About the map: I spent an afternoon last weekend building that. I had to make the markers myself, so all of those little pins had some sort of sequence to them. I’d found my great-grandfather’s unit history online, and it goes day-by-day, so I could follow along, village by village, during his time in Europe.
And I found all of that because a friend of mine, a history grad, suggested I go to the county courthouse where he would have filed his discharge papers when he came home in 1945. Soldiers, he said, did that with more diligence back then.
So at Christmas I went to the appropriate courthouse. I looked on the sign in the lobby and determined it was in the old building. A security guard told me to go up to the fifth floor. Two ladies there told me I needed to be one more building over, in Veterans Affairs.
I walked over to Veterans Affairs and a very nice lady dropped everything to try and help me. The problem is that my great-grandfather’s records were lost in a huge fire in the 1970s. The government, if you formalize a request, asks for your help in rebuilding their records. If I had the records I’d be happy too. What I do have is his enlistment card at Ft. McPherson in Georgia. I have two references of him in the local newspaper — once when he shipped out and another in a list of local servicemen wounded in battle. I have his dates of birth and death and his serial number.
So the very nice lady at Veterans Affairs, just a few days before Christmas, burns up the phones. She calls every surrounding VA office, the VFW, we fill out forms. She found, in one of her phone calls, my great-grandfather’s discharge papers.
Some other lady, on a very cold day, had to go outside to an onsite storage facility to pull the file. She faxed it over. And, together, the nice VA lady and I pored over every line, taking turns to explain different aspects of the mysterious codes to one another. She’d become invested in the search, and was almost as emotional about it as I was. The DD-214 had the date he shipped out, where he returned home and, before that, the date he was wounded — January, Belgium, the Bulge.
Never liked reading about the Bulge, now I have to become well-versed in it.
His discharge papers had his unit, finding the unit history allowed for the creation of the map. Now I know he spent more time convalescing in a hospital in Georgia than he did getting shot at. Maybe that means some of his family was able to go to south Georgia and see him. Now I know he had Christmas in Metz, which was surely not where he wanted to be, but better than dreading mortar shells.
I wonder how much of Europe this country boy with little education saw before he was put into an active unit. Probably not much, but still, I like this idea of my great-grandfather, at 24 and away from home for the first time in his life, seeing Paris. Even if he did, the best view was probably his farm when he got back home near the end of 1945.
I came to this information 12 years after he died, mostly because he was not the sort to talk about his experience in the war and, in my early 20s, I wasn’t quite ready to find these things out. Sometimes we have to move sooner, the present is what is present.
Visited my ortho today. Actually made him sit down and talk to me for a few minutes. I did this by complaining. It would have been preferable if he’d listened better months ago, when I was also complaining. But I finally got him to think about the things beyond just my collarbone.
I have the muscle spasms, you see, exacerbated by exertion and driving. It doesn’t take much to do too much and I tend to have to drive a fair amount. He asked about working out, I told him not so much, because of the muscular problems. I told him I have only just this week started riding my bike — which I should have been doing in September or so — because of my back.
He said maybe it is a degenerative disc problem. You are at that age —
Let me stop you right there, doc. I saw another ortho over the break who specifically looked at the neck and that isn’t the problem.
So I got another prescription, this one for inflammation. I was so pleased with the idea of not taking any more medication, too. He wants me to consider more therapy. We’ll see I guess. I’ve grown weary of the “Everyone’s recovery is different” answer. Almost as much as dealing with a slow recovery.
But, hey, after the visit to the doctor’s office I rode my bike a little bit. Today I felt like I could have done more, but I was sneaking in a few turns of the pedal in between rain and darkness.
Still waiting for my confidence to return on little things like diving into turns, riding one-handed and riding in the rain. So I have to wait out an afternoon shower. Maybe I’ll try the rain next week.
There’s a mail drop box a few miles from home so I stuffed an envelope in my jersey and rode up there and back, just getting in before night fell. This is my fourth ride back, none of them worth writing home about, all of them short, but this one could have been longer. It seems like my three short rides this week at least woke up my legs, if my neck is still sore.
That’s a question of posture. I want to look far into the distance, but the neck doesn’t want to be held like that just yet. So I have to look short, and then peer up as far as my eyes will go and only occasionally glance ahead. I haven’t decided how much of that literal pain in the neck is a muscular issue and how much is cranking my upper body in an unusual way so as to make sure that, this time, I don’t run over anything. It still feels like every little piece of debris is out to get me.
Silly, I know.
