June 6, 1944

Good morning!

Sixty nine years ago today, I was at Methodist Church Camp in the heart of the hill country of Texas.  It was a beautiful experience in a beautiful place.

Every morning, we went to a chapel meeting before the day began, and at that meeting, I remember, the announcement was made that the Allied Forces had commenced an invasion onto the German-held coast of Normandy.  It was a day of great patriotic pride and hope that our nation would soon lead us all into the vanquishment of the Nazi regime in Europe. I was fifteen years old, and have a snapshot that commemorates that day in my life.  And thousands of miles away, boys not much older than I were undergoing a tremendous and terrible ordeal that would end their lives or change them forever, in order to save all their fellow Americans.  We at that church camp were not unaware of their sacrifice, and in our young thoughtless way we had all of those young soldiers in our thoughts all day long.

In 1988, when I was in Paris on June 6th, we were all made aware that many many ex-servicemen from all over the world were converging upon France in memory of that invasion forty four years earlier.  I was mostly concentrating on being in the Louvre and trying to get into the Goya exhibit.  The Goya room was not to open for some forty five minutes after lunch, whether that day or every day, and while I waited in the hallway, I looked out the window at Paris (never boring) and chatted to a fellow tourist who was waiting too.  He was a tall, thin older American, and we were talking about how congested the traffic was and how many people were in the museum that day. 

"It's forty four years since I was here last," he said.  "Oh," said I blithely and unthinking, "I'll bet it was a lot more calm and quiet then."

"No," he said quietly.  "It was D-Day, and I was on the beach at Normandy."

It all bore in on me then, the reality of what he was going through as I sat under the live-oaks in the Hill Country.  The long years that had passed for each of us then, and the chance that had brought us together so much later on, to meet in a waiting area at the Louvre in Paris, waiting for the Goya rooms to open up.  YAZZYBEL