mrzablowdowski

The reason he left the comfort of his Rhode Island family. Crossing an imaginary line in a pasture. Crossing from the upstate New York family farm to enlist in the Canadian army. A sense of chivalry, gallantry, adventure to a young man? I don't know. I never met my grandfather. My mother's father. He died at home, sometime during the second war. Died from a lung lost in the gas attacks of the first war.
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Read the letters sent home to my grandmother. I was a kid. Names of the towns in France. I heard in school. The weather. The letters seemed unspectacular. Except in everyone he missed my gandmother so. I don't know why they went out west at the end of the great war. I suppose like most, to make a new start.
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Heard all my father's stories. Some two or three times. There were never war stories. Except for the little scar on the bridge of his nose, I don't know his war story. Explosion. Near Antwerp. In a coma near the end of the war.

If my mother ever asked to wake my father. I was a kid. I knew one thing. Jump back. My father deep in his dreams. The old man would come up swinging.