The Unwritten South: Part 1 (to be revised)

1. A Diary from /Dixie/ D-Day (side-note: in the real version, Dixie is crossed out)
I come from a hole in a boat.
The boat fills with water, the boat turns back.
My grandfather was a leak away from becoming another statistic on the bloody shore of Normandy. Instead, he and his fellow 49th Engineers arrived three days late via the un-holey replacement boat. The beaches were still swollen with war remnants as the shore swayed with gun shells and soft, bubbling waves of American veins.
In my mind, Papa’s veins were shriveled in blue cruelty in his frail, double-stroked body. My only memory of him sans the wheelchair is at my grandmother’s dinner table when he unmercifully forked a meatball off my plate and plucked it into his wrinkly mouth.
In the wheelchair, he loved looking at picture albums and often cried, wiping his tears with the damp and fraying tissue in his left hand. And he loved my tiny-child hands adorned with my birthstone.
“It’s aq-ua-ma-rine,” I would say. “That’s for March, my birth-day.”
He would smile and pat my back with his only functioning limb.
By March of 1944, Papa had left North Africa for Europe.
He hunched in the cold earth of a French foxhole, ate bread and slept in a Belgian barn, and waited six months in post-war England to see his wife and newborn son.
He wrote letters to Mema, and very little about the war.
In Europe, I didn’t really think of Papa. I thought of history—the overwhelming amount of history in the little Belgian towns I browsed.
I didn’t think of Papa until I stepped in an old and well-kept Belgian barn.
“Hondreds of years old,” said the Belgian man, “it went t’rough many wars.”
I should have told him my grandfather’s story, to let the story-circle be complete. To give my grandfather a remembering presence. I wrote about it instead.