About a year ago, Coldfire posted a most excellent little essay in this very forum (though it’s neither mundane nor pointless), which can be found at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=23572 (how do you do that ‘go here’ link trick when you post messages? Haven’t figured that one out yet).
It was about the liberation of The Netherlands in World War 2, among other things. Last November, my 16-year old daughter was incensed at school by an ignorant history teacher who trivialized Remembrance Day on the grounds that no member of his family died in World War 2. My daughter knows about Remembrance Day and why it’s important, because it’s always been important to me and I made sure she knows. She emailed me (I was in Cairo at the time) to complain and seek advice, and part of my response was to point her to Coldfire’s essay, with the advice, “Read what a thoughtful Dutchman has to say about it.” She printed it, took it to school, and used it to thoroughly beat up the teacher, who in my not very humble opinion deserved far worse than he got from her.
On my way home from Cairo I stopped in Frankfurt and hopped over to Amsterdam to visit a friend I’ve been corresponding with via email for years but had never actually met before. I spent a week visiting with him, and met his father. His father was 86, half-paralysed from a major stroke two years earlier, bed-ridden in a nursing home in Schiedam and, as it turned out, only two weeks away from the end of his life at the time I met him. Obviously I’d never met him before either, but I’d seen photographs, and in his prime he was obviously a big, robust, active man. It was painful seeing him reduced to this pitiable state. I stood by his bed as my friend introduced us, and this little clawed hand came inching up from under the blankets to shake my hand. I took it very gently, and he looked up at me and said, “Thank you for liberating us.”
I was momentarily not sure who he thought I was, because my friend had told me he suffered periods of confusion and memory lapses. “That was my father’s generation, not me,” I said, “but you’re welcome.”
“I know,” he said, and smiled, and drifted off to sleep.
I told my daughter that story when I got home, and being a sensitive soul her eyes filled with tears. That was the first time she asked me if I thought she should write to Coldfire to tell him what she’d done with his essay. Of course I encouraged her, but she’s inclined to be a bit shy. It took her almost five months, during which she asked me about it again every two weeks, to nerve herself to write to Coldfire, and then having done it she agonized about whether Coldfire would take her seriously or dismiss her as a dumb little kid, or something in between. I didn’t see what she wrote to Coldfire, but when Coldfire responded, as I was virtually certain he would, she showed me his letter.
Thank you Coldfire, for responding with courtesy and encouragement. You made her day, and brightened mine considerably.
