That December Sunday

On that first Sunday in December of 1941, my 9^th birthday was a few months away.  I was in my father’s pharmacy and yes it was on a corner. The drugstore air I was breathing, is no longer reproducible without crawling into a time capsule. The vapors included crude drugs (long-since fallen into disrepute) escaping from apothecary jars, mingled with cheap perfume and assorted emissions from the soda fountain which included a sandwich board where an egg salad on toast including a coca cola went for 19 cents.

Into this intoxicating brew I was filling up the rack of cigarettes: Old Gold, next to Pall Mall, next to Chesterfield. The temperature had dropped, wind was gusting but no white stuff yet. Noble’s lot was beginning to get their first shipment of Christmas trees down the block. I was a dreamy kid remembering last year’s snowball fight and anxious to use my hand-me-down flexible flyer. The radio was playing a football game when the announcement interrupted the play-by-play with news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

I didn’t know Pearl Harbor from Pearl Mittledorf, my friend’s sister, but the gravity in his voice sent shivers from which those reassuring and familiar inhalations were no match. Suddenly our collective breaths were charged with a gravity unknown to me. Even my father with usually unshakeable calm seemed to lose his tranquility as if the torsion balance scale could not find a point of equipoise.                                                                             

I had since dismissed the notion of Santa, elves and ho, ho, ho, along with the tooth fairy. Times were tough with breadlines still in the headlines. My mother was always in combat mode doing battle against daily dragons. I grew an enormous inch that day as if I had passed some threshold of initiation into an adult world.

The next day at P.S. 99 we listened to President Roosevelt’s intonations of those words, live in infamy, describing this new state of war. Years later I learned that Winston Churchill danced in jubilation over our entry into W.W. II, just in time.

My universe becomes black and white, life and death. Blood on the snow. Maps on the front page showed dark and light divisions with arrows. It was the winter of new words. Panzers, War Bonds, blackouts, air-raid wardens and a different kind of draft. Saboteurs, Blitz and refugees, U-boats and convoys. Praise the Lord for the White Cliffs of Dover and then Pass the Ammunition, I’ll Be Seeing You and the Fuhrer’s Face.

The war moved inside me. I learned whom to hate. Moral absolutes leave no room for doubt as interred Japanese-Americans found out. It was either snowing or it was not. Dark days. Bright lights.