Ny Års Afton 2006

Dear Gerdie, Gammie, Grannie, Goma, Gumma, Farmor, Fam, Famo, or Mago (my favorite),

We’re not going anywhere tonight, you're buried in the hills of Los Altos and I'm having a friend over. So what are we going to resolve for the New Year? My internet service provider (today’s mail service) is unreliable as was your mail service during the war, though today's problems are perhaps due to a global price and wage war. No point in posting any resolutions until we're (re)connected.

Looking back to 1941, I can see that you had gone as far west as you could years ago. Did you expect then to spend this afternoon and evening on the lookout over the Pacific, not at fireworks, but for ships from the Far East. (See also http://lookout1941-41.blogspot.com). Your daughter was in Honolulu just three weeks ago, on December 7th, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and you still haven’t heard from her. She told me many years later that she had hung out the laundry that Sunday morning in early December, and was angry because the pilots (whom she assumed were American) had flown so low that they burned holes in her sheets.

I’m looking back just a few years now to where fireworks are being propelled in San Francisco over Crissy Field, crackling and sparkling before they sizzle out along the Marina. The show there usually lasts for about 15 minutes. At the same time I'm writing from the old north, Scandinavia, where I can also hear the fireworks exploding from Mariaberget over the banks of Riddarfjärden in Stockholm.
I tumble dried my laundry this Sunday morning, like sage brush in an unusually warm winter wind, globally warmed. Without roots here, I rely on modern conveniences and a firm foothold on the igneous Archean rock. I’m a pioneer of the global generation and a reason for global warming. I've been hearing explosions and crackling for days, years now, across the sound barrier. Most of the fireworks here don't take off from any particular place at any particular time. They surround us, like lights. We are fascinated - in excitement and awe, anxiety and fear - of the pyrotechnical, the ephemeral light that heralds the unknown. There is fear of terrorism today, too, and some people give tranquilizers to their pets on nights like these. We can't stand their barking, howling, and screeching. We, human being, must try to protect oursleves by our greater awareness of what is going on in the world around us.

On a day like this, New Year’s Eve 1941, your son must be in South Carolina where he will soon take leave of his wife and newborn son, your second grandchild (though your first has already died in his crib), to serve on the front in France with the US infantry. There he will pass over a mine and be hit by shrapnel; he will survive to receive a Purple Heart. But why am I living with all this at once, years before and after?
You went as far west as you could on land in 1910, protected by the rawhide you received on your family farm in Indiana. Good thing that you at least seemed tough. Was it because your mother, who died when you were a young child, had encouraged you and your sisters to get an education and move on, or because your father was an autocrat? Whatever your motives, you went as far as you could, hitchhiking part of the way, with your baby in your arms. I'm looking forward to getting to know you better in the year ahead. Thanks for wanting to keep in touch. Your poetry and letters to me in Sweden in the 1970s are other California gold mines, far away and long after the big rush of the 19th century.

Christmas 1941

The other day I was browsing through a magazine and chanced upon an article – "Why not keep a diary?" It gave me an idea and made me feel that perhaps it would be interesting. I haven't any wild aspirations to eclipse such brilliant chronologists as Samuel Pepys, or, to be more modern, his great admirer O.O. McIntyre, but I do feel that now, more than ever before, history is in the making and I want to have some little thing with which to refresh my memory as the days go by.
I am sure that History is never made when a country is happy, prosperous, and at peace. One is so very apt to bask in the sun, sing soft lyrics by moonlight, follow the line of least resistance and dream.
But this is 1942 and grim war is facing us. The papers are replete with tales from the Far East, Europe, Africa. I want this to be, not a formal journal of the days' happenings, but something to which I can turn in the years that face me to refresh my memory. I hope I am able to record my impressions quite honestly as to how our beloved country and city were (and are) able to "take it". I'm hoping that we will be brave and put even our Britishers to shame.
For years I've felt that anyone who kept a diary was adolescent, neurotic, or particularly erudite. Of course, if I were Polly with a past and could write something so daring as Amy Crocker, Amy McPherson, Mary Astor and many others that might have been some inducement, but I'm just plain me – not an adolescent, not neurotic and certainly not erudite.
It would be futile for me to attempt to give the details of all the different battles on all the different fronts. The thing in which I am most interested is to record just how this most dreadful, devastating war is going to affect my peace-loving neighbors and me – how we will strive to overcome all obstacles and how we will be able to work out our economic problems when the government no longer is content to speak of millions, but billion and billions.
the first excerpt from (Mago's) Gertrude Kreigh's diary Dec 1941