Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, August 6, 1995                   TAG: 9508040012
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BY CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A LOT OF JAPANESE REUNIONS WERE CANCELED IN ADVANCE 50 YEARS AGO

It's the big annual reunion of my mother's family.

For those of us who saw each other every couple of weeks as children, once-a-year get-togethers seem like a long separation.

We find each other a little changed every year - slightly grayer, or heavier, or thinner and always with a few more children running around. Remarkably, though, we unfailingly rekindle the friendship that always transcended our family relationship. Sure, we knew we had to put up with each other because we were related, but we lucked out in that we all really liked each other, too.

Among my cousins, for instance, we all had school friends and church friends and neighborhood friends, but if you had asked any of us to make a list of our best friends, we always would have included at least some of each other.

Now most of us 18 grandchildren of Charlie and Mary Steelman are married and have kids of our own. In fact, my brother's oldest daughter is married and has a child of her own, meaning we should have four generations present this year.

It will be, I'm confident, a repeat of the joyous occasions we always have together.

We're a ``touchy'' family - lots of hugging and kissing and back-slapping. And there will be lots of laughing. My mother and her four sisters - now the matriarchs of the clan - love to laugh. It is one of their greatest gifts to their children. They laugh loud and long and at just about anything.

They were children of the Depression and adolescents during World War II. They were too young to have seen their boyfriends called into military service. Both their father and their half-brother were in service, but never were called to duty overseas.

Consequently, the war was a time of distant action, distant danger and distant thrills for my mother and many of her peers.

At the time, no one was told how close the Germans really were - how many ships they were sinking practically in sight of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse on the North Carolina coast. So the threat from Germany and Japan, while real, was a bit detached for Mom and many others who remained stateside during the war.

Fifty years ago today, the war effectively ended for them. The secret weapon of nuclear power was unknown no longer, and ``Hiroshima'' was added to the American vocabulary.

As we recollect our family history, we'll be able to reflect on that period without the heart-crushing grief of so many families who lost loved ones in the war that started coming to a close on this day in 1945.

Sitting on the lake shore, my family will mourn a little the loss of those we loved who have died since that war. Overall, though, we'll remember that we've led blessed lives with little tragedy and few misfortunes, far from "ground zero."

I'll be focusing today on the joy that has filled our lives. But I don't think I could help spending a few minutes, at least, pondering how different a family reunion today would be in Hiroshima.

I will think about how my mother's counterparts in Hiroshima might have been spending that summer day 50 years ago. Those teen-age girls did not make any decisions about whether their country would fight or surrender. Did they, too, feel detached from the war, even though they feared an invasion? Did they, too, have dreams of marriage and family and reunions?

I will pause to remember that in one blinding moment, their reunion - where one of them also might have been showing off her first great-grandchild to the rest of the family - was canceled a half-century in advance.

Even those of us who continue to believe that the use of the atomic bomb did hasten the war's end and was morally justifiable can grieve for the lost potential in those innocent boys and girls whose lives and futures were obliterated in a flash of atomic fission.

Remembering that we might have been friends with the children and grandchildren of those who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be an incentive to work ever more diligently to make sure we never need to justify the use of such weapons again.

I plan to spend a lot of time laughing today. I'll laugh at my elders and my offspring, at twice-told tales of family shenanigans, at new accounts of distant cousins' foibles.

But I'll also give a few moments' quiet reflection to those who might have been, gone with hardly a trace in the ashes of innocence left at Hiroshima.