Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My husband and I watched "The Best Years of Our Lives" last night, after I protested it was going to make me weep. Which it did. It's a beautiful film made right at the end of World War II, and stars one of my favorite actresses, who never received an Oscar, which shows how underappreciated she was, Myrna Loy. Two actors were awarded Oscars: Frederick March and Samuel Russell. All the acting is dazzling, but most importantly, everyone is a complicated human being, and traumatized. There are good endings to the three main characters' stories, but not fairy tale ones. They will all continue to lead hard lives, but they are all loved, which is what living boils down to in the end. When I see this movie I think of my parents: married during the war, having me on an army air force station, starting their post war lives with hope and heartache. My mother's fiance died in an airplane, and her father died when I was a baby. My father lost his hearing in one ear due to an explosion. He never flew again after the war. He went back to the factory where he'd been working cutting bolts of cloth, then got a job in Kansas City. They never talked about the war, or my mother's fiance or even her dad. My parents were lucky in that all their siblings survived the war, some because they were too young. But there must have been wounds. We never heard about them.