Do you have a favorite place to read?
This is my dad (Frank from WITH LOVE, WHEREVER YOU ARE) reading on our back step in Hamilton, MO. I think I was in high school when I took this picture. Just this morning I read an article that explained how reading creates more white matter in the brain and expands learning areas of the brain, enhancing intelligence and empathy. Dad read every chance he got–everything from novels to medical journals, how-to books to Alfred Hitchcock magazines. I remember Mom laughing over funny novels, like Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, while Maureen and I read novels . . . and comic books. What books do you guys remember reading when you were kids? What did your parents read? What are you reading now?
I had the best time when I took the family back to Hamilton, MO, my hometown, birth through college (at Mizzou, of course). I loved sharing Hamilton with Joe and our granddaughters. In a library talk, Ellie (short for Helen) dressed in Mom’s (Helen’s) Army jacket when I talked about WITH LOVE, WHEREVER YOU ARE. She changed into her rock ‘n’ roll persona when I read ROCK AWAY GRANNY. But I got to wear my Royals’ jersey as K.C. Batgirl for A GIRL NAMED DAN. Dream come true for this small-town gal!
This is my mom from 2009, Helen from WITH LOVE, WHEREVER YOU ARE. She was as lovely then as in her WW2 days. We convinced her to come live with us in Ohio, and to leave Hamilton, MO, her home with Frank, my dad, for 60 years or so. It wasn’t an easy battle with this feisty gal! But once committed, she never complained, but looked for new ways to share the Spirit that lived inside her and touched everyone she met. Those last 5 years were my best with my mom. I pumped her for war stories, never mentioning the stacks of letters secure in the Army trunk and untouched since 1945, letters she and Dad wrote as newlyweds on different war fronts, letters I wasn’t allowed to open until she joined Dad in heaven.
If you’ve read about Captain Frank R. Daley in WITH LOVE, WHEREVER YOU ARE, you probably won’t be surprised to learn about his bravery in another fight, his fight against cancer (carcinoma). Up to the last year of his life, whenever I came home, my dad and I played 3 sets of tennis on a dirt and chat court he built and maintained in our pasture. We played in Missouri summers, with temps in the 90’s and humidity to match. Mom would chastise both of us when we limped home. Dad remained a unique character, as anyone who knew him will testify. We grew up with horses, dogs, cats, parakeets, canaries, and a variety of wounded birds we saved and set free. The cat in the picture is Sue Ellen, named before identified as a male. Sue spent every waking minute draped across Dad’s shoulders.
If you’ve finished WITH LOVE, WHEREVER YOU ARE, you have a good idea how my parents’ love story ended. But their lives didn’t end with that last page, you know. They had to finish out their commitments to the Army, which meant moving to Washington D.C. to work in the Army Hospital, caring for soldiers recovering from the war. This is their little apartment, and it probably seemed grand after living in tents and bombed-out factories. Plus, they were together! I think you can see that although the war was over, their love was not.
Lt. Helen Eberhart Daley, Army Nurse, and Captain Frank R. Daley, M.D. (Early pictures find him still a lieutenant in the Army, however.) As I was writing and revising and rewriting With Love, Wherever You Are, I used each of these photos to help me describe locations and to help me visualize my young parents in such strange circumstances. Helen is pictured in Rennes, where she served in an Army hospital during the war. Frank is in a Battalion Aid station inside Germany, then in Heidelberg, and in a temporary camp. In the old Army trunk, I found both the sleeping bag on his back and the canteen pictured in the bottom-right photo.
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