As I sat on my couch last night watching Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes (waiting on the Cavs/Magic game to start), I was touched by Mr. Rooney’s  piece on Memorial Day.

He stated that for most Americans, today’s holiday has become nothing more than an excuse to take another day off from work, go the lake or the race, and sleep late.  He showed a few photographs from WW2, where he served, and reflected back on that time in his life and that time in the life of our nation.

Perhaps it was the still fotos.  Maybe it was his old gravelly voice.  Or maybe it was his bushy eyebrows.  Probably a combination of all three, actually.  But I just kept thinking about a man that, other than my father, has had the greatest personal influence on my life.  He left this world about six years ago, and I miss him dearly.

He was my papa.  Eugene Knight.  A real Cherokee Indian, a World War 2 Veteran, a junk dealer and cotton farmer and mill worker.  He was more than just my papa.  He was without a doubt one of the most interesting, unique and colorful human beings to ever live.  He was a world class musician and excelled at bluegrass, particularly the fiddle.  He was raised in a kind of poverty that was common in the early 20th century, yet is unfathomable to most of my peers.  He constantly told jokes, the ones he heard from all the other old men at Lloyd’s barber shop in Simpsonville.  He actually told the same old jokes every single year we would get together for Christmas and Thanksgiving.  And if nobody laughed but him, he was fine with that.  He always laughed at his own jokes.

I miss him so much.  I really do wish I could spend the day with him again like I did when I was little.  He knew everything about tractors and could fix any old vehicle.  He loved junk, too.  As a matter of fact, I spent much of my childhood riding from house to house with him, buying and collecting and selling all sorts of junk and accoutrements.  When we passed a strange house with a yard filled with rusted out cars, broken lawnmowers, cement bird baths covered in kudzu or empty 55 gallon drums, he would nearly wreck or run off the road trying to see what all kind of treasure they possessed.  By the end of the day, he was back at that house hustling with the owner for a truck load of junk, usually for less than $5.

Bt the two things I loved hearing him talk about the most were his days as a boy in the 1920s and his days in the Navy  in the South Pacific during WW2.  Like all the other men who served, he was reluctant to talk about the war at all.  It pained him greatly to drudge back up all the horrible memories.  Until he died, he was deathly afraid of thunderstorms because of the storms he weathered on his aircraft carrier.  My mom said he would pile the whole family into their truck when she was a child to try and outrun thunderstorms, or “clouds” as they called them.

I sense our culture changing on a deep level in so many ways and I can’t help but think that one reason is the loss of leadership and influence from these aging, and dying, great men (and women) of the WW2 generation.  As they get older and as they die by the thousands, an amazing generation of heroes that literally saved our world from tyranny and destruction passes into eternity and our world misses their simplicity, humility, and nobility even more.  I make an effort to speak to, and to thank, every veteran I have the chance to meet, whether a vet of Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Kuwait, or the “greatest generation” of WW2 vets.

We could learn much from their example of service and sacrifice.  And I am telling my own children the stories of their great-grandpa and his friends who stepped up when called upon to defeat a very real and dangerous evil.  They need to know that the freedoms they enjoy were not free.  

Thank a Veteran when you get the chance, and thank the Almighty that by His grace, you were born in a country that enjoys freedoms only dreamed of by the rest of the world.