I had been assigned to Fort Lee, Virginia, an Army Post, for Technical School after basic military training. The old WWII barracks was well maintained, thanks to those of us living there.  We all spent many hours on our hands and knees, scrubbing the bay floors with GI brushes.  Wax was applied with soft cloths and then buffed with handfuls of cotton balls.  You could literally see your face in those 20 year old, dark brown floors. Every footlocker was perfectly aligned with the base of the bunks, no clothes laying around or anything else out of place.  This was not “college dorm” living but a showplace of military discipline. The bunks surrounded the perimeter of the bay...

The dishwasher was humming away as we settled in to the family room after dinner.  It was summer and twilight had arrived.  All was quiet, so we decided to read for a while.  We both noticed the odd scratching sound at the same time.  Olga assumed that she had locked our cat outside.  The sound started and stopped, the repeated a few minutes later.  She then decided to see if the cat was at the door to the garage. I figured that we must have left the overhead door open when we got home from work.  She proceeded to open the door to let the cat in.  Right on the two steps leading to the inside door, standing on his back legs, was a white skunk with a black stripe on its back.  Having...

It all starts early on the Saturday morning before Easter and continues until well after the sun has set.  My Ukrainian wife will begin to prepare the array of goodies that we will enjoy the following day after church. This poses an interesting menagerie of food.  Included are the usual springtime assortment of salads containing my favorite food groups, potatoes and macaroni, but the best part is all that mayonnaise.  Nothing quite compares to that soybean oil and raw egg concoction to add healthy favors to almost anything that’s edible.  None of that low-fat stuff either.  We like the artery-clogging, cholesterol-popping “real” mayonnaise.  I can even tolerate okra...

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...