During
World War ll, when I was a little boy, I would walk along the beach in the
morning by myself and pray for my dad to come home alive from the Pacific.
When we
were in Hawaii
my parents gave me a ukulele. We lived on a
mountaintop outside Owahu. My mom was walking with me to a neighbor’s’
house when Japanese planes flew low over the mountain heading for the Harbor.
From the open cockpit the pilot looked down at us. He was right there. I could
see his face. He looked like a teenage boy. Mom began singing Christopher Robin
poems so I wouldn’t be sacred. I didn’t know there was anything to be scared
about. But during the next hour the ships in the Harbor were sunk and so many
people were killed. Dad was stationed on the battleship California, which went down that day, but we
didn’t know that right away or who the survivors were. Everyone thought the
Japanese were going to land and take over the islands. For days we had to keep
our shades down, just burn candles and listen to the radio. We didn’t know if
Dad was coming home again.
We must
have had a big house because Mom invited a number of Army wives and their kids
to stay with us, while they waited for their husbands to come get them. Their
quarters had been bombed. The Japanese attack also wiped out the Army Air base
and all its planes so the pilots couldn’t take off and fight back. As the days
passed, some of their husbands came to get them. And some never came at all.
One lady was pregnant. Her husband didn’t come get her. My mom was holding her
and crying. My dad came home and held us both close for awhile before he went
off to war.
The Navy
raised up the California
and sent her out to sea, where she was hit by kamikazes. Japanese pilots dive bombed their explosive laden planes
into the American ships killing themselves in order to try to sink our ships.
This was before guided missiles. Dad was Gunnery Officer on the California. His job was
to shoot these planes and pilots down before they struck the ship killing
hundreds of men and even sinking this great battleship.
The Navy
sent the wives and children home to the mainland. For awhile my mom and I
stayed with my grandparents in their house outside Annapolis
on the Chesapeake Bay. There were two little
boys from Germany
also staying in the big house with us. They didn’t speak English. They were
Jewish. They seemed to always stay under the grand piano in the living room. I
knew something had happened to their parents. No one said anything to me, but I
figured if I’d been raised in Germany,
my parents probably would have disappeared, and maybe me too.
Then we
moved to Long Beach, California, I think because that was where
Dad’s ship would come home to -- if it ever came back. That’s when I went out
walking on the beach and praying for my dad to come home safe. I don’t know
where I got the idea to pray. But I did. My mom would sleep with me in the bed
with her a lot when Dad was away. One time in the middle of the night we had a
surprise -- Dad climbed into bed with us. We were all so happy.
Maybe
that’s when I started believing.
