Over Here: 12 – The Welcome Letter
...As she read this letter, however, we could scarcely miss the fact that she had begun to sob. Very little noise, but sobbing nonetheless. When one of the older kids asked her what was wrong, she smiled through her abundant tears and told us that her husband was finally coming home, in less than two weeks! He’d been gone for almost FOUR YEARS...
Continuing his autobiography, Ron Pataky tells of letters from a war front.
Grandpa came in from the fields to prepare our daily lunch (Grandma, remember, was at the market during the days), on alternate days serving- up either home-made rice pudding or a great dish, inventively called "Coffee Bread," the complex recipe for which went as follows: Dilute coffee with warmed, sweetened milk, add some sugar and vanilla, and slowly pour over hand-broken bread chunks. Let soak. Serve warm.
I tried without success during my adult years to find "Kaffeebrot" on menus at restaurants both here and abroad, only to finally abandon the search when failure became both obvious and undeniable. Der Schnitzelbooger in Salzburg came closest, with Munich's Der Pooperlooper a not-so-close second.
Oh, and tapioca was a third mainstay on the somewhat limited Grandpa menu. And plenty of assorted nuts, cottage cheese, and apples, from which we derived our considerable energy and nutrition.
Recess at the white frame schoolhouse was a marvel of ingenuity, especially by today's standards. Out in back of the school structure stood a matching smaller building, a beat-up, one-car-garage-like shack containing a single lawnmower and the winter firewood supply. The same flaking exterior. The same precariously-shingled roof. Identical in color (white). I have no idea how long the two buildings had stood there by that time, but it'd been long enough for at least one recess tradition to have formed along the way.
Kids would divide into two groups, with the groups standing on opposite sides of the building. A primitive ball was introduced, and even though one side couldn't see the other, the ball was batted back and forth across the roof until one side blew it. The goal was to get the ball back over the roof to the other side, at which point it was their problem.
Keeping things simple, a point was earned when one team or the other finally sent the ball either left or right, missing the roof altogether. At the end of recess, the team with the most points became the big cheeses for the day, although Mrs. Egner was quick to remind one and all that
even big cheeses had to concentrate, and to be quiet, like everyone else.
Since personnel for the teams changed daily, there were no heroes, and no losers. Individual fame at the no-name school lent entirely new meaning to the word, "fleeting". And traditional "showing off" was modulated by the presence in the entire prison population of only two semi-inflated, decidedly-plain farm girls.
We had one other recess option. If we were deluged with absolutely horizontal rain, or if the school was engulfed in a blinding, howling snowstorm (or maybe even an infrequent killer-locust infestation) we "stayed in."
In that case, we might sing "Colley, My Cow" six or seven hundred times, or some other American classic [?] much like it. Had I the foresight at the time, or even a few years later, the entire scene would have made for a wonderful book series. I maybe could’ve called it something like, "Little School on the Nothing," and sold it for plenty to Zoot Suit Productions or some such).
Kindly Mrs. Egner, alas, is now merely a featureless face in my aging memory. One memory, however, still stands out. That morning, as usual, the postman came to the school to deliver the daily mail.
Mrs. Egner, as it turned out, would receive yet another letter from her husband. He'd been wounded in battle in Europe, and had spent several recent months in an Army hospital, although still overseas. As a result, his letters, unlike those from a battlefield, had become a common, perhaps twice weekly occurrence.
As she read this letter, however, we could scarcely miss the fact that she had begun to sob. Very little noise, but sobbing nonetheless. When one of the older kids asked her what was wrong, she smiled through her abundant tears and told us that her husband was finally coming home, in less than two weeks! He’d been gone for almost FOUR YEARS. (The greatest generation? You bet your sweet bippy. And I doubt there will ever be another like it.)
It was nearing the end of the school term, and, after it concluded a few days later, I never saw Mrs. Egner again. I do know the husband's name was Mr. Egner, though, and I like to think that Mr. Egner came home in fine shape, and that he and Mrs. Egner had a rich, full life together for many, many years thereafter. Somehow, I know they did.
**
To read earlier epiodes from Ron’s book please click on
http://www.openwriting.com/archives/over_here/
