Colonel and Me……
(Vengrai Parthasarathy)
“A loaf of bread cost a mere six pence then and when they increased it to seven, there was a big howl”, recounted Robert , an Air force veteran., as he got into a nostalgic mood about ‘those days’.
This kind, young-at-heart gentleman has been my constant companion on our walking jaunts. Every day that I have spent with him has been uplifting.
A fine raconteur, he would hop into the past and dig out some nugget. He often talked of the depression days when he had hauled tons of coals and timber and earned two dollars a day. “It was good money then”. The Colonel has waded through life with Ginny his school sweetheart whom he married and stays married to, for over 80 years. “Though my job took me to different places I have not missed a single Christmas with Ginny. “She is an adorable girl”, he says this family man .with a fabulous family .down to the youngest great grandson.
Robert hails from Long Island. After retirement from the Air Force he was looking for a place to settle down. He came to San Diego, saw the verdant green of Rancho Bernardo and its equable climate, and said “This is it”. Ginny said Amen to that.. They have been here now for thirty years.
Robert had come up the hard way. “Once I had to clear out two or three inches of wet cement from the ship’s deck. I have managed to keep stress out of my life. In my job as Navigator I had to remember that other lives depended on my alacrity. I can claim to have done a good job of it” he says with great modesty. It was in a very casual manner that he told me one day: “I have had a triple by-pass surgery and am under the cardiologist’s watch”, He had a dead pan expression on his face even for such significant news. Great guy! To keep himself ‘in the swim’ he walks about three miles for three days and for another three days in the week he goes golfing. “I preserve a precious memento of my ‘Hole in one’, says this keen Golfer.
Robert is a proud and quintessential American. Every day the first thing he does in the morning is to hoist the ‘old glory’ to flutter in all its glory and take it down with all solemnity in the evening dusk…As of October 2011 he had done this 13000 times!
Every life has its own theme. Robert’s is “Today is better than yesterday.. Tomorrow will take care of itself “ .Colonel Robert Spence, I salute thee. You are the old glory.
PS: Now at 97 the Colonel, having lost his wife of over 80 years, is staying with a couple as paying guest in Escondido.The days of walking together are over. I myself am incapacitated by a hip-fracture. I do speak to the Colonel and feel sad even thinking about him.-a wonderful friend!