Full Circle

It was September of 1945 and WWII had just ended.  He had worked at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, where the new Army computers were doing ballistic tables to calculate trajectories for large Army and Navy guns.

She worked in a munitions factory packing .50 caliber machine gun rounds, and hand grenades, until her advancing pregnancy made it too difficult to do those things.  They put her on the mail cart, delivering internal mail in the plant.

They lived in a small apartment off the town square of New Brunswick, New Jersey.

They had met a couple of years earlier at the arsenal at Savanna Army Ordnance Depot; he was Army, she was employed packing munitions.

He got transferred and she went with - which is how I came to be born in New Brunswick.

By the time I was 6 months old, we had moved back to Chicago (although the only person in our family actually going back to Chicago was my Dad) living in a flat near Ogden, Grand and Noble on the Near North Side.

In my late twenties, having been to Vietnam and back, married to my first wife, I took a job at a company called Admiral Valve Repair and Supply.  On Grand Avenue.  Just a few blocks away from Ogden.  And Noble.  Where we were when I was really, really, small.

The funny thing is, I remembered certain landmarks in the area.

There was a LONG staircase up to a second floor flat where friends of my Mom lived.

There was a Hot Dog place that had been there forever.

And I knew that the stop and go signals at the corner were wrong. (That's what we used to call them in Chicago - stop and go signals.)

Funny, how sometimes life will take you full circle and you don't know it's coming until you see the stop and go signals.

Ain't it?

Ndinombethe, ubuntu.