A Basket of Gems. Robert J and Jean V. Stock

summer of 1942 I saw Jean on Wednesday nights and weekends, every other night of the week we talked on the telephone. Once a week, usually on Saturday night, we went to a movie. One dollar got us two tickets to the movies and two sundaes at James Drugstore. On Sunday afternoons we frequently visited my sister Gen in Sankertown and took long walks in the woods, or just lay on our backs in Gen’s backyard and appreciated the clear blue sky and the puffy white clouds. There were moments when I lay in bed, I wondered if Jean ever missed her old boyfriends, who were working, and could take her to see the big bands and dance, plays, expensive restaurants, and give her expensive gifts. If some guy asked her out, would she accept? I could hardly blame her. Would she accept this lifestyle, with my having four years in college ahead of me? She would be twenty-three years of age before getting married. By then, her best friends would be married and have children.

      I had just finished the first year at St. Francis College, when I received the “Greetings letter” from Uncle Sam to report for duty at Indiantown Gap on April 12, 1942. My life-plan was suddenly changed. I now had a permanent job for a while, in the army. I wrote Jean a letter every day I could; she wrote me a letter every day. Despite the remarks my soldier friends made like, ”She’s probably in the back seat of a Chevy with a 4-F son-of-a –bitch with his hand on her thigh”, I was confident she wouldn’t cheat on me!

      On my first furlough in April, 1944, I asked her to marry me. Her answer was, “When?” My army pay was fifty dollars a month; she had ninety dollars in a savings account. Jean took the train to Muskogee, Oklahoma, where I was in Basic Training at Camp Gruber. We were married in the chapel at camp Gruber on June 17, 1944. We had one month in Oklahoma, before I was shipped to England; Jean went home.

      I was discharged from the army on March 10, 1946 and matriculated at Penn State University for the 1946 summer semester; I graduated in February 1950. The United States Government paid for my college expenses and gave me ninety dollars a month for living expenses. Jean worked at the bank, while I was attending college. We lived with her mother.

      Living with her mother, I got to know her brothers and sisters and their families. I loved the Veil family as much as I loved my own. I was accepted by all the members of the family.

      After I graduated from college, I worked for General Electric Company for 37 years, taught math at Penn State for 13 years, and had three books published. As the years went by, we found out that two people couldn’t be more compatible then we were; we not only loved each other, we liked each other. We had mutual interests: music, poetry, sports, travel … we had seventy wonderful years together.

      Did God predestine us to be soul-mates! I believe!

      The Waif

      I was sitting on the ground hunched over my steaming mess kit, which contained my Thanksgiving dinner. This was the best food I had seen since I’d left the States: mashed potatoes that looked almost edible for a change (I had heard they were not dehydrated), cranberry sauce, candied sweet potatoes, succotash, a huge crisp brown turkey leg, fruit cocktail, and chocolate cake. Of course, everything was mixed together, but it sure did make my mouth water. I was just about to dig my anxious teeth into that big “drumstick” when I saw two brown, spindly legs in front of me, so thin, the knees and ankles looked almost arthritic. The knees and feet were engrained with dirt. Slowly I raised my head and saw a ragged pair of G.I. khakis cut off two or three inches above the bony knees and drawn tight around the waist with a piece of tent rope, knotted in the front. For the next foot or so twenty-four ribs made their imprint on tanned skin … a neck … the most abject expression I had ever seen on a human face … He had sunken cheeks that were congruous with the rest of him, thick lips that he kept running a pink tongue over, an unkempt head of black hair that stood straight up, which made his head look too large for his body, and two big brown eyes that were dull and lifeless. He didn’t say a word – he begged with those eyes … I couldn’t escape them … and as I stared into them, I thought of this scrawny Filipino waif as exemplifying all the millions of helpless, hungry kinds in the world – the towhead in bombed German towns, trotting alongside G.I. trucks to get even a lump of sugar out of a K-Ration; a little Chinese lad, not more than two years old, sobbing on a dead mother’s breast; and a wide-eyed pick-a-ninny in a southern slum district eating from a garbage can. I was a tough combat engineer, a man who was taught to kill, to enjoy killing, who had killed and laughed in a dying man’s face – I never thought I’d be sympathetic toward anyone again the rest of my life. Those two big brown eyes defeated me … I felt the hot tears streaming down my cheeks – It was the only time in my life I remember having cried. He sat there on my lap and ate out of my mess gear. For just an instant I thought I saw his eyes sparkle … I enjoyed my Thanksgiving dinner.