“Childhood Memories”

by Tom Crowe-Garey

25 Sept. 2017 Jackson, MI ·

A friend’s post yesterday captured my attention. She told of a childhood story that shaped her frame of mind and an implied empathy for humankind in general.

Although short, it was compelling enough to invoke childhood memories of my own. My 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Hester telling us how her family had to enter through the back door at a diner and weren’t allowed to eat inside or use the restroom.

It further invoked another memory of when my parents owned and ran a security company in a retirement community called Sun City. I spent most summer days there, alone and on my own to explore. In that time, I met Ms. Vaughn. A friendly, but stout woman with snowy white hair, a USMC Veteran…and a lesbian. She knew my parents as she was a client of their business, and they adored her. I knew she was a lesbian because I’d been to her house after swimming at the clubhouse and lunch together. I noticed multiple black and white and color photos of her and her partner through the years. I asked my parents and they informed me she had lost her “friend” two years prior.

That particular Summer, I’d also met another customer of my parents. Her name escapes me, but she was memorable. It wasn’t her beauty as an older woman that captivated me, it was the fear that was etched into her eyes from years ago. She was an older Jewish woman whom I’d always been friendly to, but something about that morning was embedded into my psyche. We began talking, and she mentioned she and her sister were survivors of Dachau, she showed me her identification number tattooed on her left arm. (I forgot to mention this to my friend, but she lost her mother and Aunt in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but was able to keep her sister from being shot) They were sent from Birkenau to Dachau just prior to the war’s end. There was a point at which they were gathering men and some women to be executed, and they were able to hide, but not without one of the guards shining a bright light in their faces (here’s what horrified me as a child most), they expected to be shot, tears streaming and losing their faculties…the guard didn’t see them and they survived.

These sorts of stories, are just a few of what shaped my mindset. Others being when I saw Martin Luther King Jr’s son speak at the University of California, Riverside in 1988 while I was an 8th grader. I remember Kevin and Kim Li from Junior High as well. Their family was from Laos, and fled prior to the Vietnam War’s end. I still recall standing up for them when slurs were flung at them. I remember Patema (misspelled), the exchange student that feared for her life if she went back home, because her culture frowned on educating women. These were real…they ARE real people that showed me no one is less than.

Not one race is better than the other, religion better than another, rich versus poor. I witnessed girls that were battered by foster parents, and grade schools (yes, grade schools) turned a cheek. Later on, after not seeing them in school for several years, seeing them with 3 or 4 kids…and I was barely a Sophmore in high school.

I get upset when I see people I knew once upon a time, forget WHERE they came from, and who they once befriended, now acting like their childhood innocense was in vain. Hearing, “he won…GET OVER IT,” from the mouth of an old friend since grade school, referencing refugees, stung like a bee. A thousand bees. A friend from Airborne School and DLI up at the Presidio of Monterey, then our first duty station at Fort Bragg…turned undeniably vitriol towards outsiders.

Wait…what happened here?

What happened to sticking up for those who didn’t have voices? Teammates that were treated unfairly around campus, but were treated like brothers on the field? What about reading other religious texts like the Koran to the bible and comparing differences, yet similarities? Keeping an open view.

Life. Life is what happened. Fear. Fear is what happened. Have we grown so callous and afraid of our own shadows, that we collapse within our own minds and take what others have to say without a grain of salt?

I hope those I grew up with, friend and family alike, read this and have a moment of reflection, a pause to think, and hopefully a moment to challenge themselves.

I had a lifetime of experiences setting the stage for how I think. I was never a child, but prepared for adulthood with a mind swirling with possibilities to help change the world by being a voice (sometimes of reason, others with anger…to raise awareness and garner like-minded souls, and others to enlighten that life extends further than the tip of the nose).

So, what happened, dreamers? You grow old and let life get in the way? We live to learn and to teach. Life is much too short to engage in hatred, is it not? Those things we promised ourselves we wouldn’t do when we grew up…we’ve done. It isn’t too late. It’s never too late.

An ounce of kindness is a seed planted.

(Courtesy of Calvin Harris, H.W., M.)