Memories are like the beads that slip along a prayer string. They slide through our fingertips. Some are lingered over, some hurried past and still others are skipped altogether.
My husband’s mother shared many memories with me. She was once engaged to an Army Air Forces flyer from Bangor, Maine. Austin Keith was a promising playwright. The two met at Yosemite in the summer of 1944.
After my mother-in-law died, we found a framed photograph of a sweet-faced, smiling young man in uniform nestled in the bottom drawer of a birdseye maple dresser. With the photograph were the lyrics for a musical score, handwritten on stationery the colour of a clear, Yosemite mid-morning summer sky.
FASCINATION
By Ozzie
(Each z drawn like a tiny thunderbolt.)
Never in my lifetime did my heart expect to find
Such loveliness as yours for inspiration
How wonderful it was of Fate to be so very kind
And yet I merely called it FASCINATION
Attached to the upper left-hand corner of the sheet of paper was an Army Air Forces Pilot Badge.
Austin Keith.
One evening, I fed the name into my search engine and found that Austin had been a First Lieutenant and pilot of a B-29 that collided with another B-29 as they assumed formation en route to a mission over Tokyo on the 25th of February, 1945. The two aircraft fell into the sea and the crew of both planes were lost. Austin’s remains were never recovered. He was twenty-five years old.
In 2011, David Bergquist, a Bangor historian, published “Prelude to Courage,” a biography of Austin Keith. The title is taken from a one-act play written by Austin while he was attending flight instructor’s school in late 1942. The play reflects a prescience and spirituality that were heightened by the realities of impending battle and mortality. Dr. Bergquist had access to Austin’s wartime letters to his parents, friends and theatre mentor at the University of Maine, but these are the beads I would slip into this brief, extraordinary story:
That when Austin disappeared into the Pacific Ocean, he was in love with a nineteen-year-old, auburn-haired beauty from Alameda. That she was a Berkeley undergraduate, a journalism major, who didn’t take her studies very seriously, who dreamt of Europe. That the couple walked hand-in-hand beneath the innumerable stars that pierced the black night sky over the Yosemite Valley and kissed at the misty base of the Falls and planned a life together. That he read his poetry to her and pinned her with his Wings. That upon receiving the news of his death, the grief-stricken co-ed suffered a breakdown and was forced to leave university for a year. That his nickname for her was Steve and that seven years later, in Rome, she would give this name to her only son.
My Steven.
On my wedding day, I lifted a string of pearls from its special box and the necklace burst apart in my hands. The freed pearls cascaded over the edges of my outstretched palms and flew away in every direction. They ricocheted off the white tile floor and rolled into the dark corners of the room with abandon.
Ozzie Keith.
Our fates were strung upon the same strand.
You are a luminous pearl thread among the beads of my mala.