Columnist {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Maureen Heimerl wasn’t thinking specifically of Memorial Day a few weeks ago, when she sent me the note. More than 25 years after the death of her dad, she explained how she had finished turning dozens of poems he left behind into a little collection for their family.
Heimerl found something deeply moving in the verse of Alfie Wright. What she told me of her father’s sorrow for a lost brother was the first of parallel stories of remembrance I heard by sheer chance within hours of each other – both involving young men from South Buffalo who died weeks apart in World War II. Almost 80 years later, what joins them is love and absence, on Memorial Day.
Heimerl’s father eventually became a longtime English teacher at Timon High School. In a foreword to the collection, the writer and journalist Stephan Talty – a long-ago student of Alfie’s – described him as a distinctive figure in “thin-lapelled sports coats, thin-legged wool trousers (and) skinny ties,” often worn above bright socks. As a teacher, Talty wrote, “ .
.. Alfie took these contradictory things – toughness and kindness, a love for books and a devotion to discipline – and lived by them.
And made you feel you could live by them, too.” Alfie and Mary Wright (center) and their seven children, shortly before Mary's death. Heimerl, now retired from a career as a nurse practitioner and admi.
