be glad to get home
I don’t believe I’ll ever
want to go away
Won’t I be glad to finally get home again.
I don’t believe I’ll ever want to go away again.
By the way did you see the movie “Up in Mabel’s room.”
It was quite funny I thought, but in it was a nice house in the country that was like a house I would like to make into a home with you.
We really want to have a house that we will enjoy living in and not something just to be a show off place.
I like to live in the whole house.
Getting kind of rambling I guess but that is what happens when one is away so long.
(In the letter he writes that his unit had just moved to Luxemburg “… shortly after the German break through“, a break through now known as the Battle of the Bulge.)
I am not sure that there was ever a better description of my Dad’s view on life then what he wrote 60 years ago.
First, “Won’t I be glad to finally get home again. I don’t believe I’ll ever want to go away again.”
My Dad liked to be at home and once home, he never ever really wanted to go away again.
Second, “… want to have a house that we will enjoy living in. I like to live in the whole house.“
I got to grow up in that house.
It was a big house but then there were 11 kids in the family and we lived in the whole house.
And we enjoyed living in it.
We were really lucky and we had a summer place out on Lake Michigan.
But it wasn’t a show off place but a house by the lake that was our home away from home and we lived in the whole house.
And BOY HOWDY, did we enjoy living in it.
This a snapshot of my Dad and my youngest brother Al sitting together at the summer place.
Cement brick walls and plywood fixtures and tin metal cabinets.
Plastic trays and cups.
Nothing to show off.
There is some art on the wall of a painting of lemonade that my Mom spotted at an art fair in nearby Grand Haven, Michigan.
It now hangs in my home in South Carolina.
It is 1987.
My Dad would been 67.
Al would have been 17.
I would have been 27.
My brother Bobby would have been 37.
That’s how it works when you born in the decade years of 1920, 1950, 1960 and 1970.
This was my Dad’s last summer as he died on January 10, 1988.
For those 68 years that my Dad was around you can say that once he got home, he did not ever want to go away again.
And where ever my Dad lived, he lived his life in the whole house.
That was just the way my Dad liked it.
No Haiku For You 