Memories need to be shared as well as treasured

St. Petersburg Times (Florida)

Beverly Beckham

"Tell me about the war, Dad?" I ventured, a long time ago when I was a child and needed a story to take to school.

"Were you scared? Did you think you might die?"

"Your father doesn't like to talk about the war," my mother scolded. "Run along and do your homework."

"But this is my homework " I protested.

Later that night, my mother tiptoed into my room, sat on my bed and told me that my father had received a Purple Heart for his bravery in battle. The name alone sounded grand and noble, and I wondered why she was whispering. I pictured my father in uniform looking like John Garfield in Pride of the Marines, and my own young heart swelled with pride imagining how wonderful it would be to walk into school the next day and show everyone this thing called a Purple Heart.

"You can't do that," she said. "He doesn't have it anymore."

"Where is it?" I asked.

"I don't know. He's never said."

I wanted to run downstairs and ask where it was, why it wasn't ensconced in glass and enshrined in the living room, why I had never heard of it before, but my mother said no, I couldn't ask. "Your father doesn't like to talk about those things," she told me.

As I grew up, I tried a few times to get him to discuss his past, but he always brushed the questions aside. "How come you never talk about your family?"

"There's nothing to say."

"What were you like when you were a teen-ager?"

"Why would you want to know?"

After a while, I quit asking and limited our conversations to the present, to the things we were both doing, letting the past slip farther and farther away.

About a year ago, for no apparent reason, my father presented me with a black-and-white picture of him and his two brothers when they were small. Three little boys in white sailor suits scrubbed and shining, their hair so newly combed that teeth marks stand out, posed soldier-straight for the camera, my father and his older brother in long pants and short hair; the youngest, in the middle, in long hair and short pants. I'd never seen the picture before, never in all the albums over all the years, and it made me sad because I recognized, not for the first time, how little I know of my father.

"How come you never talk about the past?" I asked him again recently.

"Why should I? It's over. Buried. Gone."

"But I don't want it to be. I want you to tell me things so I can tell my children and they can tell theirs."

He paused for a moment and sighed. "I don't think anybody'll be interested, but what is it you want to know?"

For five minutes I caught a glimpse of the child he used to be. He told me about climbing aboard a horse-drawn cart in the predawn of summer mornings to deliver gelatin with his father; then lying awake in the evenings, listening with his brothers while his father played the piano in the barroom across the street.

Then he stopped, suddenly, the child gone, the man back in control. "This stuff isn't important," he said.

But he's wrong. It is important. It's the only thing that is: Our pasts, our histories, the essence of our lives. Why else are we here, if not to learn, then share what we've learned? All of knowledge is not contained within the pages of books, I told him. A bit of it lies within each of us.

And that bit is what we're all here to share.