It’s Memorial Weekend. I have several veterans in my family and love and feel grateful for their service. Yet the man I most cherish happens to be a veteran. Not by choice, drafted into the Marines as a young man to be thrown into a mostly forgotten war; the Korean War. We hear very little of this war. My grandfather was a “nerd” so to speak that ended up with a Purple Heart. After the war, he spent a lot of time healing from an injury that haunted him to the end of this world. He went on to finish college and work at CSU before moving back to Kansas to raise dairy cows and sell milk to the small town I grew up in.
My grandfather, Manson Lynn Jones, was a tremendous man. I can’t speak for the first part of his life but the 21 years I had the pleasure of knowing him he was an almost flawless human being. He was the one to talk to the lone man during coffee, the man who taught me to respect others and their views, taught my father to teach me “to each their own” and to be kind and humble.
Humble would be the best word to describe him. He used all his time with us to the fullest. When he died I made a scrapbook of the songs and funny poems he taught us driving between town and the farm. He never drove an inch over 45 miles an hour, he was known for this. He made picnics to have with us, played baseball with us, let us play basketball out of the back of his pick-up when he had it backed up to the barn to unload the corn. We grew up raising and butchering chickens with him, raising baby lambs and baby calves. We even had a tame, but lazy cow he would put a lead rope on and let us ride around the farm. Sometimes the cow would just sit there, but we loved every second of it.
I can honestly say that the only thing he ever did to hurt me was leave this world. I am happy that he no longer suffers from the pain and infection from the wounds he sustained in the Korean War. I hated to see him hurt. Yet, I will never be the same; he was my safe place. He may have survived the war but it abbreviated his time here on Earth and his time with us. I was cheated more years with the greatest man I ever knew because he was called to give his service to the United States of America.
Enjoy Memorial Day, but remember “the reason for the season.”