Lost In a French Village 1962

The opportunity to get my mom to tell me stories is dimming. I took her to a doctor's appointment this week and asked her about a photo she had sent me earlier. 

Two things you have to know about her is that 1) she's the best genealogtist you'll ever meet; and 2) She is now like a mad scientist with ChatGPTs image AI. 

The photo she sent was this one. It's of my dad and Gerald Getty, one half of the Getty twins. My dad went to school with them and they went through print production classes together in high school East High in the 1950s. Harold, the other half of the Getty Twins, was in the Air Force in England at the same time Gerald and Larry were in the Army in Germany. This would be the 1961-1962 period. Harold had met a beautiful English Rose and the wedding was set. The Army boys got their pass, their wives, and Gerald's car and that's where our story begins.

Mom and Dad would have been 19 and 23, so Gerald and Betty were about the same age. Gerald was driving his little junker car and off they went. They had to drive to Calais, France to cross by ferry into England. That went well. They got all the way to Carol’s parents’ house unscathed. 

Mom and Dad spent the night in their guest room while Gerald and Betty stayed at a relatives’ house nearby. 

Everyone was excited, until….the company commander refused his permission for them to marry so the wedding had to be called off. 

So, back they started for Germany. They made it a ways before the car conked out. This was in a rural spot near a super tiny French village. It was nighttime. Unlike now, when they could have found a pension or an AirBNB, they found nothing in the village. No car repair, no restaurant, and no place to stay. 

They knocked on doors until someone agreed, via the quartet’s awful French and the even worse English skills of the villagers, a place for each of them to stay. The bed that was provided to my folks collapsed in the middle. It was a sleepless night. 

In addition to all sleeping situation, they hadn’t eaten since morning and they had about 50 cents between them. The family gave them leftover cake and water to drink. 

In the morning, they met up and were told they needed to talk to the one person in the village who spoke really good English. Mom referred to her as Bridget Bardot--I believe she was, well, va-voom. 

They found Bridget Bardot and while she had some English skills she was far from fluent. Suddenly, various villagers wandered in to “help” Bridget Bardot in translating. Frustrating and comical as it was, they finally arranged to have the car picked up for repair and were dropped at a train station in a nearby village. 

They would pick up the car the following week. In those days, you didn’t just get a pass or leave whenever you wanted, it had to be planned and approved and could be canceled at a moment’s notice based on mission needs. I never did hear if he got his car back. 

At the train station, they realized they did not have the money to get to Paris where they could get transportation to Germany. With help from the train people, they contacted the US Consulate in France and they wired enough money for tickets to Paris. 

When they arrived, they had no money to get to Germany, so they took their 50 cent and bought a 10-cent bottle of wine and spent the rest on a loaf of bread to split between the four of them. 

The wine was awful, my mom reported, but it was the best bread they ever had. 

I’m not sure who helped the group get home; I believe it was the USO, but they were funded enough to get four train tickets to Germany. 

This is a photo of Larry and Gerald standing in the middle of the street with their giant suitcases in that little French village where Bridge Bardot lives. I wonder if her English ever improved?

Death of a Dad

My father passed away on Jan 7, 2024 about 3 in the morning. I wasn't there. I had intended to spend his final moments with him, but death played a trick on us. We had been sliding with rapidity towards the end, but it all came sooner than predicted. I immediately got out of bed and drove to see him and be there for the funeral home. There was a sense of surrealness about his passing. I had been with him the previous day for some time - but I knew something was horribly wrong. He was trying to eat his oatmeal and he was struggling. I fed him a few bites and he fell asleep mid-bite. Once I made sure he had no food in his mouth, I tucked him in and went out to report his condition to the nurse. He couldn't speak. 

I've talked before about the complex relationship we shared. Though terribly sad for both he and my half-brother, his wife died five years previously. Soon after, my sister and I saw that he could not stay in his house and needed to move. We talked him into moving to our town (where he grew up) and into an independent living facility. After grousing for some little time, he began to love it there. He was the "Homecoming King," participated in a lot of activities, and flirted with all the women. Just the way he liked it. He always thought he was a charmer, and to those not too deeply in the know, he was. He loved to make people laugh. Yet, there was a darkness in him. A bitterness that never left him. An inability to see that the challenges in his life were most often of his own making. Just like it is for all of us.

