In this world there are constants we believe will always be present in our lives.  They help to reassure us of our place in the universe.  They act as beacons or guideposts through life’s good and bad times.  They can be something as simple as the rising of the sun in the East and the setting of the sun in the West, or the beautiful inevitability of life we have taken as our own which defines our physical mortality, our spiritual immortality, and the way we measure the morality of our lives.

On January 12, 1999 I lost the physical presence of one of those constants in my life, my mother, Ruth Decker.  My mama was a native of Monticello, Kentucky, although she did not live her entire life in the town of her birth and upbringing.  She was born March 16, 1922, the sixth child out of eleven children of Sherman and Marthann Anderson.  It was a hard upbringing.  She had to quit school in the sixth grade to help with the family income, plus help cook and keep house.  However, at seventeen she caught my father’s eye when he was just eighteen.  Within a few months they were married and starting out on life’s uncertain road having no intimacy beyond holding hands and walking home together.  Quite different from the growing up fast and loose of today’s world.  In short order, nine months from the wedding, my brother George, was born in August, 1940 and within six years all four of us kids were born, Margaret Wanda, Anna Ruth and Guy, Jr.

During this time my Daddy served in World War II, and fortunately for me, the war years apart was what inspired my folks to have me, their youngest child, Guy Decker, Jr.  After the war Daddy worked as a mechanic and started a garage with a friend, and it was during this time he became a member of the Kentucky National Guard.  This decision seemed to seal his fate.  When the Korean Conflict occurred, the Kentucky National Guard was activated and he was eventually sent to Korea.

I remember Daddy being tall and handsome in his uniform and Mama being beautiful and strong at their parting as he left for Korea, fighting for the ideals of democracy.  While Daddy was away, he sent each of us children elegant silk quilted jackets from the Orient.  They were each a different red or blue with embroidered dragons.  I felt so very fortunate and proud wearing mine, because it seemed like a fierce physical manifestation of my Daddy’s love for me and my Mama, and my brother and my two sisters.  I remember being intensely sad and upset when Mama would get a letter from Daddy and lock herself in their bedroom, where I now slept with Mama while Daddy was away, and cry while she read his letter over and over.  I hope they were letters full of love and longing, because she deserved both.

Fortunately, in very short time Daddy was transferred to Japan and the opportunity presented itself for us to join him there.  Mama leaped at the chance with hardly a second thought!  She was thirty years old with four children, ages eleven, ten, eight, and six, and she had barely been out of Wayne County, Kentucky.  But Mama was determined to persevere through her love for Daddy.  The depth of her passion to be with him gave us all the courage to endure whatever was necessary to make it so.

Mama and all of us kids were assaulted with twenty-one needles for the various inoculations required for travel in what was still war-ravaged Asia in the early 1950’s.  Mama endured the screaming fits and the whining of all us kids.  Somehow we survived this pricked humiliation and shortly found ourselves on a westward train to San Francisco.  We were small town southerners, unprepared for the movie reel visions we saw, but we kept in mind that Daddy was waiting for us in a city called Tokyo.  The scenery was accompanied by the constant staccato clicking of the train wheels against the tracks.  We were awestruck by the vastness and the beauty of America, by the diversity of the people we met aboard the train and the fleeting friendships shared by all these people on our journey to the Orient.  Everyone we encountered was inspired by my Mama’s courage and love as she attempted such a journey with so little experience and even less worldliness.  But her love was the flame that inspired us all, and our Daddy waiting for us was the beacon we held in our minds and hearts.  We knew there would be safety and a warm home at the end of the journey, because Daddy had said so.

We arrived in San Francisco weary and tired after five days.  With one leg of the adventure completed, after a two-week layover, we started the island hopping flight across the Pacific Ocean.  The flight consisted of stops at Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii, Guam, Wake Island, and finally, Tokyo.  But the initial flight to Hawaii was aborted before we were halfway to Hawaii, because one of the prop-engines died.  We mercifully returned to Travis Air Force Base.  The engine was ultimately repaired and many hours later we were again airborne doing the island hop dance across the Pacific.  We endured the monotonous fatigue of endless sitting, the cramped seats, other irritable passengers, air pockets resulting in the plane taking sudden plunges of altitude, leaving our stomachs and nerves several hundred feet above the endless clouds.  We endured a fire in a wall heater of the plane with its ensuring frightening mayhem as smoke filled the winged cocoon.  Like Chinese water torture, there was a numbing drone-drone-drone of the old propeller engines while trying to keep in check the fear that one of the engines would fail us again and leave us adrift in the middle of the Great Pacific with only our Mae West life jackets to keep us afloat.

After thirty-six hours of flying over the blue ocean with huge puffs of clouds floating as far as they eye could see, we landed in Tokyo.  We didn’t see angels or even the Face of God in all this vastness of space, but there was laughter and joyful tears with this reunion that we had held in our hearts with such anticipation.  It was wonderful being picked up in Daddy’s arms, seeing the kisses passed between Mama and Daddy, and the strong but tender caresses of Daddy’s hands on our shoulders and tops of our heads.  We experienced the electrifying wonder of his hands telegraphing his pleasure that we were again before his eyes and within his loving grasp.

Going to bed on that hot August night in Tokyo, we slept in army cots with the windows wide open allowing very strange and unknown smells to drift through the night summer air while intense colored lights flashed across our tired but contented faces.  Today it all swirls about my head as an exotic dream, a little boy from Monticello, Kentucky who had left his home and everything he had known to again be united with his Daddy.

There are many stories I could relate about Mama, but at this time of her passing many of them flood my memory, but time must be honored and I must be selective.  This particular story means so much to me because it is the benchmark of when she became a “Military Mom.”  She made a home for us wherever Daddy was stationed.  Sometimes we lived in converted army barracks, for several years we lived in a house trailer.
We lived in army housing developments of varying degrees, some beautiful, some ugly.  We lived in homes outside the army base, both in the United States and overseas.  Whatever the living circumstances, Mama and Daddy filled it with love and they made it seem like our “natural home.”  We learned life is where the family is, not a location or a physical structure.  Both Mama and Daddy made it possible for me to attend eighteen schools as we moved from Army post to Army post while in the process acquiring both an academic education and many invaluable life lessons.  All of us children were taught to accept all people, whatever their race, nationality, creed or religion.  My Mama was possessed by Martin Luther King’s dream of “All God’s children living in peace.”

Daddy, my sisters, brother, and myself will miss her physical presence.  We are comforted by the remarks made by Rev. Harlan Ogle, especially when he spoke of her life as a “Military Mom.”  He said that just as any veteran had the right for his or her casket to be draped in the American Flag, my Mama also had earned that honor, because she had served her country as had any person in the military.  Our family believes this to be true, but not very often recognized by those who have not lived their lives within that tradition.  Mama would have been gratified by this acknowledgement.

We would like to express our appreciation to all of Mama’s many friends and relatives who participated in her memorial, sent flowers, prepared food, and expressed their condolences in so many individual ways.  She always kept contact with many people we had welcomed into our lives throughout our travels, and she would have appreciated all the love and joyful sentiment bestowed upon her at this time of her passing.

Back to home page