February’s End

One more day, courtesy of a Presidential election year, and February 2008 will be gone. Spring is just over the March horizon. February has many memorable days for me to observe. I have commented on the birthdays, but there is one more, for my late grandmother Nana, that I still remember each year.

On February 17, 1903, Thelma Wilmarth was born to a large family in Pennsylvania. For 93 years she raised children, grandchildren, cooked, sewed, packed up and moved from Army post to Army post, and loved without let or hindrance all her family, down to great-grandchildren. On a cold and blustery Good Friday in 1996, family from the four points of the compass gathered at Arlington to see Nana’s ashes lowered into the grave already holding our grandfather Boozle, Colonel to Nana’s Lady.

We then went to the Fort Myer Officer’s Club for a lunch hosted by an old Army friend of my grandparents. We drove past the chapel where forty years before, my Aunt Barbara had walked out under a archway of crossed swords with her new husband, my Uncle Tommy, then a young Army officer. He eventually retired a full colonel, and that day they both sat again in the club where their wedding reception had been held.

Nana would have liked the coming full circle that marked that day. Memory is what we have in every family, a personal history and mythology that defines us. Looking backwards we find our direction forward.

I wonder what March will bring?

The Colonel’s Lady: Thelma Wilmarth Reese Merchant

What do you call a woman who can bear children, raise them with love and unflagging energy, cook like a first-rate chef, sew well enough to provide her daughters and herself with clothes that looked tailor-made, go to work when her husband was overseas, love without reservation her extended family, her husband, her daughters, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and do it all with an unlimited well of good-humor? In my family, we called this woman “Nana.”

I have called her “The Colonel’s Lady,” and here she is with her Colonel, Franklin Walter Reese, USAR.

The occasion was their 25th wedding anniversary. They would mark another 24 years before my grandfather Boozle died of cancer. Their love was deep, powerful, occasionally full of laughter, very, very rarely with sadness or discord.

It is a running joke in our family that Nana was “the General” to Boozle’s colonel, but her generalship owed little to iron discipline, chain of command and punishment detail. Nana built her strategy on what she knew her loved ones most desired, so long as it was not to their detriment, then marshalled all the forces at her command to carry the day for us. No general on a battlefield was more determined; no foe could slacken her fierce partisanship on our behalf. She loved unconditionally, and was loved in equal measure by her family.Nana lived on beyond the Colonel’s death, married again to Fred Merchant, a sweet man who never stopped smiling when in her company, as though he couldn’t believe his good fortune. Nana had that effect on men she loved. But she told them that the good fortune was hers. They loved her for that, as well.When, after the surrender of Japan, my grandfather was posted to Korea, and later to Tokyo, Nana sent him off with perfectly packed trunks and a blank, leather-bound journal which she commanded him to fill with his daily activities and thoughts, until she and my aunt Barbara could join him, once their turn for family transport came. They both thought that would be within six months, or less. It turned out to be eighteen months. Nana coped, keeping a household going in limbo, seeing my aunt off to school each day, occupying herself with household minutiae and writing letters to Boozle.

Reading the journal, printed up by a family friend years later, I realized how lost and lonely my grandfather was without his wife, without her boundless energy, love and support. Almost every entry shows this sadness. Along with this overarching melancholy, however, there are literate and penetrating observations on everything he saw or thought. Nana knew her Colonel. I am so grateful for this window into his life, and she made it possible.

Both my grandparents have been gone for some years now, but their love for each other and their family still forms the foundation of our lives. We laugh at the stories we tell each other, and we warm ourselves before these memories as we would before a fire in winter. I love them both, still, though they are gone, and as I get older I realize more and more why my grandfather showed such devotion to his Thelly. She was the organizing force and enabling source of love for him, and for all of us. If I could give her one more hug, I would.

My Grandfather the Colonel

My grandfather, Col. Franklin Walter Reese, USAR. His grandchildren, starting with me, called him “Boozle.” The story about that name later. The picture here is of FWR after retirement, while travelling through Europe space-available on service aircraft. This would be around 1957-59, when he was often mistaken for Ernest Hemingway.The photo, in fact, was his passport photo for those years.

My grandparents, Franklin and Thelma, were the heroes of their grandchildren, islands of unconditional love throughout our various childhoods. They were also great idiosyncratic characters of matchless humor, sense of adventure and zest for living.

FWR was also a raconteur and entertainer who could keep his friends and family in stitches. Whether telling with deadpan humor of falling into a glass-fronted bookshelf on the upstairs landing whilst sleepwalking, or acting out jokes with appropriate accents, expressions and dramatic pauses, Boozle was good value at any party. And during twenty years of active duty in the Army, there were many parties. I don’t know if the Army has a bugle call for the cocktail hour, as they do for reveille, taps or other times of the day, but they ought to. Especially during the forties and fifties, the U. S. Army was a place of hard drinking, and Boozle was the man for the hour. Cocktail, that is.

Now, his name. During WWII Boozle was stationed in D.C., and my father, after marrying my mother and impregnating her with me, was shipped off by the U. S. Navy to the South Pacific. While awaiting my arrival, Mother lived with her parents, so my first home was with Boozle and Nana, and my Aunt Barbara, still in school.

The “Nana” is fairly standard, but my infant self was responsible for christening my grandfather “Boozle.” Each night, on first arriving home, FWR made straight for my crib, where I was usually still awake, fussing and doing baby stuff.

My grandfather would lean over the crib, making circling motions with his hand, forefinger extended, descending towards my little belly, sounding out buzzing sounds as he homed in on my belly button: “Bzzz, bzzzz, bzzzzzz…boozle!” and he would gently poke my belly. So, naturally, my name for him became “Boozle.” And all the family adopted the name. Something about it seemed so right for the Colonel.

I don’t remember this, of course. I was a prodigy in my family’s eyes, being first child and grandchild on all sides, but eating and pooping and sleeping pretty much occupied my days. Which is why the curious incident of Boozle and the bookshelf in the nighttime didn’t register with me. I heard that story a lot, along with the Boozle! story and how foul the soy formula I had to eat smelled, among other trivia.

Especially after a more strenuous than usual cocktail hour, Boozle was prone to sleepwalk in the night. Sometimes his automatic pilot worked, but, other times…there was the tumble down the stairs into the bookshelf on the landing. My grandfather awoke amidst a pile of books, shattered glass and spattered blood. My grandmother scolded him severely while binding up his wounds and accused him of waking the baby-me. Apparently this was as great a sin in those days as when I had my own babies around the house.

Boozle was a bit more concerned about the bloodstains on his books, which he had acquired with great care and bitter expense during the Depression. Boozle always loved to read, and his letters from where ever he was posted were wonderful to read, funny and literate and brimming with his spirit.

The books were carefully cleaned, the bookshelf repaired and became in time a resource for the grandchildren whenever we visited Nana and Boozle during vacations, at posts from Washington, D.C. to Augusta, GA. Book-loving and bibulous, but always first and foremost a grandfather. I hope I am half as good a one as he was.