Days of Infamy

December 7th, 1941 was a marker for me; a frozen moment in the album of my life. It was mid-day on a Sunday. I was eight years-old, going on nine if anyone had asked. I would be older than that by the next day.

I was in my father’s drugstore, stacking cigarettes, Chesterfield next to Camels next to Lucky Strike. and listening to the brown Bakelite radio. Ace Parker went back to throw a pass when the football game was interrupted. That ball is still spiraling in my head.

Pearl Harbor, the announcer said, in a voice weighted and alarmed. Pearl who? This was a different Pearl than my friend’s sister. I knew that much.

My father, who was nearly imperturbable, was seen for the first time, agitated. The few customers who didn’t know one another, suddenly shared the same worried face and curses. I listened hard and felt the quake, the seismic shift. It was my initiation into the grown-up world.

The next day PresidentRoosevelt (who had become a single word) declared that the date of the attack will live in infamy. His intonation sounded biblical to me, coming as if from on high. I had not heard that word, infamy, before and I doubt I’ve heard it since until this current regime’s overthrow of our democracy.

That winter I learned whom to hate. There were blackouts and air raid wardens. I bought 10 cent savings stamps going toward a war bond. When Kramer’s grocery store had butter, I stood in line with a rationing book. I learned how to knit squares which would become blankets. Rubber soles were replaced by a synthetic substance that left a black streak.

Refugees joined my class. They were better students and seemed always to skip to a higher grade. Years later, I learned that Kew Gardens was a destination for Jewish families in flight from Europe.

Five months after Pearl Harbor the U.S. Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway. A local movie house in my neighborhood renamed itself the Midway Theater.

Those were years of one nation indivisible. We cheered the Allied bombers over Berlin or Tokyo and we hissed the swastika and the Japs.

It was a great time to be 9,10,11 and 12. We all knew right from wrong. Hollywood agreed. By September 1945, I wondered what newspapers would have to print. The war was over. Evil was defeated. I was twelve and that chapter was closing. Roosevelt had died and God along with him. Infamy, unnamed, was yet to come. Again, I was on the verge.

If I were allowed one question to ask President Trump it would be: Why did we fight WWII?