Long road

I occasionally search archives for a picture I'm told existed in print of my father walking down a snowy road during World War II. No luck yet, but I've found a new potential source in the LIFE picture archive. It's worth a trip in any case. Most of the pictures in the archive were never printed.



Some lucky family has a treasure in this photo. This and all pics in this post are from the Battle of the Bulge, the source of most of my father's war stories. These were morbidly gruesome and spare of detail. One, which clearly weighed on him, was about how he had assisted a medic in the field conducting some unknown number of euthenasias by morphine.



Another, meant to instill some message about not being a complainer, involved sitting on half-frozen corpses at mealtime to avoid the wet ground.



Which isn't, with my ironic tone, to downplay what my father went through. The hardships these soldiers faced, mental and physical, do indeed put any complaining on my part to shame. The eccentric old crab I never once considered calling by his first name was, at the time, Wally, 23, some unimaginably youthful, immature version of the former. What did he want out of life?

Delightful laughter

I hope this video somehow survives its tumble through the vasty oceans of information to come and becomes the historical artifact it deserves to be. One can imagine or read about self-satisfied fatcats living in their castles in the sky in the 1920s, but one has no opportunity, so far as I know, to hear them. The laughter and sighing adorning these interviews with one of the best-known bears of the past couple of years will tell our grandchildren more than any words about the pompous idiocy of our high capitalist culture.



The point, of course, is not merely that the object of derision was right. Plenty of bears have been wrong, and hindsight is 20/20. It is not even that so many bulls were so wrong about the economy. This goes beyond the particular subject matter to give us a novelistic insight into the shining, ringing confidence people can build upon their own ignorance. I love the ones who say "I have no idea where you're getting this from" or "I don't know what numbers you're looking at." I find it hilarious that these same people are probably going to continue to work as analysts, when we have here what could fairly be called proof that they were not just wrong in their judgment but ignorant of the possibility that they were wrong, which seems pretty damning of their expertise.

Parenting

Every now and again our eldest is determined to communicate with my wife when the latter is nursing a sleeping baby and therefore unable to engage in speech. This creates pathetic artifacts like this:



And, the verso of the same card:


It is sometimes a lonely house, I suppose.