Hopkinton, Massachusetts

1925-2006

The Pear

You were allowed one letter and one postcard per month.  For the letter, you received one sheet of paper that ripped if you pressed too hard.  And when nothing came back, you wondered if your words were getting through—if they even knew you were alive back home. 

Some guys let it get to them.  Some were convinced they'd been thrown over by girlfriends and wives, given the old bum's rush.  Just one more thing taken from you.  First your gun, then your freedom, and then your girl beyond the seas. 

Don Simpson got no mail.  But it didn't matter; he knew that Mary cradled him in her thoughts.  Penned in Stalag IIIC since September 1944, he understood the pain she had to be feeling, as well as the grief of his mother who had lost three of six children as infants.     

“I was very concerned,” says Don, “that they were worrying themselves crazy.”  In his correspondence home, he didn't complain and he certainly didn't let on about the shrapnel in his right hand and buttocks.  Or that the Germans had taken Mary's class ring from him.  

Even as other POWs received letters, inhaling words through fingers and eyes, even as one-third of his body weight disappeared, and even as Don ached to eat the birds that flew over the camp, he did not doubt.  He knew that Mary was true. 

They had met in a pear tree.  He was in the tree, actually, a 15-year-old kid picking pears for an elderly neighbor, and then she appeared on the sidewalk below.  She wore a pretty dress.  Her brunette hair hung to her shoulders, the way it did most of her life.  He called out to her, “Do you want a pear?”  She stopped and replied, “Yes.”  So Don tossed Mary a pear and she caught it, and he came down with his own pear and they stood on the sidewalk and ate the fruit together.

It wasn't like him to be that bold, and maybe he wouldn't have said anything if they had passed each other walking, but he had a pear in his hand and the world seemed ripe with fabulous possibilities up in that tree.