I can relate...

...to the Veterans who are locked away from their memories. Not those who no longer have the ability to remember or recall the events of their lives. But I'm referring to those whose memories are intact, full of happenings both monumental and mundane. They have recollections, but no one to hear them. So it seems what they remember never happened--with no one to bounce those thoughts off of.
     I had this thought today when I was clearing the icy coating off my car. The drive to Shop'N'Save had  loosened  the ice enough so that using my snow brush  I could scrape the coating from the roof and hood. I always attach a great deal of importance to doing this because of something that happened a long time ago:
       I was working in the State Education Department correcting Regents papers, on a 6-week or so assignment.  I remember I parked in Coughtry's parking lot because parking spaces were at a premium downtown near the State Ed. building. I would walk about a mile to work and then back again during the months of January through March. Though the weather was cold, and windy as always in the Plaza, I didn't mind the walk.  For one thing, it brought me past Phil's Bakery, during the Lenten season, and they ruled when it came to Hot Cross Buns.
    But it was the thought of what happened on the drive home that triggered the memory that is etched forever in my mind, though to no other audience. Surely, as the veterans and I might have supposed, potentially life-altering events should exist somewhere else than in the recesses of the mind, but such is not the case.
   For instance, I have vivid recall of driving home one of those days, having met up with my station wagon at Coughtry's, and continuing up Central Avenue. I drove a few miles and then the curtain fell.  The layers of ice on the roof of the vehicle all at once slid down over the front of the vehicle, totally obscuring the view ahead. I tried to look out the passenger side window to move as far right as possible, pulled over, and stopped. I couldn't see what was happening, but two men from Hoffman's Car Wash ran over and quick as a flash, because I was in the roadway, they cleared the layer of ice and frozen snow off the windshield and the hood of my car, and waved me off on my way home.
      I'm sure that at the time I must have told a person or two what had happened, and I'm also sure none of them really understood the danger I'd been in, and I'm even more sure that nobody today would even have a glimmer.  So I can only imagine the mindset of  veterans, who may have spent years of their lives undergoing horrendous experiences.  Someone, somewhere, must certainly know what it was like.  And so, the origin of war stories------"Listen to me.  I was there."