LETTERS FROM MY DAD: PEELING POTATOES

I stood at the sink in my son and daughter-in-law’s home peeling potatoes. A granddaughter stood on each side of me, peeling potatoes. They were giggling. I was savoring:  it was the day after Christmas and we were all together. My daughter hovered over the fried chicken, a family recipe from her deceased Dad, the only other one capable of carrying out the recipe to perfection.  I said a silent prayer for giving me family closeness. And I thought of my own deceased dad, sixty-seven years ago, peeling potatoes.
Sixty-seven years ago the dark and hideous gloom of World War II loomed over America and my young parents, who found their love story over shadowed also. Dad had been home on furlough the early part of December, but had been ordered to an Army Air Corps base in Salt Lake City. He left Dec. 10. No family closeness, savoring togetherness for him. Except by letter. My mother kept everyone: from basic training and gunnery schools in Texas, to mechanic school in Mississippi and now Salt Lake City. Airmen were sent to this base to wait for their real orders. Their schooling was finished and they were waiting for assignment to a crew and plane. Dad was there six weeks and he wrote eighty one letters just to my mother! Even for my dad, that was a lot of letters. But it was Christmas, he was lonely and lovesick and…there was not much to do in Salt Lake City but wait and write letters and peel potatoes.

December 30
Bob and I were on night K.P. It was from five o’clock until two in the morning…we had to peel 150 pounds of potatoes, fix them for French fries, sugar some donuts, wash some pans and mop the floor…

January 17
Last night I worked K.P. Six of us had to peel three hundred pound sacks of potatoes. Then we all fixed ourselves eggs and bacon around midnight.

January 25
We peeled a bunch of sweet potatoes tonight. I hate the very sight of them…

I am so thankful for this image…seeing my dad hunkered down over potatoes, sharing it with his beloved thousands of miles away.  His letters were full glimpses of his waiting days: passes to town, much movie viewing, lectures on malaria and sex prevention, going up in the pressure chamber, “detail” work other than peeling potatoes…delivering fish to mess halls, shoveling snow, anything the Army ordered them to do while they waited.

As my granddaughters and I put our peeled potatoes into the boiling water, soon to be mashed and spread with tasty chicken gravy we talked a little about their beloved grandfather frying chicken, who died before they were born and I mentioned my beloved father, their great grandfather, peeling potatoes in Salt Lake City, who died before I was born.

Sometimes we forget to appreciate the mundane as anything but a chore to finish. But when it becomes a connecting link between generations, it cannot help but become much more.  I will always think of peeling potatoes as just that.