Curiouser and Curiouser

 CURIO

 

In 1924 my dad found a piece of a German helmet in an almost barren Munich field. Part of a swastika was still visible as well as two initials underneath, an aleph and a himmel. My god, he thought. Could this piece of junk have belonged to Hitler? He stuck it in his jacket pocket, sat down on a wooden deck lounge chair and mulled over his find. When he looked at it again he was angry, overcome with grief for the poor soldier who was blown to bits. The rough, salty Atlantic waves burned his cheeks. From inside of him, sympathy brought tears and soft words to his lips. They changed rapidly. 'Damn, all those German bastards. They should have died before they started the 'war that would end all wars.'

 

Naomi, who was going to be my mother, was waiting for her Louis when he reached New York again. He told her who and what he had seen, how his relatives had disappeared, that graveyards were ransacked, times were bad there. 'But, we are together now, Naomi,' he said and so they were wed.

 

Louis still had the piece of helmet he had found and wanted to display it so others would perhaps get the same feeling of hatred and pity the way he had. In the basement of the small house he and Naomi had rented, he built a rough hewn shadow box, let some dark red paint run down its sides and attached the piece of helmet to a chain and let it hang into the red blood. Naomi didn't like it, wanted him to destroy it but no, not my dad. He brought it up into the livingroom, put the shadowbox on their fake fireplace mantel and invited whoever he met to come see it.

 

Word spread and neighbors, strangers, knocked on the door, came in, studied the curio. Conversations teemed with different thoughts. Jews, gentiles, blacks were welcome. Louis's curio caught the attention of the NY Herald and a story was written about what the find and the shadow has come to mean to so many.

 

This week, at the beach, he was idly digging a hole big enough for my baby sister to sit in and be buried, when he hit a metal clunk. With Amie's little tin shovel, he slowly, carefully, removed what he had found. It was an empty rusty can with what looked like a picture of General Patton.

 

 He took it to the lake, washed it carefully, dried it on his jeans and decided to make another shadowbox, a patriotic one for the finest general America had in WWII. He cried a little, thinking about the insanity of war.  It would stand up well next to the woebegone Helmet.