I was just talking about Pearl Harbor with my mom, Nikki Rader Newkirk, and I heard a commemoration of it on NPR in the car earlier. My mom was 17, a high school senior--and suddenly her entire life was changed forever. Boys she knew were called up, other boys from other places were stationed in Enid, Oklahoma. One, a New York Italian, used to hang out with Mother's family just because he so missed his own family and all the noise and activiity of a full household.

Pearl Harbor happened just about five years before I was born. By the end of the war, Mother was married to a young man from South Carolina that she never would have met without that war. A few years later, thought, she was married to my Daddy, a boy from Enid who was home from Great Britain and in college on the GI Bill. SoIn the post-war 1950s, Oklahoma boomed, finally recovering from the Depression and the Dust Bowl. We had new neighbors, new cars, new houses, new schools as my generation, the first wave of the Baby Boom, made its way through childhood and adolescence. All we had to worry about was retribution for those bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--not from the Japanese, who were now our friends and partners, but from the Russians. We had "duck and cover" drills, as if our wooden desks would protect us from the blinding flash and the mushroom cloud. During the Cuban missile crisis, we stood in the school parking lot and shivered and cried as we considered our potential lack of a future.

So, yes, I remember. And I imagine most of my contemporaries do, at least. My son, with his deep connection to my dad, remembers. And we will teach the granddaughter, only five, as time goes on. Her memories won't be as immediate as my mother's, or as personal as mine. And eventually the common memory will become as remote as those of Gettysburg or the trenches in France, subsumed into a kind of general gratitude toward those who have fought and those who supported them. Maybe we seem oblivious or ungrateful, but I think most of us know the debt we owe to those who have won and preserved our freedom. Now, we pray God to make the best use of that freedom. We choose our leaders and representatives; let us try, at least, to choose those worthy of our forebears' sacrifice.