I've often said here that one of the biggest problems with being an older parents is that your kids have grandparents that are much older. That goes double when you're a second-generation older-parent kid - I never met either of my grandfathers, and my kids will never meet my father, not on this Earth anyway.
There are some exceptions to that idea however. One of them came in to play over the Memorial Day weekend. I asked my son to ask my mother what it was like for her during World War II, when she was a newlywed and young mother. What a gift it was for him to hear first-hand stories about such things as waiting to hear from her brother, a pilot who flew missions in Germany but who also had a natural tendency toward reticence. (In fact, my uncle took part in bombing missions of the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, but he was reluctant to talk about it.) It was a chance for him to learn how the war affected people on a family level, even those who didn't fight it.
We also went to a Memorial Day celebration in our town of Lewisville, where a WWII vet raised the flag on a new monument honoring POWs and MIAs.
photo: Sean (in yellow shirt) salutes during the playing of taps during the Lewisville Memorial Day ceremony.
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