“SOUL TAKES FLIGHT”
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s was a time of stark contrasts. I still vividly remember the arrival of our first television; it was a wondrous device, even though it only aired a few programs a day. But it was the radio that truly captured my imagination. I could listen for hours, completely absorbed in the voices and sounds. My soul seemed to soar on the wings of the music to another world—a moment of pure escape.
Yet, an invisible burden always hung over our childhood. My father, and the fathers of all my friends, had fought in World War II. My own father, in the Navy, had witnessed horrors beyond imagination. The stories of family members were just as raw: my Uncle Joe, as a seventeen-year-old, stood face to face with a German soldier on the Nijmegen bridge and had to pull the trigger to survive. My cousin Paul’s father was sent to Nagasaki just hours after the atomic bomb was dropped. At that time, while man still dreamed of the first step into space, we lived in the aftermath of a world forever changed by the fires of battle.

SMILE

As a reaction to the above.