LOST THING

MAY 2009 – NO. 33

They should have crumbled to rust and dust. The things my great-grandfather carried through World War I, I mean. But they had been tossed in a white canvas sack and submerged among the bric-a-brac of my grandmother's dark, cool closet and thus forgotten by time. What use does time have, anyway, for a collection of straight razors with brightly colored handles, a blank stack of French postcards, a scratchy-wool Army cap, and a journal?

I had use for them, certainly; I wanted to broaden my knowledge of the man, which was so miniscule as to be nonexistent. Three generations' worth of years will wash away the color and detail of anyone's life, leaving gray photographs in dusty frames and little else. The process only accelerates when someone dies relatively young, as my great-grandfather did, from pneumonia caught during a late night's tending to a sick farm-horse, in the depths of the Great Depression.

Before I saw the contents of the canvas sack, those circumstances of his end were basically all I knew of him. That, and that he had served in what they once called The Great War, where a chemical gas attack on the Front had scoured his lungs and perhaps made him vulnerable to that final illness. The old photographs show a man slight-statured but obviously strong, in that way of farmers, with swept-back blond hair and the slightest suggestion of a wry smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.

His journal is maybe two inches by four, with a hundred or so onionskin-thin pages squeezed between soft, stained leather covers; the format forced him to be a man of few words, jotting each day's entry in terse haiku. Before that, though, comes the flyleaf with his personal information:

The front pages are devoted to charts:  parcel post rules, table of weights and measures, surveyor's measures, rates of postage, and a census of cities; Google being 90 years away. Then start the daily entries, on January 1, 1918:

The entries raise more questions for me than they settle. Was the recording of each day's weather a farmer's practice, or a more fundamental meticulousness? Why no mention the friends he must have made, or the leaders he may have hated?

The crossing on the transport ship was rough (the entry for Wednesday, January 30, 1918:  Rain/Sick/Spewed. That was typical). Then comes France:

Boredom finally punched through a taciturn nature that had deflected even artillery shells; that last entry he wrote in all-caps, with jagged letters. And there it ends.

I finished transcribing his entries into my MacBook on March 1, 2009, 6:54 a.m., late-winter ice ticking on thin bedroom windows. After five hours of typing I still knew nothing about the larger circumstances of his life, beyond those recorded days that could have belonged to any soldier of that era.

But as I stepped into the living room of the old house, rubbing at a face puffed by insomnia, I lowered my hands to see Burgott staring back at me from the faded photograph on a side-table. At that moment I felt I understood a little better the laconic, rugged spirit behind that half-smile. I felt that maybe the tiniest scrap of his life had been yanked back from time.

A few hours later, back in New York, I logged into Gmail and saw the frantic emails from a half-dozen colleagues and editors, screeching through cyberspace about deadlines, layouts, the magazine world and thus "Life As We Knew It" imploding upon itself. Same old stuff. Ordinarily, reading those missives, my heart would have sped; I would have busily started adding my own turbulence to the data-slipstream. In this instance, though, I sat back in my chair and stared out the window at Brooklyn. Cloudy. Mist.

I closed my MacBook.

My lips made a self-conscious attempt at aping that long-ago grin. Think wry, I told myself. Occasional shelling is all.

When you read entries about stringing barbed wire in muddy No Man's Land, it sort of puts your own franticness in the right perspective.

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AUTHOR BIO:

Nick Kolakowski is an editor and freelance writer living in New York. He is currently the technology editor at eWeek.com but has written for The Washington Post, AARP The Magazine, Sound & Vision, Trader Monthly and several other publications.