He wanted to gulp knowledge like a raptor. 

He had questions.

Teachers aren't prepared for questions. They're trained to dispense knowledge in measured bites. Questions disrupt the process.

He could sense that he and his questions wouldn't be welcome there. 

School was an orderly place. He could see that even before he entered the door led by his mother's hand. That's why she found him waiting for her on the front stoop of their row house on Homestead Street in Baltimore when she returned home.

The school was within walking distance and he knew all the shortcuts. His mother didn't.

My nephew and I stood across from each other, the last of eight pall bearers. Our hands were the last of the living to touch the woman's coffin as it came to rest on the lip of its grave. It was her second.

The woman went to her first grave more than ninety years earlier when the Cossack's came with the setting of the sun as fear swarmed towards the village with the lengthening shadows of the surrounding forest. They were deserters from the Tsar's army, armed with the Tsar's weapons, hungered by the Tsar's lack of provisions, angered by their inbred hatred of Jews. They had come to rape, pillage, and plunder.

It was a pogrom.

Once upon a time I had a parakeet. Well, to put a fine point on it, it was the family's bird, but I cleaned its cage and fed it, so I claim the proprietary interest. Then again, the bird seemed to have other ideas. Take, for example, the business of talking.

Other people I knew had birds of the same breed. Theirs talked. Mine didn't and every attempt I made to correct this deficiency was rejected.

By the bird.

“Pretty bird” was the entry level vocabulary practiced in those days. Authorities assured me that the bird would learn through hearing the phrase repetitively. How repetitively? I never knew. The authorities were mute and so the bird remained despite countless hours spent repeating the phrase to an inattentive bird.

The package was ugly, really ugly. A half gallon milk carton printed in black and Kelly Green on white. Nature's Own Organic House & Garden Fertilizer. “Organic” dominated the label. The purveyor, a sparse man of about seventy with crew cut white hair and the body of a college athlete, informed me that he had been attempting to market it in home and garden stores for about six months. It wasn't selling. I wasn't surprised. 

I was a young marketing consultant in those days, fresh out of the Army with no marketing experience, but my boss had enough for both of us.

I shook the package to test the contents and was surprised to hear something dry rattling inside. After all, it was a milk carton.

I opened it and shook out one pellet into the palm of my hand. It was dry and hard, about an inch long and a quarter inch in diameter. Peering through the spout I could see its clones nestled in loose array. All were uniformly dark brown and had no smell.

“What is it?”