The Secrets He Kept

 1/365 January 17, 2024; Wednesday

Trabaje para vivir, no se viva para trabajar!

Does it really take a whole life to figure this out? I wondered as I looked at the beauty that is my setting. An uncultivated woods whose boughs are laden with snow that glistens in the occasional sun’s rays that creep through the clouds, falling snow, and woods that now surround me.

I made a choice to live here, a place where I could have guests, the grandchildren, anyone really could visit. I had lived in places that had that sort of space before, but did not invite you in. 

I remember the haunted look my dad carried with him. The gaze off into the distance. His clear blue eyes tense, holding something inside. The dreams he shared with me of attempting to chop through ice but never being able to reach water. 

His stories of falling through the ice, and almost dying.

His attempt to save a whole nursing home from an explosion he as sure was going to injure the inhabitants.

And finally “I was sworn to secrecy” the “gas burned my skin” but “I didn’t feel it.” And “everyone hated the Germans because” and then the thought disappeared into silence. And finally on a lonesome rode in Mexico surrounded by people who blamed us for the death of a cow in the road “someone’s got to take the blame”.

These emotionally charged memories haunt me or at least define what I remember of my parents, who passed away over 20 years ago.

As the Manhattan Project documents have been declassified mostly, I realize that what he kept inside, perhaps part of national security, may have been only the tip of the iceberg. I will write a story of survival, minimalism, and perhaps fear that kept him so serious in his life, that lent a message to his children, one of an emotionless, sparse existence, where things were much safer than people, where loner activities were safer than being in a group, where you could be vulnerable at all times to betrayal of yourself, your loved ones and country, where you could not trust the very essence of what it was to be a human being, to show compassion for yourself or others, that isolation in its definition of loneliness was safer than love.

This series of mini essays will explore Chemical Warfare and the development of Nuclear Warfare, from the point of view of trying to find clues into the personality of the parents that influenced me, and as people who were everyday people, bright, vulnerable in their situation, growing up with little and making a life out of their intellect and perseverance, and proposing a story that is basically fiction, because I will probably never find their names documented anywhere, and I will explore the reason for that. At all times I will attempt to reference all sources of data that I encounter and place in quotes all direct extractions from prior written information. Folia. Freedom of information act. 

Should send to legal department, maybe a form on the net.  Heck with local newspaper people. edo