Last last month, I got an email from my cousin, John, asking for my physical mail address. He said that his brother Robert had found something he thought I'd be interested in. I replied, and a week ago, I received a warm letter from Robert, along with an interesting enclosure.
The enclosure in his letter is the bottom dog tag. I've had the other two, since Martha had saved them.
Here is the letter:
The sentence that got partially cut says "tale of the tag".
I can only think of two "easy" explanations. First is, the house belonged to a friend or friends of Dad's, and he gave it to them, or somehow lost it while visiting. Second, Martha visited after the funeral/accident, and gave or lost it. I'm guessing that finding out who owned the place after WWII until the end of 1950 might shed a bit of light on the puzzle.
About the title of this post. After Mom passed away, I spend a month of weekends going thru her stuff, sorting what I wanted to keep and what not to keep. I found a boatload of Dad's things, which just nailed me to the floor. And the name was given.About ten years later, my cousin sent me an envelope she found addressed to me that was in her mom's (my aunt's) desk. It was her written recollection of what happened to Gladys, Lane and me after the two of us were born. As I recall, that pretty much cost me my weekend. I learned to hate time bombs.
But this one not so much. As I told Robert, I've had 35 years to process all of this since Martha passed on. That was the start of my mourning not only her, but Gladys and Dad as well, something I had never truly done until then.
