When You’re 64

The Beatles asked the plaintive question, “Will you still need me, when you’re sixty-four?” and today’s visit to the Normandy beaches, American cemetery, and Pointe du Hoc answered with a resounding, “Yes, we do.” Sixty-four years and a week since the D-Day June 6, 1944, Clay French students left the glamour of Paris behind to drive north, to the home of Camembert, cider, and the Plages de Debarquement, as the French call the Normandy beaches.

To an American, all that needs to be said is in those two words, Normandy beaches. Even the young hold a solemn and deeply felt honor for the generation that lay down their daily lives as students, doctors, businessmen, teachers to take up arms in a world threatened with the loss of human rights, justice, and individual liberty, a world teaming with the rising tide of brutality and abuse of power. It was a time of the worst and the best in mankind.











We walked the paths of the American cemetery overlooking what was named Omaha Beach, studying the names on the crosses, admiring the immaculate care given to the lawn and gardens, stopping to read the eloquent praise and national sorrow for these who gave their lives. At the hour the chimes rang out then began to peal out America the Beautiful followed by a familiar hymn. Elderly men knelt before graves, children held a parent’s hand, and we looked out over the field of graves, a veritable city of souls lost forever at an age when each thought life would be long and loving.

In a cold drizzle, we moved on to the coastal access to the beach to gather sand for husbands, fathers, grandfathers who want a tangible evidence of this place held sacred to our people. The twisting metal spikes rising out of the beach are barbs bringing death, arms reaching out for aid, men rising together in a common cause. The burnished silver catches the sun and a breeze whips out the flags of the Allied nations. We are both here frolicking on a sandy beach and there grieving the suffering of so many who never lived again after setting foot on our playground.

Manuel, our coach driver, took us slowly up the coast until he found the small stone marker in a wooden fenced enclosure that marks the first burial ground of the Omaha Beach dead. That prime beachfront land remains untouched, a testimony to the profound respect here for the sacrifice of so many Americans whose lives paid the price for peace.

The Pointe du Hoc memorial bears witness to that sentiment. This sprawling terrain atop the straight cliffs above Omaha Beach carries every scar of the bombing and battle that lasted three days after the first of the 225 Rangers scaled its steep precipice. Broken concrete walls laced with iron bars, deep craters, and the ghosts of those who sought protection within and those who finally crippled them lay strewn about this green grassy knoll. One cannot be in this place and not be also in that time. The sky cloaked in planes wingtip to wingtip, the sea blanketed with ships, the beach clogged with the remains of the drowned, the dismembered, the survivors crawling toward the artillery, we see and hear the horror of that day.

In the same way that it feels so jarringly out of place to hear the trilling of the lark and see the graceful fluent flight of the swallows over this place, it seems incongruous to hear the laughter of the children running down the craters or crawling through the gun ports. Yet it is perhaps more than anything else that laughter and that song that commemorate the sacrifice of those lost here. It was to give life to the swallows and the children that they were willing to die.













We made a lunch stop at the town of Bayeux, site of the cathedral home to the famous tapestry showing the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The tapestry was a marvel, but the Liberty Tree holds its own as a breathtaking moment: this tree was planted in 1797 to honor the newfound freedom of the revolution and withstood in the shadow of the cathedral the Allied bombing that leveled much of the city. The cathedral itself seems like all its Gothique sisters to stand on tiptoe toward the heavens, a graceful
impossibility in stone.

We left Normandy wanting not to leave, wishing for another day to visit the information center, watch the films, hear the men’s memoirs, study their faces, go up the coast to Arromanches, inland to the German cemetery. This is a land that we pass through, making lists of those places to which we vow to return.












The walled old city of Saint Mâlo is almost immediately added to that list. The beauty of the stone and the sea, the wind and the winding streets, the shops of lace and Breton treats, ceramic and sweets, the gracious old hotel that dates to the 17th century, all charm us. The sunset soaking into the sea beyond the rocky ruins off the coast keeps us up on the walls despite the cold. Some of the Alaskans take a dip at the beach, the rest dip in a toe or admire the sea from a safe distance. All use every waking moment to take in the singular beauty of this old pirate city, home to Jacques Cartier, wishing that we need not leave her so early tomorrow.