The drawer to my grandfather’s secretary desk would not shut.
The desk would qualify as an antique if not for the one leg that doesn’t match the other three, the result of a handyman my Popou employed somewhere along the line.
It was originally a dark cherrywood. There used to be a key that would lock it. My mother says it was always locked when she was growing up, creating a mystery of what secrets lay inside that he did not want her or any of her six siblings to see.
My mother inherited it after he died.
She painted it antique green – a color I hated but that was popular in the late sixties and early seventies. Despite the color I always loved the desk and the intrigue that seemed to surround it. Not to mention the Hershey’s chocolate bars with almonds that Popou kept it stocked with. And mothballs. I have never been sure the obsession that generation of Greeks had with mothballs but I do remember the chocolate carrying their scent.
I’m not exactly sure how the desk wound up with me.
I think at some point after my father died and she was on one of her purging missions, my mother threatened to throw it out. I rescued it as one would a stray puppy.
I had it refinished, stripped down to it’s natural color, all traces of that antique green gone. I was told the wood had originally been another piece of furniture which made it even more mysterious and precious to me.
It’s fragile, so I don’t keep much in it.
My checkbook. My passport. Extra keys. The prayer book my father carried with him during his time of service with the 34th Division of the 133rd Infantry in WWll, a war that he served in from December 3, 1942 until November 9, 1945. A war that left him with a shrapnel wound in his shoulder, a Purple heart and internal scars that evoked nightmares of the time he spent in Africa and Italy that would haunt him the rest of his life.
That turned out to be the source of the problem today.
The book was stopping the hinges from shutting.
It seems this passage, tucked inside the pages, typed on tissue thin yellowed paper, about another war, one in which they used bayonets and muskets and was between the North and the South was begging to be read today of all days, Memorial Day.
I read the passage and imagined my father, a young man with his whole life in front of him, forced to fight in a war he believed in even though fighting was against his nature. I saw him sitting in his barracks someplace in Italy, reading these words, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, trying to make sense of what causes differences in beliefs to lead to such destruction, yet resting in his naive hope that he was fighting in the war that was going to end all wars.
The passage, from The Strange Woman, written in 1941, by Ben Ames Williams is about The Civil War – yet in reading it seems nothing about war has ever changed, nor in humans.
That makes me sad. Especially as we stand in the midst of this period in which hatred is being stoked and encouraged by those who have the power to do otherwise.
But I am, after all my father’s daughter so I am eternally hopeful and can rest in that last line that says “unless someone told you that the hour of fighting had come, you and that Rebel could be friends just the same.”
This post is in honor of all those who fought and fight now that I may have the privilege of writing this blog without fear. It’s also for my father, who I miss every day and for my grandfather and his wonderful desk which continues to be a great source of intrigue and as it turns out – a connection to those who came before me.
This brought me to tears – thank you for sharing.