Back to Yesterday (30 page)

A
fter I came back from the war, I never left Sophie again. I took her with me to Montgomery, Alabama where I completed my commitment to the Army Air Force by training young cadets to fly combat. We remained there until the end of the war in 1945 and then we moved back to Tennessee and built a life for ourselves.

We bought a little house and Sophie and I started a family. Connor Edward Hudson was born April 17, 1946. He would be our only child due to complications during childbirth. Sophie had to have emergency surgery which left her unable to bear any more children. Once we accepted the fact that our family wouldn’t grow beyond the three of us, we embraced our fate, and made the best of the blessings we did have.

Connor and I developed a love of baseball over the years and when possible we attended professional games in giant stadiums. Sophie often attended the games with us, not because she loved baseball, but because she loved us. She said she loved the joy it gave us, and for that, she would sit through anything.

Our life together was amazing and solid and I was the happiest I’d ever been, though, early in our marriage, some things would trigger a memory from my time in the war. I would lose myself in the present and be transported back to yesterday, back to Levi’s farm where the feeling of anxiousness would creep up my spine and peek over my shoulder, taunting me to the point that the only way to shake it loose would be to go for a long walk and allow the feelings to ebb and flow. I learned early on that fighting it only made it worse, therefore, I allowed the anxiety to visit on occasion, gave it the attention it deserved, and then said goodbye to it like an old friend. Eventually, the visits became fewer and fewer until they stopped altogether.

On one spring day in 1966, I had a different kind of visitor. I had removed all the shutters from our house and was sanding them down, preparing to repaint them, when a car pulled into our driveway. A young man stepped out and I put down the sandpaper, wiping my hands on my pants. I waited for him to state his business, but for the longest time, he said nothing at all. He looked up and down the street, assessed our home, and took stock of everything around him.

Finally, I approached him. “Can I help you?”

When I looked into his brown eyes, I saw something familiar in them. The young man stared at me, wide-eyed for several seconds. His eyes clouded and then misted over. He looked away and stared into the sky, running his fingers through a thick mane of hair.

“You made it,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You made it back.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I found you.”

Picking up on the Dutch accent, I realized who was standing in front of me. “Maikel?”

He nodded, swallowing thickly. “Yeah.”

He was a grown man now, in his mid-thirties. I pulled him into my chest and hugged him like a long lost relative. For the longest time, no words passed between us. Every time I tried to speak, my throat closed up. It was the same for him.

Sophie came outside. “Charlie? Are you okay? What’s the matter?” Her eyes darted between Maikel and me, worry set on her pretty face.

I wiped my eyes, and still, for a moment, I couldn’t speak.

Maikel held out his hand. “You must be Sophie.”

“I am,” she said. “And you are…?”

“This is Maikel,” I said with admiration. “This young man and his father helped save my life.”

Without a moment of hesitation, Sophie wrapped her arms around Maikel’s neck and hugged him like he had saved
her
life.

“I’ve wanted to thank you for so long,” she said, her gratitude palpable. “Thank you so much. You brought Charlie back to me.”

Sophie and Maikel embraced for about as long and he and I had. Two people who had never met in their lives held each other like they had known each other for a century.

After a time, we invited Maikel inside our home, fed him, and insisted he stay with us while he was in town. He wanted to stay in a motel, not wanting to impose, but Sophie wouldn’t have it. Maikel stayed in our home for three days, catching up over the last twenty-three years.

I was sad to hear that Levi had passed away two years prior. He had made Maikel promise that he would come find me and make sure I had made it back safely. Maikel fulfilled his father’s wish and we promised each other we would stay in touch.

Oh, and Maikel became a pilot after all. How do you like that? I couldn’t help smiling every time I thought about it.

After Maikel’s visit, I sat on our front porch one evening, sipping a glass of tea, listening to my wife and son laughing through the opened windows. I smiled, looking up towards the sky, feeling like the luckiest man in the world. A star flickered, and I swear it was more like a wink. Like someone up there was saying…
You’ve done well, son. You’ve done well.

I tipped my glass towards the winking star. My chest puffed with pride and gave credit where credit was due. “Here’s to you, Tank and Levi. I wouldn’t be here without either one of you.” I drank to both of them. “Until we meet again.”

~ Hillsong United

Oceans

C
harlie caught me writing one day. I wasn’t exactly hiding the fact that I was writing but I wasn’t exactly sharing it either. I don’t know why.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I finished writing my thought and then set the pen aside. Deciding to be truthful, I said, “I’m writing our love story.” He folded his arms across his chest, propped his shoulder against the doorframe, and with a grin breaking across his face like the sun eclipsing the horizon, he asked, “Yeah? What are you gonna call it?”

I leaned back in my chair and contemplated for a moment. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m still thinking about it.”

“Well don’t tell me how it ends,” he chirped. “I want to be surprised.”

I threw a pillow at his head. “Get out of here,” I said with mock frustration. “And let me get back to work.”

That was a few years ago.

I picked up the manuscript and read back over the last thing I had written. Perhaps it was time I finished the story.

I had stopped writing after Charlie and I lost our son Connor and our daughter-in-law to a horrible accident. We were never the same after that, and writing mine and Charlie’s love story seemed fruitless in the face of extreme and utter heartbreak. The only thing that kept us going was Cooper, our grandson. He was only twenty-one when he lost his parents, barely out of college, and he became our number one priority.

For the better part of that first year, we were all hopeless souls, bound in grief with ropes of despair and chains of utter sadness, cutting off our will to go on, to live.

One night Charlie awoke with a start, crying and reaching for me in the night.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I had… I had a dream,” he said. “I was alone in a room, no windows or doors. I was covered in a blanket of darkness and I felt this extreme amount of despair, like…like I had the sins of the entire world sitting on my shoulders.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I had a desperate need to rid myself of it…throw it back out into the world and unburden myself. It was…” He rubbed his chest like it hurt. “It was awful. I couldn’t get out of that room. There was no escape. And then this light appeared and I felt warm and loved. Someone stepped forward.” Charlie looked at me, tears rolled down his cheeks. “It was Connor. He…he was smiling at me.” Charlie shook his head. “He showed me pictures like he was going through our photo album. He showed me a picture of him with a missing front tooth, then a picture of me teaching him how to throw a baseball. Then one of him on his first day of school, all grins and smiles. Then of his prom night and the day he graduated college. He showed me his wedding day and the day Cooper was born. He kept showing me picture after picture until I realized he was showing me his life and how in every image he was happy.”

Charlie pulled me into his arms and with a trembling voice, he said, “Then monarch butterflies flitted and fluttered around the whole room.”

The tears I had been holding back broke free and we held each other, crying. We weren’t crying because we were sad. We cried because it brought us peace. Our son had given us peace. He wanted us to know he was okay.

That was how we were able to move on. We had shared that story with Cooper and it brought him a certain amount of peace too, and it put our broken pieces back together. We all felt the shackles of our grief loosen enough that we could all breathe easier after that.

I didn’t know six years later I would be faced with another catastrophic blow to my heart.

Charlie and I had eaten an early lunch together. Shortly after he’d said he didn’t feel well and he was going to lie down. When he was still asleep two hours later, I went into our bedroom to check on him. He was half propped on his pillow and half lying down, a letter on his chest. I picked up the folded piece of paper. It was the letter I had given back to him on our wedding night, worn, and yellowed from age.

At the bottom of the letter, he had written…

Sixty-seven years ago you waited for me to come home. Now, it’s my turn to wait for you. As long as it takes, I’ll wait.