Alius Vita

I was born early in 1941 to two wonderful people.

I'm not exactly sure where we lived. It was flat. And cold. And I was kept inside our little house most of the time.

Sometimes I'd be propped up to look out the front window over the porch, that how I know it was so flat. I knew it was cold because the barren fields were covered in frost and whenever people would walk by the window on their way to the door, they blew steam out their mouth.

When the weather warmed up, I was taken outside more, but I was usually lying down in a stroller, or buggy, or whatever they were called then, and there was some sort of a canopy to, supposedly, keep the sun off me. It really just made it so I couldn't see. I wasn't propped up in the window as much at that time, either. That probably had something to do with the fact that my father was gone more often during the day. Maybe not.

In December, my father, along with a lot of other fathers, decided to join the Navy. Early in the next year, he was gone and my mother decided to move us from our house into the house my grandparents lived in. She got postcards with pictures of clear water and odd trees and sand. She cried when she got them.

My father died near some place called Tarawa in 1943.

I didn't know that at the time, though, since I had died nearly a year earlier. Whooping cough got me.

Aloha, as the letters my father sent my mother always said.

In the spring of the last year of the eighth decade of the last century, I was born again, to two different, but equally wonderful, people.

This time, Dad didn't join the Navy and I made it past my second birthday.

As I grew I started to remember things, like being propped up in a window watching the flat, frost covered land. I remembered moving from a little one-story house into a much larger two-story one. I remembered being tiny and coughing so hard I'd throw-up all over myself, the floor, or anyone who was holding me. And I remembered the last time I fell asleep.

If I had survived my bout with whooping cough in the last pass, I'd be 66 now. I'd either be retired or expecting to retire soon. Even if I hadn't accomplished anything up to that point, at least I could be proud that I had survived long enough to be done with something.

I wonder what I would have been. I wonder who I would have known.

In college, I took a trip to Washington to find out what happened to the former me's father. That's where I learned he died near Tarawa. I found out how he died. I even learned where he came from and to whom he was married. I never searched for information like that again.

I may remember parts of that life, but it's not mine. It was someone else’s, and he didn't make it. There's no reason for me to dwell on it.