The Luckiest Generation

(Disclaimer: This probably should have been a Thanksgiving post, but you know - I'll likely forget about it, so you're getting it now.)

Masters of the Air, Apple TV

I've been watching Masters of the Air.  It's been a hard watch for me because my father was a B-17 and B-29 bomber pilot.  For any of you who saw Godzilla Minus One (and if you haven't: do because even if you're not into monster movies like me, it's a genuinely great film) the devastation Kōichi Shikishima returns home to...well, my dad did that.  He was one of the pilots on the fire raids over Tokyo trying to bomb Japan into submission. He was 27 at the time.

It haunted him until the day he died. He was pretty open about talking about the war unlike a lot of veterans, but he fashioned it the way he wanted us to hear it, not the way it really was. He always told my mom it was the safest of the armed services. He told me stories about the war as if he was narrating an Indiana Jones movie - he made it seem adventurous almost. I remember watching a war movie with Mom one night that I hadn't seen before. It ended up being particularly brutal to the point it made me uncomfortable thinking of her watching it, knowing she knew young men in those shoes who didn't come back. At the end of it I turned to her and apologized.  I'll never forget her telling me it was okay, she was just glad my dad had been a pilot. I nodded like I knew that was right. It wasn't until I read Andy Rooney's autobiography My War many years later and after Dad's death that I realized the extent to which he had lied. Rooney set me straight about the mortality rate of bomber pilots and what even the ones who survived endured. They called my dad's type of plane the Flying Fortress. It was a flying coffin for so, so many. My dad was incredibly lucky.  He suffered one minor wound, a tiny scar to show for it. But the horror he must have seen. The fear every time they left the runway. The anxiety. And he did it anyway. And then to live with the horror of what he was ordered to do over Tokyo. My heart breaks over and over and over again as I watch what seems to be a pretty accurate telling of the 100th Bombardment Group (a few issues here and there but overall it fits with what I know), and they're pretty frank about it being a brutal, deadly war. I never stop thinking of my dad.  But all from the comfort of my living room because never - not at 27 or now at 63 - did I have to face the things he did.

Credit: Joseph Louw

And that's made me think that for all my gritching about aging, I have a lot to be thankful for, having grown where and when I did. I was too young to have any of my classmates serve in Vietnam, and too old for the Gulf War.  I was alive during the Civil Rights Movement and remember the day Dr. King was shot, but sheltered in the bosom of the Rockies where the population was about as white as the snow in December I had no idea what really went on to try and secure basic equality for people of color.  I was in college in Texas before I realized there had been segregated bathrooms in my lifetime. Pardon the pun but I shit you not. I was WAY too young to sweat out the Cuban Missile Crisis. I became a Godzilla fan because he symbolized the threat of nuclear annihilation we all lived under growing up but I can't tell you I led a traumatized childhood because of it (I did have some intense dreams of trying to find shelter during various weird attacks though). But all in all I grew up in a time where we still accepted that things progressed in an upward trajectory, each generation righting some of the wrongs of their forefathers and making the world a better place. Talk about naïveté!

But I am thankful I lived in a time and a place where we seldom worried about locking the door at night. Where I could wander anywhere in the town my bike or legs could carry me and my parents didn't worry (there was a serial killer who lived on Sourdough Rd for a time however - David Meirhofer - and I had friends who lived on that street, so...yeah, maybe they should have).

I am thankful that I met many of my father's friends, most of whom were also war veterans, when they were middle aged and still full of life and generally willing to tell me their stories, glad I suppose that someone my age was interested. 

I am really glad I lived in a time before social media. I use it now like just about everyone, but it would have been so destructive to an immature soul like mine when I was young, and I would have been so destructive with it.  And while I would've been happy to have had a cellphone when I was very, very pregnant and stuck in traffic in Austin wondering what I'd do if my water broke while I just sat there going nowhere fast, I didn't appreciate at the time what a relief it was to just disconnect when the workday was done and should have. Now I answer emails and texts at hockey games.  You're never really off.

Don't get me started on the environment, or how crazy and divisive politics is now. Our great scandal was Watergate, which broke when I was in the sixth grade, my friends and I just starting to get interested in party politics.  It seemed so awful to us; that a sitting President would do such a thing! I wonder what those young girls would've thought of the January 6th Insurrection. 

