Unasked Questions Unanswered

The fact that I even remeber that today is Pearl Harbor day is surprising to me, as I tend to live in total oblivion to worldly events and history in general. That is not to say that I don't pay attention to most (okay SOME) of what is going on in our crazy world these days, but still. I don't think that I ever spent an entire day wondering about my grandparents so much. I realized today while listening to NPR that there are so many questions that I never asked my grandparents about their lives, and what a shame that is. The radio program was taking calls from people who were speaking of their feelings and memories of Pearl Harbor, and the Minnesota connection. There were many scratchy elderly voices speaking of food rations at the grocery store, an interrupted baseball game, and of young men worrying about the attack and the possibility of what it meant in their lives. Then, a man called in who was there, a Navy man stationed in Honolulu when it all went down. He was 89 years old.

My grandpa passed on at the end of October, 89 years old. This man really got me thinking about how little I knew of him, my grandma, and their life together as a young couple. What a time to be alive. Their lives stretched out through some of the most important years in modern history. And now they are all gone. With my grandpa's passing my mother's generation became the elders in the family. What was lost? What memories were trapped in his head, never to be passed on? What should I have asked him ten years ago when he still had memories to share? Why didn't I ask? The photographs that were unearthed in preparation for his funeral showed a man I would have liked to have as my friend, he seemed to laugh a lot and always had a mischevious gleam in his eyes. Those folks knew how to party, and all I ever saw them as were grandma and grandpa. Grandma bossed Grandpa around, and Grandpa muttered under his breath and tinkered in the garage while Grandma put out rye crisp and cheese whiz for lunch. I have a suspicion that this was not always the dynamic in their lives.

Time has marched on, times have changed, people have come and gone. What memories will I have that I would want to share with my grandchildren? Will I still have a memory? Will I be able to convey to them the memories and feelings that have shaped my life? Or will I simply be known as Grandma?

Unasked and unanswered.