A curiosity of mine: in American English, the word “gray” is spelled “gray” except in reference to the soldiers of the Civil War, in which case we generally take on the British spelling of “grey.”

We got a letter last week with a handwritten note added at the top, promising that this was going to be the last Christmas letter of the year. My husband gleefully reacted, “No it’s not! My sister hasn’t sent hers out yet!”

My friend Nanci was talking about her 92-year-old mother-in-law, mentioning her son’s speculation that Bashie was probably the last living person whose father rode in the Pony Express. You heard that right. And he fought in the Civil War! He was 75 and his wife was 45 when they had her. Now imagine this: if his father had been that old when he had been conceived, his father would have been a teenager during the Constitutional Convention.

And that would then be his granddaughter who is alive right now. We’re a young country!

I asked Nanci if I could post this, and she said sure, and added more to the story. Here’s her note:

“Of course, we’d be flattered for you to say something in your blog about Darryl’s grandfather, Joseph A. Fisher. He actually was serving in the Civil War and a pony express rider concurrently. There was a big problem with the Indians raiding the mail, so President Lincoln asked Brigham Young for 100 men from Utah to help with the war effort in the special assignment of being riders, and he was one of those 100 young men. (It might have been 1861.) He was actually hit by an arrow and left for dead, but miraculously was found, the arrow was pulled out, and Bashie’s brother remembers a big hole in his back that as a boy would like to put pennies in where the arrow had been. He served for 9 months. ”

Try going through airport security with that.

Rosemary at designsbyromi.com was quoting Abraham Lincoln, and asked if anyone else had any favorites quotes from him.

I do, but it wouldn’t make sense unless you also quoted Daniel H. Wells–who happens to be my grandmother’s grandfather. It’s one of those family stories that will endure forever.

They passed each other on the road, back in the early days of Illinois, two very tall men, Wells with flaming red hair. Lincoln challenged Wells with, “Stranger! Prepare to die. I promised myself if I ever met a man uglier than me, I would shoot him on sight.”

To which Wells responded, “Stranger! Go ahead and shoot. If I’m uglier than you, I don’t want to live.”

And both men headed off chuckling.

I got this as part of a letter from my Mom yesterday. She was talking about someone at church she’d been paired up with to go visit and keep an eye out for some of the older women in the congregation. I thought it interesting enough to share, with permission:

“My new companion is a Dutch convert in her 80’s, a lovely soul with a strong conviction and sense of duty. We had a few minutes between appointments, and I got to know her a bit. She lived in Rotterdam as a young woman during the German occupation, and she had some stories to tell. I have heard Uncle Wally talk about Dutch potatoes sent to help German saints after the war, but Truus (that’s her name) was there, helped grow the potatoes. She said that they were not told at first who the potatoes were for; they assumed they were growing them for themselves. They had had a very hard time under the Germans; she called 1944 the hunger year, when the ration of bread was 1/2 pound of bread per person PER WEEK! Lots of people starved. The farmers sold food at first to those who could get out into the country, but toward the end of winter refused to sell. She said that the stake president called everyone together and sent them out to forage in the fields and byways for whatever was growing and edible, and then bring what they found back to the community soup kitchen, where things were boiled up and served nightly. This finally broke down when people quarreled about who got the best portions.

But you can see why they were delighted when the church sent seed potatoes and told them to plant them. She said their potatoes grew better than anyone else’s, because they were prayed over. There was a huge harvest and people were ecstatic. Then the church leaders called them together and said the potatoes (or at least a large part of them) were for the German saints who were starving. She said it was a real lesson, hard but necessary, in learning not to hate. The brethren were not only feeding German saints, they were helping Dutch saints spiritually. I had never heard the story that way before.”

(p.s.: No doubt lots of other people prayed over their potatoes and whatever all else they may have been growing. And of course, participation in sharing the ones Truus was talking about was strictly voluntary.)

A few thoughts on yesterday’s post: during WWII, my father was young enough to enlist and be stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, but the war ended before he could be sent overseas.

He had two older brothers, one a captain serving in the Pacific. The other’s letters home were heavily censored and pieces snipped out, but one letter that got through declared to his mother simply that, six weeks after he got overseas, the war would be over. She dismissed it as a young soldier’s boasting.

My Grandmother Jeppson, meantime, anguished that the war had taken the last of her three sons, headed the local Red Cross effort to knit for the troops; as she put it in a letter I have read, she felt that the harder she knitted, the faster and more likely her sons would somehow arrive safely home (and they did). Hours and hours and hours a day, and how, I do not know; nor do I know at what age her rheumatoid arthritis began and whether it was an issue to her at the time.

But her middle son proved correct in his declaration. He wanted to put a stop to all the killing. He wanted to put a stop to the evil that threatened the world, and felt it had to be done before the Germans’ own efforts became what the Americans had at hand. Oppenheimer had had his group sent to Yale, Harvard, and MIT to learn as much as they could of what they needed to know.

Morris R. Jeppson did what he felt had to be done on the world’s most famously-named airplane. Hoping hard there would not be a second plane, nor any other such flight ever.

Reading Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s post at yarnharlot.ca today brought to mind an old memory, I guess my earliest road-trip memory. I was five or six years old, and, given our large family, I was sitting in what was the coveted position of the front seat of the station wagon between my parents. We were in Virginia, going past a Civil War battlefield, and I didn’t understand all those things in the grass. As Dad pulled off the main road and the car faced up a hill, with an ancient wooden fence to either side of the road as we faced that battlefield, my father, a vet, gently, sadly explained to me what a war was. I will never forget the moment the concept sank in.