Another hero

To add a bit more to the last entry, there’s one more Loreno brother—the oldest—who didn’t get a mention in the article. He wanted to go to war, but the work he was doing as a welder was too valuable to the war effort, and they made him stay home.

Nonetheless, I think of my grandfather as a hero. I don’t want to be one of those people who overuses the word till it has no meaning left. But he was a man who stayed faithfully at his post and did a job that must have been tedious at best when he wanted very badly to be doing something else. And beyond that, Grandpa is my own personal example of what it means to love—not your enemies, perhaps, but at least your opponents. You might say, how to have opponents without turning them into enemies.

I’ll never forget one particular day Mom and I got into a political argument with him over something or other (he was an FDR Democrat to the day of his death). He caught me in the hall afterwards and told me, “I love you, my little Republican granddaughter.”

Does that make Albert Loreno a hero? In this day and age, I tend to think it does.