Manchester Area People for Peace

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A Letter for Peace Day

To the Editor

I stepped outside tonight to call the cat, but the midnight sky was so bright with stars I lost my voice. While I waited in the doorway, a screech owl called out loud and long from a big tree at the edge of the yard. They really do split the night, you know.

So I went in, pulled a jacket from the closet, and went back out. The jacket I happened to choose used to be my father’s. Two pink tissues he left in the right hand pocket are only a little softer than they were three years ago, folded, as if they were cloth, into perfect squares.

Three years ago, I walked down this dirt road at night more often than I do now. My little girl was a baby then. Some nights, when she cried and cried, I would wrap her inside my coat and take her outside into the otherworld of crisp snow, or frogs, or crickets, or katydids, and we would both become very quiet, each listening for the other’s breath. She usually fell asleep before long.

Tonight I walked beyond the pond, all the way to the “new” field. New to us, that is. We purchased it the same year we created a daughter. We had an ambitious idea: to harbor a little breeding habitat for herps and birds, and maybe make a little money selling seed we might harvest, if we could establish some desirable native forbs and grasses. My father, a retired USDA plant physiologist, was a collaborator in the project. He had worked with clover and vetch his whole career, and in retirement had time at last to consider grasses. Three years ago, he was helping us inventory the weeds and plan for their demise. We planned to have it all planted in natives by now. It isn’t. But at least the thistle is under control. We have learned a lot, and, my father would say: that’s the main thing.

I know he would say exactly that and if I could, I would call him up just to hear it one more time. It’s a wonderful rule to live by: to put learning itself foremost every day. He never went to work; every morning he went “to school”. Every evening over dinner, he would tell us what he learned that day. It was as simple as that. He learned things from the graduate students who studied with him, from the staff who watered the plants on the weekend, from the electricians who were always fixing the growth chambers, and so on. The longest, best stories were about complex experiments, months in the making, carefully designed, meticulously carried out, all for naught – except to reveal something that no one had known. My mother told me this summer that she fell in love with him the day he didn’t get upset when she ruined an experiment that was part of his doctoral research.

On September 20th, Peace Night, that screech owl is still tearing at the quiet night and I am still walking in my father’s coat, wrestling with a profound sadness that he faced at the end of his life. He was a veteran with a Purple Heart who believed all along that freedom, having been won, would be enjoyed for generations. In the end, he feared we were truly failing. For want of food, or time, or critical thinking skills, or education, or compassion: he saw us failing to make decisions as a people. We seemed to have lost our will to learn and grow. Without the will to progress, there would be no point in having freedom at all, no point to his day on Iwo Jima or his years of research or his careful parenting. No future for his grandchildren.

I don’t have an answer for that. This Friday, the day he would have been 80, I will remember him raking leaves. Raking and raking, in a succession of hats and jackets, raking big piles into an old sheet; pulling the corners together (it’s tricky when one leg doesn’t bend at the knee or the hip); heaving the sack onto his back like an old wizard and running off with it quick as a rabbit.

Linda Kendall Knox

Manchester Township
September 20, 2004