If My Heart Had Wings: A World War II Love Story(7)

“Well,” she said slowly, sipping her coffee and thinking back. “Hmmm. I guess the first thing we did was tour the Hamline campus. He lived right across the street and had gone there for four years, so he knew the place inside out. And it didn’t cost him anything, which was very important during the Depression.”

“What year was it?”

“1939.”

“Whew, ancient history! Okay, you saw the school. And then you just started dating all the time?” I was still trying to figure out how romances worked.

“Yes, we were together a lot that summer. He really showed me around St. Paul, which was great since I’d just moved there and didn’t know much about the city.”

“What kinds of things did you do?”

“Well, we went to Como Park, which is this great big beautiful park right in the middle of the city with a really nice lake where you could go ice skating in the winter and canoeing on summer evenings.” Her gaze softened. “In Minnesota, it stays light until about ten o’clock in the summer, and the light is really soft and kind of golden. I remember never wanting to go home on those nights.”

Then suddenly, she came back to earth and was all business.

“You’re not going to waste that omelet, are you?” she asked a little sharply, eyeing my plate.

I hurriedly stuffed a bite into my mouth and tried to keep the story going. “And what else did you do that summer?”

Mom leaned back in her chair, trying to remember.

“We liked to dance,” she said brightly. “There was a place called the Coliseum Pavilion that had a great big dance floor that was smooth as glass, and we’d go swing dancing. You know, like, ‘jeepers creepers, where’d you get those peepers?’” She bounced a little in her chair as if she was dancing, holding up an index finger and wagging it back and forth.

“Mom!” I guffawed through a bite of omelet. “That’s so corny !”

“What’s wrong with it? Here’s another one,” she said gaily, jumping to her feet and pulling me up with her. She held my hands in hers, and we bebopped around the kitchen as she sang, “Triple step, triple step, back step; triple step, set it up, I turn; triple step, set it up, you turn; triple step, triple step, back step!” She was calling out the basic steps of swing dancing.

I scream-laughed the entire time, and finally yelled, “Ugh! Enough of the Swingin’ Years!”

Then she stopped, which made me a little sorry. We didn’t have many opportunities to dance around the kitchen like that.

As we cleared the table and caught our breath, I tried to keep the mood going.

“Any other fun times that you can remember?”

“Oh, what did we do anyway? Hmmm. He and I spent a lot of time at Hamline Sweet Shop eating ice cream sundaes. And, of course, we went to the movies; Hamline Theatre had double features. But if we wanted to see something in Technicolor, woo-hoo, the big thing back then, we went the Centre Theater. That’s where we saw ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and ‘Gone with the Wind. ’”

“That’s when those movies came out?”

“Yep, 1939. It was a big year.”

It was obviously a big year for her, anyway.

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M Y WORLD HISTORY CLASS in summer school was excruciatingly dull—that is, until we got to World War II. Although I didn’t know a thing about the war, except that it involved Nazis, I suddenly had a connection to it—it was the war that took Lyndon away from Mom. Believe it or not, that was enough to get me to read all of the assigned sections and stay pretty interested.

My paper, however, was on the most boring topic in the universe: the events of 1941 that prompted the U.S. to enter World War II. Ugh. Normally, I would have half-copied a bunch of stuff from the encyclopedia and dashed the whole thing off as fast as possible. But this time, I discovered a way to get interested and stay interested. I just kept asking myself, “What were Mom and Lyndon doing while the country moved toward war?”

I found that I could actually keep myself from falling into a stupor while working on my paper by imagining things like this:

In January Mom and Lyndon were holding hands, ice skating happily on beautiful Como Park Lake, while the Germans blasted England from the air, on their way to killing 40,000 British civilians and damaging or destroying more than a million homes.

In February Mom was breezing through her mid-year calculus exams at Hamline with no sweat at all, while German U-boats sank hundreds of Allied merchant ships headed for England that were loaded with food and other supplies. The Germans’ aim: to starve the Brits into submission.

In March Mom and Lyndon were gobbling hot fudge sundaes at Hamline Sweet Shop, while FDR signed the Lend-Lease Act, which allowed the U.S. to support the Allied forces without actually committing to the war.

In April the two of them were boogying to Glen Miller’s “In the Mood” at the Coliseum Pavilion, while the Nazis used a combination of speed, surprise, and brutal force called the “blitzkrieg” strategy to take over Norway and Denmark.

In May Mom and Lyndon were munching buttered popcorn and watching “The Wizard of Oz ” at the Centre Theatre while Hitler’s forces took over the Netherlands and Belgium.

And in June, as the pair celebrated two years of “going steady,” France fell to the Germans, and the Nazis occupied Paris.