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Excerpt
from...
Joie de Vivre - A Memoir
The following is the opening of the biography of Rose Cunningham, who spent her life fleeing from Communists and Nazis. In the process of flight, she mastered five languages. Her use of those languages opened doors to a life of continual adventure and amazing accomplishments. It was a pleasure helping her tell her story.
Present and Past
Above my twelve-year-old granddaughter Ashley and me, the sky was a stunning blue, spotted with white patches of clouds that resembled little islands. The air smelled of fish and iodine and carried a sharp coolness that awakened all my senses. Below us, the agitated Atlantic splashed fiercely onto the rocky beach. As I watched my beautiful, precocious granddaughter hurry down the path, while her long chestnut hair floated in the breeze, she called back to me, “Come show me where you used to play.”
“In a moment,” I said, taking in her perfect oval face and big, dark brown sparkling eyes.
While Ashley ran ahead along the narrow strip of sand that threaded down to the beach, my eyes swept across the panorama of cliffs and water at Port Manec’h, France, and a tidal wave of memories swept over me. For a moment, I was twelve again, skipping along this same path on summer camp outings and later playing there after my parents rented a nearby house. My mind flooded with fond childhood memories – as well as an event that put my entire family’s existence in jeopardy.
As I joined Ashley, I tried to brush away the memory of one particular moment. On September 3, 1939, my brother George and I were at a summer camp, enjoying a picnic on this beach. Our happy meal came to an abrupt halt when news arrived that France and England had declared war on Germany, thus starting World War II. Parents were called hurriedly to come for their children, and summer camp was suddenly ended.
Sixty-two years later, at the exact time Ashley and I strolled that same beach, another international conflict began. In France it was afternoon; in the United States, it was the infamous morning of September 11, 2001, when four planes crashed: two into New York’s famous World Trade Towers, one into the Pentagon, and another painstakingly diverted from the U.S. Capitol crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Once again, the world was plagued by terror, and nothing would be quite the same anymore.
As much as I love that narrow beach and the happy times I spent there as a child on the verge of womanhood, I will never return. Call me superstitious if you like. While I realize that my footprints in the sand at Port Manec’h did not trigger two separate world shaking events, I was there when both happened and see no reason to tempt fate again.
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