Veteran’s Day this year will be 11-11-11. It won’t happen again for another millennium. 2011 is also my mother’s centennial, a year she didn't live to see, although she came close.
She died in 2004, the year we bought Milll Brook House, and money from selling the modest home in Michigan where she had lived since my birth helped us survive unemployment in 2006 and retain our our new old house. I sometimes wonder what she would have thought of our purchase. She would have worried that we could never manage such a big project on our small budget (as I often do myself), but she would have taken pleasure in the thought that we were embarking on a new adventure, living out a dream that she had had. Although she did not live in a large city, she always hankered to move outside of town and live in the countryside. Driving through woods and fields to a neighboring town, she liked to point out the house, about halfway between, that she had always wanted to buy.
Yet her own life was not without adventure, some of her own making, some her husband’s and some the world’s. As a high school graduate, she went off, without her mother’s blessing, to study art at Pratt Institute in New York City. She was nine months pregnant when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Baby in tow, she joined my father where he was stationed in Texas, and, like hundreds of other Army wives, criss-crossed the country by train with her toddler as the Army shifted my father around, eventually sending him overseas.
In the late 1950’s, she followed him to Okinawa, where he, a civilian college professor by then, advised and taught English teachers at the University of the Ryukyus. Interested above all in people and art, she took the island by storm, encouraging local artists and befriending a multitude of Okinawans and other island residents, instilling confidence and burnishing pride in a population traditionally held in low esteem by mainland Japanese and still reeling from war. Those friendships lasted a lifetime, and among a certain, now-aging circle she is still a legend.
Unselfconscious, she lacked the “shy-gene” that plagues the rest of our family and had, as my father liked to say, a gift for friendship. There was hardly a place I could travel where she didn’t have friends for me to look up, and they always showered me with kindness in remembrance of her hospitality and affection toward them.
She was part of the “Greatest Generation,” and she lived up to that moniker.