1918.
Armistice Day.
My grandfather died two months later, a natural born American citizen and pastor of German descent who tried to introduce English-speaking services into his churches, but not without a lot of resistance, which helped kill him in the end of a massive heart attack, aged 52.
It was front page news. The whole town mourned. My dad, not yet 4 years old, was plunged into poverty after the depression of 1920 and spent the Roaring Twenties that way until something worse happened, the Great Depression. At that point his mother sent him to Iowa to live with his older brother, also a pastor, where he went to high school. He remembered his brother was paid in bushels of potatoes and corn and the like instead of in cash because no one had any.
He graduated in 1933, came back home and eventually married in 1937. He went off to fight in another American war against his ancestors, in 1943. Even that late in the history of German Americans, that raised some eyebrows in the family. He served in the artillery in France and Belgium, survived, and sailed home on the Queen Mary with a Purple Heart.
My mother once said her most vivid memory of his return was the smell of his cigarette smoke in the bathroom in the morning. Years later the bottle of Shalimar he brought home for her from France crashed to the wood floor in the bedroom, leaving a more permanent scent of a different kind. They lived in that house until 2000.
They are gone now.
But I remember, at the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month that "war is the father of everything" (Heraclitus, Diels-Kranz 22B53).
