Remember Pearl Harbor

It was Sunday and for me at age eight the perspective was based on whatever eight year olds think. I know what I was thinking and if other people had something else on their minds....well, tough apples. On that afternoon, I came home the long way from Tulpehocken Street, one block from our house. Hey! I had found a five dollar bill in the gutter over there on Tulpehocken Street. I hadn't learned about being selfish so I sought out Jimmy Evans and we went on a spending spree at Glickman's store: donuts, candy, soda pop. While not selfish, I wasn't philanthropic. "Halfies?" No! I didn't offer half of five dollars to Jimmy, and he didn't ask for "halfies." But sixty-five cents spent at Glickman's store that afternoon got us our introduction to gluttony in the alley back of Belfield Avenue within burping distance of Jimmy's house, my house, and Glickman's store.

And on that Sunday afternoon the world exploded. I was eight years old and sat ignorantly by the radio with my family as a commentator told the older ones of the outrage that Japanese planes had done at Pearl Harbor. In houses everywhere families huddled <@145>round their radios and for a moment everything else was in suspension.

Mrs. Glickman might have thought that this little kid had stolen the five bucks. Mrs. Glickman probably was distracted for a while by the bad news on the radio. In time, though, she sought out the circumstance of our afternoon excess.

We didn't have a telephone in our house. As a matter of fact, not too many people in our neighborhood did and the occasional need for a <@145>phone was satisfied by a short walk to a public telephone booth. Mrs. Glickman, who had a <@145>phone, called Mrs. Snoyer, who had a <@145>phone, and she walked down to our house that evening to tell my parents about the orgy. They rousted me from my bed. An inquisition followed and they were satisfied that the Tulpehocken Street story was true. Then I was led, by flashlight, into the yard where I retrieved and surrendered the four dollars and thirty-five cents from a flower pot. For me this was the tragedy of the day. I lost a fortune. No doubt it benefited our table, but eight year olds don't want to hear of things like that.

Twenty-six years later, Bill Pira and I were somewhere in Quebec on the way to Montreal. We were having lunch in a little rural village distinguished only by its huge Basilica church. We couldn't get much conversation from the proprietress other than ordering from the menu. She spoke only French; we, English. A small boy, perhaps eight years old, came in and loaded up; candy, pop, the junk that eight year olds with the resources and undeterred prefer. At the register he produced a twenty dollar bill. My God, there was Mrs. Glickman in French, uninhibited by Pearl Harbor, demanding to know how such a small boy came by twenty dollars. Her questions, though we didn't understand then, were obvious. His answers were probably fuzzy so she asked his name and called his mother. His twenty dollars was good.

We drove on to Montreal and I told Pira of my little boyhood binge. I noted that here (in this little French town) mothers and friends still looked after things that we seemed to have forgotten.

The day when I found five dollars became a day of national consecration. Not so many years are gone and the remembrance has faded away. The old Americans who marked their passage in and out of war were honored through little flags in the windows of their homes: blue stars for each that fought, gold ones for those who died. Those who "remember" are sickened by the lessening of recognition of Pearl Harbor day. It's like everything else doomed to be diminished by time. Pearl's shrine, the USS Arizona, is now a curiosity visited more by Japanese tourists than by American pilgrims.

Time is the great leveller, and to the ever diminishing band of people driven by memories to commemorate once stunning events, it is personally to them incomprehensible that diminished interest has overcome those emotional demonstrations of yore. Kennedy, the fallen idol of a shorter time age, has passed from romantic to the shelf of cold history with Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. Pearl Harbor will soon run even with "remember the Alamo" and "remember the Maine." The word "remember" moves from command, to plea, to indifference. This is a natural softening of time to heal its wounds.

The lesson about remembering is uneven. In our wars of ascendancy the purpose succeeded and was served by its immediacy. The native Americans, British and Spanish, southerners in our own divided nation, Germans, Italians, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Russians, and Vietnamese, all in adversarial position had to and were depicted by then present and future chronicler through propaganda as monsters to raise up our excitement for that purpose. Once resolved, effects diminished as the generations in conflict died away. Antagonisms whose strength outlives the older purposes have darker results: "remember the Boyne," "remember Versailles" have stirred away deserved tranquility.

It's easy for me in 1990 to remember what happened one day in Pearl Harbor in 1941. I found five bucks and it was mine and it was taken away from me and I resented it. Tough apples to those who were ten years older then and had to crawl into fox-holes and work hard to avoid being killed. That's not in the arena of urgencies for eight year olds who are thousands of miles away from the fruits of quarrels.

A Postscript:

Some other person might have remembered Pearl Harbor more because of losing five dollars that day. It was a lot of money in hard times.

26 January 1990