SAGE ADVICE: Secrets of ‘The War’

I used to worry we’d get in trouble when I’d ride in my grandfather’s old blue pickup to the Kmart in Marion. He always parked right up front, ignoring the little signs that depicted the guy in a wheelchair.
Not much older than my eldest is now, I knew one or two things for sure. One was that the space in front of the little guy in the wheelchair was handicapped parking. Two, the rules were you couldn’t go around parking in those spots if you weren’t disabled. Three, he wasn’t disabled. He was a farmer, a preacher and a grandfather, but not disabled. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why a man I was certain had been fitted for his sainthood robes while still on earth would so flagrantly break a rule that by its very nature makes you a pretty crummy person.
When I’d work past my mortification, I’d sometimes ask why we parked where we did.
He’d always answer, “To be closer to the door.”
I rarely pressed the issue or pointed out that we’d surely be in trouble if anyone with a badge and gun happened upon us. When I did, he was kind enough to not point out the obvious fact that his pants hid a wooden leg that caused him to stutter a bit on stairs.
The war, of “The War” on PBS, gave my grandfather that wooden leg that caused him to stutter a bit on stairs. It also gave him a lifetime of shrapnel in the head and shoulders.
It took his brother’s life.
My great aunt, my mother’s father’s sister, said she remembers watching the newsreels in the 1940s, thinking, hoping and wishing that each time she’d catch sight of her brothers, one in England and later France, the other somewhere in the Pacific. Some 60 years later, I find myself thinking just maybe, hoping and wishing the same thing. My wife and I have been watching the Ken Burns special. Every time a scene cuts to stock footage of soldiers trudging onto a beach or a shirtless Marine looking up to watch a plane fly over his tiny island I wonder if Papaw is in that group.
The first night we watched the series my wife read my mind and asked, “Would you be able to recognize your grandfather?”
I would. I’ve seen enough pictures of him from that era, looking for all the world like a man more fit for Hollywood than a small farm in Grayson County, to pick him out of a crowd. I think I could probably pick out his brother, too, since both, like my boys all these years later, seemed to look nearly identical. If I see Papaw in the Pacific, it’s probably Blane.
Family legend has it that when my sister, five years my senior (four if she’s counting), first saw my grandfather without his wooden leg, she ran from the room screaming. It never registered with me. It certainly never occurred to me that a wooden leg might be cause to park in a handicapped spot at the Kmart. The only times I really even considered what was or wasn’t there were the times I watched him haul the waterlogged limb from the creek after a baptism and when I would, for fun, jab his pocketknife into the place where his shin should have been. He never complained or told me to knock it off, which is what I would have done were some punk kid jabbing a pocketknife into the spot where my shin should be.
“Did that hurt?” I’d ask.
“No,” he’d say time and time again.
I hope it really didn’t.
Contact Mark Sage at 228-6611 or .