The cold and wet drove me indoors yesterday. It was a day of laundry and TV sports. During the course of the day, I barely saw a mention of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese attack in 1941. I guess it’s time of living in infamy is up. Stands to reason. Time has passed. Other tragedies have befallen us, and the US really is no country for old men. Youth is well served.

Of course, for me the attack on Pearl Harbor is where it all began. It brought the US into World War II. It brought my mother and father into the Navy and then to Corpus Christi where they met, and it brought me into the world a year later in 1946. Serendipity all the way round. Talk about an odd confluence of events. The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and I come into the world five years later. The world does indeed move in mysterious ways.

Of course, it’s understandable that the memory of the attack on Pearl Harbor would fade because in the 83 years since the attack history has piled up around our feet like dead leaves in the fall and it’s hard sorting through it all and other things have assumed importance. And here’s some context, 83 years before I was born, the Civil War was in its third year, and since then we’d fought a first world war, and survived the Great Depression. History. Not a lot of fun when you have to live it.