Poppy gets serious

You know what this is? It's my grandfather's draft card. He filled it out when he was doing a medical residency in Montana.

He was born in Virginia and went to medical school at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Why Montana? Well, apparently he was a Robert Service fan, and he wanted to see the kind of country that Service wrote about.

He served as a physician in the U. S. Army in France during WWI.

The whole time he was in the army, he arranged to have his entire paycheck sent directly to my grandmother. To keep himself in spending money, he played poker.

Every Memorial Day I think of him, whom I never met, and of the suffering he saw during the War to End All Wars. Apparently they'd run out of medical supplies. Like morphine. And he'd have to operate without it.

Apparently he came back from France a different man.

Memorial Day is not just the start of summer.