Author - Rick Gile

From time to time, my wife will invite a group of good friends and family to our house to decorate eggs for Easter.  If it happens to be the first time you’ve been invited to her annual ritual, initially you’ll conjure up visions of women and kids running around the house dipping those hard-boiled white chicken droppings into bowls full of food coloring.  Au contraire.  Olga is Ukrainian and what she has in mind is something quite different.  They call it Pysanky.  For you language buffs, that comes from the verb meaning “to write”.  I have a suspicion that it may also be translated “do not drop”, but I could be mistaken. As we prepare for the...

The snow was beginning to obscure the roadway as that cold January afternoon turned to evening. I had completed my enlistment and we were heading back to New York to start our new lives as civilians. It was the third day of our journey and the old yellow Plymouth station wagon was doing pretty well in the storm. It was the first time we had experienced a Nebraskan blizzard and we thought it would be better to make Norfolk before stopping for the night.  The roads were quickly becoming impassable and our three year old son, Mike, was running a fever. I pulled off into the parking lot of an aging, one story motel with a tiny diner next door. The carpets were well-worn and the furniture a bit...

That’s not a typo. V-mail was a WWII secure system that was used to communicate with soldiers during the War.  My father contacted my Uncle Wayne via V-mail while Dad was somewhere in either England or Northern France, training for Operation Overlord. Here is part of the story from my Dad’s sister, Ada, in her own words: “Right after Pearl Harbor my brother Jim enlisted in the Army in December of 1941 and my boyfriend, Wayne enlisted in January 1942, but they didn’t know each other then.  Wayne came home on furlough in May of 1943 just before he was sent overseas.  He and I became engaged.  I wrote to Jim and told him.  Jim decided he wanted to meet the guy who...

My father and his brother, Dick, were the best of pals. I remember that greeting on so many warm summer Saturday mornings when Uncle Dick would come to our house to have coffee with Dad. They’d sit around the dinette table in our little kitchen and talk about things as friends do. I don’t remember anything very profound in those conversations but I could see the bond they had, even though I was a kid. I guess the most memorable thing was that they were always laughing about something. Mostly, I can’t ever recall a harsh word between them. I wish now I had asked how that “Hello, Moe” greeting had started or why they called each other Moe, but I’m not sure...

It really stated back in the mid-1970s when Olga and I had returned from California after serving in the US Air Force. We had bought a house and Walt, Olga’s brother, asked if he could live with us while attending a local Community College. Walt had gotten himself “born again” and began attending a Church in Albany. He shared his faith with Olga, me and our two young sons, much to our displeasure.  After listening to him tell me about Jesus for the umpteenth time, I couldn’t take it any more so I literally made him leave our home. So you know, after lots of “encouragement” from my wife, I did go out with the car and retrieve him later on. He stayed with...