Bozeman / MSU

While the world was far from perfect, it was a peaceful time in Bozeman, Mt. Later I would find that peace stifling, but I can be grateful for that time and place, and if I have any idealism left in me it was fostered there. I was indeed so lucky to have grown up when and where I did.

Now, of course, I worry about the time and place my grands are growing up in, and want to use my time left to make my childish belief that each generation leaves things better than they found them a reality.  Not sure I'll make much of a difference in a world so polluted, so full of hate, but they're worth fighting for so it's worth trying for.

Brittle

I've never understood snowbirds. Probably because I'm such a creature of habit.  I hyperventilate if I can't get the same parking space...there's no way I'm going to relocate myself twice a year, even without the issues of mother-in-law, five dogs and a job. But I'm beginning to get why people do upend their lives to go down south and then come back up. And I'm not really liking it about myself.

I grew up with winter. And I grew up spending a lot of time outside in it. I love winter.

In theory.

Like a lot of the country, Pittsburgh was enveloped in a cold snap a few weeks back.  It broke and now it's unseasonably warm and slowly, oh so slowly, drying out from the nasty, muddy mess that resulted from snow melting and rain pounding down for days.  But for several days it was in the teens with snow on the ground - the Collie Army's happiest of happy places. And with the exception of about a half hour one Sunday when I dressed like I was about to go on an Arctic expedition and went out to play with the dogs (and a half hour is being generous), I huddled up inside unless I absolutely had to go out in it.

I can make it through winter Steelers games because I've become a master at the football fan layering technique - although I have been known to go to the Pro Shop once or twice to buy more layers - but I feel like the younger son in A Christmas Story, and I am exhausted when I get home because I was literally walking around with ten extra pounds. But the rest of the time when I'm just dressed warmly but not like the Michelin Man I feel so brittle, like you could tap me and I would shatter.

I first noticed I was becoming a Winter Wimp about three years ago I guess. We'd get a cold snap, I'd suddenly develop an aversion to going out, then it would warm and I'd chastise myself for missing out and tell myself next time to man up (if you will), then I wouldn't, and around I'd go.  What happened to me?  Is it mind over matter or is there an actual physical thing that happens to us as we age that makes us less likely to tolerate cold (and don't say we get smarter and know to come in from the cold...LOL).  Well of course I Googled the question and learned it's loss of thermoregulation as we age and our circulation decreases and a few other, non-sexy reasons, so yeah, there is something that happens to us.  But what I didn't find was what to do about it.  Because I don't want to lose the romance of winter. 

Feb 2011 in Glenshaw

I chose the oddest time to voluntarily move to a northern town: mid-January.  Just the way the cookies crumbled really - spending one last holiday as an extended family, cutting off ties with the old position in my company at the year-end, etc. However it was probably stupid for other reasons...mainly a lot of snow that January in Pittsburgh.  I have a lot of stories about trying to get moved in during the dead of winter.  Most funny now that time has passed. Some weren't as amusing at the time.  But I recall the day I first walked into our empty house and first looked outside my kitchen window at the massive oak that stood point blank in the center of the yard as snow fell softly all around it.  That was as close to heaven as I had been in years.  That quiet lovely moment that so reminded me of Montana. And that winter I was out in all that snow a lot: no fence and a dog...multiple walkies no matter the weather.  But it was fine.  The snow insulated us and it was joyous.  That is what I want back.

Of course, climate change is having a huge say in that, but when the rarer opportunities to frolic in the snow with the dogs come, I want to enjoy it, not just miserably tolerate it.

My dad hunted when he was my age. The cold didn't bother him. I'd love to ask him (he did have these awful metal battery operated hand warmer things that I don't know how you actually used your hands with those bricks in your glove), but sadly that opportunity is lost. Honestly the answer I might be chagrined to learn was a little help from Jim Beam, so maybe it's okay he's not my role model for snow days as we age. I don't really need the image of my dad loaded with a loaded rifle haunting me.

So I'm turning to all of you. Particularly all of you living North.  What's the secret to enjoying winter without having to go to Florida or Arizona to do it?