Two at Once

By Daniel Weinshenker, Denver, Colorado, U.S. 

 There’s a laugh that’s not really a laugh. You know what I’m talking about, right? When someone laughs but you can hear the cry in it?

My ex-wife’s grandfather, who became my grandfather, was in the war. At the base in Washington State, where he was stationed before he went to Japan, there was a booth. They recorded audio records, for soldiers to record letters to send home to their families. He sent them back to his wife, who was pregnant. And he was gone so long that eventually she gave birth to a son, my wife’s father, and one of the records/letters home was to him.

I found these records a few years ago. Nobody could get them to play. I sent them to an audio restoration place and a few weeks later got them back with some files. The letter to his son, whom he had never met, was the one I keep playing in my head. And not the whole letter, but just this part, where he introduces himself to his son … and chuckles. The chuckle gets me. It’s how something can be two things at once, how something can be happy-go-lucky and terrifying all at once. I feel I can hear that. I can hear a man who, in the 40s in that voice that sounds just like Cary Grant or another actor of the day … in a tone that feels like, “Well, would you look at that!” is also wondering if he’ll ever see his wife or newborn son. If he’s even going to live at all.

Staying at home feels quaint for some of us. People are baking bread, painting, being creative. And I wonder what I’ll remember about how I don’t hear Colorado Boulevard anymore from my porch. How the silence itself is so, well, nice, but why the silence … isn’t. I wonder what my daughter will remember about the wolves. How there was a time we’d become dangerous to each other, and we howled and howled every night to say thank you, and I’m sorry, and I want to live–all at once.