the rix mix

On December 7, 1941, the sunday Japanese planes blew apart the United States Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Mrs. Joseph S. Rixon was in the 9th month of her first pregnancy. A baby boy was born two weeks later, sickly, but he survived & eventually grew healthy. Maizie Amidon Rixon had been married to Joseph Samuel Rixon for under a year. She was a beautiful woman in her early twenties, stubborn & emotionally fragile, with the sophistication & conceits of a middle-class New Jersey girl who lived near New York City & had not suffered at all during the Great Depression. Men adored her.

Nothing so singularly horrific as Pearl Harbor had happened to the United States of America since day three of the Battle of Gettysburg, & would not happen again until September 11, 2001. But Gettysburg occurred in the middle of a terrible war, & it was no longer a living memory in 1941, & it was counted as a victory. Pearl Harbor was a beginning. I try to imagine what my mother felt between the events of Pearl Harbor & the birth of my oldest brother.