Article, Post World World II: Five and Dime Store by Neale Sourna

Five and Dime Store by Neale Sourna

My parents did meet, like the old song, in a "5 and 10 Cent Store." Okay, technically, it was a drug store, People's Drugstore, but that's close enough. It was after the Second World War in Richmond, Virginia.

Daddy had been a Marine, after being drafted at about age twenty-two, to serve in the "Pacific theater." He'd boxed for them and....

"Dug foxholes and hid in them," which was always his answer when we were growing up of, "What did you do doing the war, Daddy?"

He told us nothing about that time, never once glamorizing it or his part in it. Finally, a few years ago, he told one of his grandsons and I listened, silently, afraid he'd clam up like he used to do.

He told of loading and offloading death-reeking bodies of soldiers.

"A smell you never forget." He hadn't known Mama, then.

Our mother, for her part, at that time, sent letters to...http://www.romantic4ever.com/d_how_we_met/100408-five-and-dime-store.html

Character: HBO's "Rome"--Julius Caesar, Octavian Augustus

In the process of thinking of male characters, especially "alpha" males, don't always assume that they were raised by alpha male dads. More than likely, with some of the most successful men on the planet, they were raised to their maturity and success by their moms, alone, and not by their fathers.

Fathers, who, traditionally, are fully obtuse and ignore their children, until they do something or become something they want, for their own paternal pride, can breed rather cloying, hyper "see me, see me, see what I can do dad, am I doing what you like, dad" men: General Douglas MacArthur, David O. Selznick, every Kennedy brother of the John F. Kennedy clan generation, George W. Bush, and such.

Ambition and the success it can generate, and the "manliness" to handle and govern other men, as in politics and in war, doesn't need a blood father who raises and goads the boy into manhood.

Can any of the men mentioned above surpass--and some have actively tried--the ancient success, as men among and above men, ruling men, as Big July, Julius Caesar, and his grandnephew / adopted son delicate, fay Octavian Augustus Caesar, Emperor of Emperors of the extensive state of Rome? Or Temujin, Genghis Khan who formed the formidable Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous empire in history?

Nope.

--Neale Sourna