LONELINESS
Being lonely is fearsome circumstance and we really don't experience it in is true harshness until we gather a bit of age about us. Oh, yes, we have all had moments, when we were youngsters, in which we were, for a time, without immediate friends with whom we might react and we, doubtless, spoke of such times as being a “lonesome “day. An old person, however, can be uniquely alone in that the friends are gone and will not return.
Some places are made for loneliness, I think. In my experience about the loneliest place I remember being, I'd say, was being seated not too comfortably on a metal strip in the Tail Gunner's bubble out on the rear end of a B-24 Bomber returning from the continent and flying low over the North Sea. You may not think of that as a particularly lonely spot. It wasn't quiet, for sure. The noise was steady and drumming constantly and, when held properly to your ear, you could hear scratchy human voices in the speaking tube. How could one be lonely with two humans just about fourteen feet behind you? The tiny, tinny voices yelled cryptic fragments. The system was not made for talking; more for listening to terse, crisp commands and comments. In talking to Waist Gunners I found they were different. They were lonely together.
Other military spots were just as lonely, I found.
“What do you do out there all night?” someone asked a guard who's duty it was to man a machine gun emplacement on the far edge of the airfield runway.” That's changed a lot, “ he replied. “There was a time when I could just sit there all night and ask myself questions, but that all had to change. I kept getting such stupid answers!”
For several months before our Bomb Group joined us in England during World War II we shared a particular type of guard duty with a British RAF company at the new base on a welcomed R&R stay following duty on Malta. There were, at that time, a number of crashed planes along the North Sea coast in Norfolk county and it became our job to guard them at night against pilfering of equipment, until they could be cleaned up properly. That ,too, was an all-night assignment as were so many guard-duty tasks. They were often made even more-so by the lack of “torches”” or of carbine shells. That meant you pulled guard duty without a flashlight and with either two or three carbine shells depending on what was available that night.
There are moments of “loneliness” in just about any occupational niche you choose, I suppose. I can recall feeling; lonely in a manufacturing plant where I worked on three tremendous, clattering. looms out of sight of the fifty or more other workers in the same. large area. Loneliness,so often, seems to stem from lack of association with other individuals.
That's why it is so important for each of us. as we get older, to make sure we are building younger friendships as we go. Never miss an opportunity to share your knowledge, skill and acquired abilities with a young person questing for guidance in a special field in which you have shown some success.
Teach a kid to build a kit. You will fly with him or her. You will fly together.
A.L.M. January 11, 2005 [c574wds]
