Chapter 25
What is a Life?
One day I sorted through my father’s memory albums. There were pictures of his Navy ship and articles from his baseball conquests. Seems my father was a very accomplished baseball player, being an exceptional hitter, scoring 4 runs in one game and was noted to be a force in the infield like no other as a first baseman, according to a newspaper article I found. He played on an American Legion team and because his record was so amazing, he was inducted into the team for his ship, the USS Philadelphia in the navy. He told the story this way.
“I enlisted when I was seventeen,” dad said, “I went for basic training where I stood in line to get weighed, checked out medically and given my uniforms. Afterwards, they told me to go to the mess hall, so I did. I grabbed a tray, went through the line and sat down, not knowing anyone around me, of course. Over the loud speaker, someone was calling my name, saying, ‘is Bill Williams here?’ I froze with fear as I thought, oh shit, I wonder what I did! I slowly stood up and said, ‘I’m Bill’. An officer walked over to me and said, ‘Bill, I understand you’re a pretty good baseball player’. ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied. ‘After you finish your meal, please report to the athletic office. We would like you to play for the navy on the USS Philadelphia team.’ Our team won championships in its division and we played often until I was shipped out.”
I sat with my kids at home one afternoon and asked my dad to tell this story to them in hopes they would remember him one day when he was dead and gone, but I also made a video tape of the experience turning it into a DVD later. Who knows how long that technology will last? But my kids have it and my dad is no longer in that body. So if they want to remember him, they can pull out that DVD and try to find a player.
I went through the albums and tore out pages to save and pages to throw away. What a tragedy to think that his life or any life for that matter, was in the end summarized and documented in the pages of a Photo/Memory album, now being torn apart. I made different stacks of photos for both of my children. If my children do not have children, I am hoping for a few moments in their life they will appreciate these sweet memories of my dad. If they did have children, I hoped they would pass the stories on.
But the experience made me feel very minute, very small indeed. What is a life, after all? You are born, you go to school, you meet the girl, you get married, you go to war, you play sports, you have children, your children grow up, you grow old, your wife dies, your kids leave town, your friends die, and finally you die. In between, you had so many wonderful experiences with so much fun and so much pain. You go on summer vacations, you buy a new home, you go dancing with friends and you teach your children how to swim. But what was it all for? It seriously broke my heart to think of everyone who, life after life, had so many hopes and worked very hard and loved very much and tried to do the right thing and worked to support a family and cried when his children didn’t appreciate him and found some happiness and danced and laughed and played golf and cried and then died. Then I wondered about my own life . . . and dying.