It was tragic when he transitioned from his independent facility to the skilled nursing care.  He couldn't do what he wanted when he wanted. He hated the food. He went to all his rehab appointments down the hall and then did none of his part of the rehab job between appointments. He wanted out so badly, but he was the one who controlled his outcome and he just didn't do it. Finally, he became one with watching TV 18 hours a day. That was his sole activity. He had no strength left to stand or walk or bathe himself. He started to like the same, vile food. Slowly, whatever shred of dignity and self-determination he had went. And, he no longer cared.

There was one shining light in this horrible, awful outcome for my dad. He got right with all of his children. That was no mean feat. We all felt we were given the time with him we needed to ask the right questions, strip the armour from our hearts, gain the insight we needed to forgive, accept, and at last understand the core of who he was and how his own emotional pain drove so much of his life. 

So much of the past few years of my life were wrapped in dad things, I was at a loss for a while in what to do. Thankfully, I had estate things to manage that took some time. Then, there was nothing left to do. 

I think of him more often than I thought I would.

He Looked Down Upon Me and Laughed

In the little town of Vinton, Iowa, just down the road a spell from the big state mental hospital, and home to of the best popcorn fields in the world, there sat a little tarpaper shack, where the weeds grew unchecked between the cracks of the neglected tar and gravel street, down near the railroad tracks.

The house sat right up against the street, with two lop-sided, rotting wooden stairs leading to the front door. The yard was huge and full of all types of Iowa wildflowers and a large, meticulously tended vegetable garden. In the back was an old outhouse that eventually became the garden shed. The entire house was probably 700 square feet. The floors sloped and waved and jutted from 70 years of settling and warping. The bare floor was sprinkled liberally with simple hand-made throw rugs to keep the chill of an Iowa winter at bay.

The house had that aged, musty smell yet was invariably spotless. Long-faded wallpaper with patterns out-of-date by the 1920s covered each wall. The kitchen was the largest of the rooms and obviously the most used. Under the simple kitchen table was a small rope with a knot in the end that served as the handle to lift up the cellar door. Once open, stairs led perilously down several rickety stairs to the tiny, pungent, dank, dark, dirt room where the year’s food supply, culled from the bountiful garden, were stored.

The living room was small—with a coal burning stove eventually replaced by an electric heating stove. A short couch lined one wall, and directly in front of the couch; facing the same direction as the couch, sat the one comfortable chair in which a woman sat for much of her day watching the small black & white television at the other end of the room. Hanging above the television, a small, lonely picture of Jesus looked down upon the room, surveying the every thought, word, and deed of generations.

The woman, who lived to somewhere between 99 and 101 years old, depending on who you took as authority on such things, was tall and lean. Her dress was always immaculately ironed. Her hair was white as pure driven snow, and was always covered by a hairnet. When she spoke, her voice warbled and rasped from too many years of use. Age and gravity had some interesting repercussions. Her face was very, very long, reminding me of a tired old Bloodhound with wrinkles on top of wrinkles. Her earlobes had somehow managed to extend nearly to her shoulders, and her breasts, well, she was never one to bother with such frills as a bra…she was old, let’s leave it at that. Whenever I saw her, a particular Girl Scout song would pop into my head, “Do your ears hang low, do they wobble to and fro, can you time them in a knot, can you tie them in a bow, can you throw them over your shoulder like a continental soldier, do your ears hang low?”

As a child, I paid little heed to her, and as my conversation wasn’t very interesting to her, we never made a connection. I probably spoke a total of 10 words to her my entire life. She visited freely with her son and grandson (my grandfather and father), but my sister and I were left to our own devices playing on most visits at the back of the house in the tiny closet-sized bedroom, with an ancient erector set and tinker toys. All I really knew is she spent over 65 years a widow, raising her kids the hardscrabble way, but most of it was spent alone in that little house, taking care of her business.

Our last visit came when I was about 20, on leave from Germany. Her hearing was nearly shot and her eyesight failing. My father pulled up a straight chair to be near her. She sat in her chair, facing the same direction we faced sitting on the couch behind her—which was always so odd to me—looking at the back of her head. My senses dulled as I listened vaguely to them speaking. Finally, out of the blue, she said, “Lori, where are you?” I snapped out of the daydream state I invariably slipped into, thinking, “Wow, she is actually speaking to me.”

I reached forward and gently and lovingly placed my hand on her arm, feeling suddenly quite warm and sentimental, sure she was asking because she could neither hear nor see me from her current vantage point, and said, “I’m right here Great Grandma.” Perhaps at last, we'd make a connection!  And, then she sighed heavily, and I swore I heard Jesus laughing as he looked down upon me.  She said, “No GOD DAMN IT, where are you in Germany? Larry, what is wrong with the girl?”

Copyright,  2008