Jim Kurtz writes this newsletter brief...
This October has been extremely challenging for me in many ways. An MRI revealed a need for my second arthroscopic knee surgery in fifteen months. Two new meniscus tears and a stress fracture required me to be on crutches for eight weeks. Three of those weeks are now behind me. However, five still remain, and I find it increasingly difficult to discover ways to fill in all my time.
This morning I remembered that during the process of writing The Green Box, I researched different items that I had found as a child inside my dad’s green box in our attic. Telegrams, medals, photographs, and love letters were all self-explanatory. However, there was a piece my dad typed when he returned from the war that contained excerpts from Winston Churchill’s book, My Early Life. Churchill had himself been a prisoner of war; although, his imprisonment was during the Boer War. When describing the all-consuming ennui that is an everyday part of a POW’s life, Churchill used one phrase that clearly caught my father’s attention and he deemed it important enough to put it down on paper. It read: “The days are very long, hours crawl by like paralytic centipedes. Nothing amuses you, reading is difficult, writing impossible.”
Paralytic centipedes. Wow! Once again, while feeling a bit sorry for myself, trying to fill my days with something meaningful, I tried to imagine what it must have been like for my father, Bob Kurtz, in the summer and fall of 1944 as a POW in Stalag Luft III. Down time was the menu of each day, and he had to endure it halfway across the world in the pine barrens of northern Germany. In letters he sent to his parents, he mentions reading three novels a week when he first arrived. By October, he was not reading at all.
And I have the audacity to complain? Hah! I’m just thankful that my father never gave up and finally made it back home. Others were not as determined.
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