Sometimes I get so abruptly emotional about the last letter my grandpa wrote before disappearing into Axis prison camps for 5 years and returning home a withdrawn skeleton in 1948.

and it's not because it's very beautiful or emotive. quite the opposite in fact. it is that the last thing he wrote, in a blazing hot tank in the Tunisian desert, was about half a line of 'hope you're well, we're facing the enemy soon' followed by, no kidding, three pages about the minutae of the engineering conundrums posed by taking tracked tanks on sand.

and it just makes me do a sad laugh bc a) that is also very much the person he was at 85. couldn't get out a full sentence of emotions most of the time but he would spend 3 hours lecturing a 4 year old on the mathematics of torque. that man was a CARTOON of autism. but also b) like. it's weird to do the People Are People thing about someone who was around until I was 10, like, I know he was people, I met him. but like. thinking about that 18 year old in the desert not even contemplating the horror of war bc he's too busy trying to design more effective tracks. I mean that's like 50% of 18 year old autistic guys I've ever met. truly We Have Been Here.