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| Santa Barbara News-Press Front Page |
From the time he was a little boy, in the 1920s, he
collected postage stamps.
And when he
grew older and went off to war, along with most others of his generation, he
continued to collect stamps wherever in the world he happened to be, and mailed
them home to his parents and sister for adding to his collection.
My uncle’s
other passion was flying.
On the night
of 29 February 1944, at the tender age of 21, my uncle flew a B-24 Liberator on
a mission over Burma.
His plane
got hit by anti-aircraft fire.
My uncle
ordered the crew to bail out, and most of them did, sailing by parachute to the
ground. They were captured by Japanese soldiers and held as POWs for the
duration of World War II.
Because two
of his crewmen were wounded, Flight Lieutenant Edward James Douglas Stanley
chose to stay at the controls of his plane, hoping to crash-land them to safety.
But the
plane disappeared and was believed to have crashed near Rangoon.
My mother was only eighteen when her brother was reported missing in
action. Every week she wrote letters to
The War Office and the Royal Air Force begging for information.
They never answered her, and she resolved that none of her three sons would ever go to war if she had anything to say about it.
They never answered her, and she resolved that none of her three sons would ever go to war if she had anything to say about it.
Refusing to give up hope, my grandmother kept my uncle’s possessions—including
the skin of a python that he discovered slithering inside his tent when based
in India—lest her son return.
In the mid-1990s, a decade after my grandmother died, someone who had
extensively researched my uncle’s doomed flight, contacted me. He primarily wanted to know what had become
of my uncle’s family but also wanted to share his findings, which, while
detailed, did not pinpoint the remains of my missing uncle though confirmed
that he had most certainly perished.
What this fellow really wanted most, he told me after we became
acquainted, was to organize a memorial service at St. Clement Danes, the RAF
church. I assisted with both moral and financial support and the result was a
poignant Service of Celebration and
Thanksgiving attended by my mother (and father), for whom, after more than half-a-century,
it was a kind of closure.
Later that day, my mother gifted me with her brother’s stamp collection.
Three years ago, I
visited London as part of a mystical journey I’ve been on and I asked a
muse who guided me during part of that trip to take me on an adventure by
subway, ideally to some part of the British capital I’d never been before.
At Green Park tube
station, our starting point, she led me to an eastbound platform, onto a train,
off a train, onto another, and joked about going to the end of the line and
getting lost in Epping Forest, which would have been fine by me.
But that’s not what
happened.
She chose for us to alight
at Chancery Lane—not two hundred yards from St. Clement Danes, the RAF church—and
ascend to Lincoln’s Inn, where the law was born six centuries ago.
Two symbols (messages
from the universe) immediately caught my attention: A prominent old clock set
into bricks and mortar (now’s the time,
it said to me) and a prominent weathervane (follow
the wind), and soon—at the muse’s invitation—I was inside the round Temple
Church, a place of worship built in 1195 by the Knights Templar, a medieval
order created to protect Christian pilgrims and which also invented the West’s
first banking system.
Prominently engraved upon Temple Church’s marble floor:
Climbing the spiral stairs to an upper gallery I noticed they were
decorated with ornate tiles depicting Pegasus, the mythical winged “horse of
muses” that symbolizes the harnessing of magic in the material world.
And then, outside Temple Church, this mythical
horse was everywhere around us: a bar
relief on a wall, a medallion on a gate, a metal sculpture, even a café called
Pegasus—the running theme of a neighborhood chosen by the muse.
Pegasus was the “nose-art” nickname of the B-24 Liberator my uncle flew.
My mother also gave me my uncle’s python skin, which I took to a master
bookbinder for crafting into journals I’ve been saving for the cross-country
road trip I’ve forever intended to take.
Snakes, because they shed and grow a new skin, symbolize renewal.
Renewal is what happens after wars end, the dead are counted, and people
try to move forward with their lives, as painful as that may be if a loved one
has been lost.
My muse walked me to the Golden Jubilee Bridge.
“I’m leaving you now,” she said.
“Cross the bridge.”
And I did, leaving me to muse about the symbolism of bridges: progress,
unity—and a spiritual “crossing over” to the other side.
And so, on this Memorial Day, I’m thinking of the uncle I never met, and saying a prayer for those who, in the service of their country, crossed over so that others
could renew their lives in freedom.
(Adapted from a nonfiction book-in-progess.)
(Adapted from a nonfiction book-in-progess.)
