“Lucky”
by Randell Jones - March 19, 2020
I’m lucky and grateful. The age odometer turned over in the tens column this year, never mind which. It’ll always be “the new 50,” even when it rolls over again, if my luck holds out. And who at that age gets to call their dad on that birthday?
I did. Like I said, lucky.
My father is 95 and still lives independently although now in a retirement community 400 miles from where he’d lived since 1952. That’s a bunch of years to put behind you in one place and then have to walk away and start over. But Dad’s a trouper, a ballroom dancer actually, and he made new friends as soon as my brother found a place that held a regular gathering. He’s smooth—my dad, not my brother (wink)—both in his dance moves and in scanning the room to find the lady he’s next going to ask, as long as the music keeps playing. The family joke, after his dance partner and bride of 57 years—my mother, Kathleen—passed 16 years ago, was that now he was dancing with younger women. Of late, they are 75. Two of his former dance buddies from 400 miles away drove down to Baton Rouge this year to visit and dance. At the next weekly gathering, some of his new dance buddies asked, “Were those your daughters?” I suppose at some point, one is flattered by that question. He had a good laugh, so it must have suited him just fine.
But that’s not my point. I mention my dad for another reason. This year includes another anniversary, one to be noted, and perhaps celebrated but not in the usual way. For this one, we hold gratitude quietly, steadfastly in our hearts. It was 75 years ago on May 4, 1945 that he was blown up aboard the U.S.S. Sangamon in a kamikaze attack not far from Okinawa. He was a 20-year-old radioman sitting at his duty station receiving Morse Code. The suicide pilot dove into the deck below him; exploded shrapnel ripped through Dad’s thigh and into his intestines. The sailors who pulled him out laid him on the deck among the dead and dying. Before he passed out, he heard one say, “We’ve done all we can do.” He was evacuated to a hospital ship, his stretcher dangling and snapping painfully from a cable strung between the two pitching vessels. After a few surgeries and during recuperation, the war ended. The Sangamon was towed to port and scrapped; the crew dispersed. He and Kathleen married in August. Fifty years later, when his separated shipmates gathered for a reunion, they said in surprise, “Dennis, we thought you were dead.”
Others did die that day. Several dozen millions more were lost to that war which fades from our awareness today because the Greatest Generation—those who could rightly proclaim, “we’ve done all we can do”—has nearly left us. Nearly, except for a few hardy troupers still dancing as long as the music keeps playing.
Lucky. And grateful.
copyright 2020, Randell Jones