My handsom Marine

Please keep my Grandpa Sobie in your prayers. We miss him around here! We're used to having him live right next door adjoining our house, and it's quiet without him. He's landed himself back in the hospital with blood clots in his lungs (4 of them) and it looks like there are a few more in his leg. Tomorrow he will have surgery, placing a filter of sorts i nhis body to hopefully keep clots from entering where they shouldn't. He's in a lot of danger right now. I held his hand in the hospital tonite, and noticed that for the first time Grandpa felt frail and vulnerable. He's lost a lot of weight; maybe that's one reason. It made me cry. He is such a dear, wonderful man. I wrote the following for the local newspaper three years ago, around the Christmas season.

Leonard “Len” Sobie is an unassuming man of 83, with gray, thinning hair, smile lines lingering about his mouth and eyes, and a slight limp left behind from his double knee surgery. One can easily imagine what he looked like as a 21 year old Marine tanker in the South Pacific theater during WW2. He’s still tall and handsome; a dapper dresser with an easy laugh and quick whit. To most of the people who see him around town in Wadsworth (whether at Steiner’s swimming several times a week, at his usual post in Sacred Heart’s pew each Sunday, or hunting the grocery stores for his much loved Kielbasa,) Len looks like your average, still-independent senior American. But to those who know him, Len is much more than a jovial WW2 veteran who has passed his prime. He’s a Christmas hero.

When you see the large, white Toys for Tots boxes filled with toys for Medina County’s underprivileged children, you may not stop and think about the men and women who take the time to set them up, retrieve the contents, sort, and deliver the toys. Len is one of them. And because I’m privileged to see him on an almost daily basis, I know that the Toys for Tot season is his delight. Just this morning, after a long evening last night of sorting toys and carrying boxes, I gave him a hug and asked how he felt. His eyes sparkled. “I’ve got a little rip in my rotator cuff, so it bothered the arm to carry those boxes…” he admitted, “…but it’s so rewarding!” He proceeded to tell me stories about the children he was helping and the workers who put in long hours beside him. I tried to bring the conversation back to him: “I just want you to know how proud I am of you. When you were younger you risked your life on the fields of Guam and Iwo for us, and now you’re still making America a beautiful place by your…” He waved me off, embarrassed, and began to walk away. He turned back to me, though, when he remembered to tell about one last co worker in the Toys for Tots campaign who had put in a hard week of work for the cause.

I really don’t think Leonard realizes he’s one of America’s heroes. He probably thinks his days of glory are a bygone, forgotten season of life. When he came home from the battlefront with a few metals and a few scars, the whole nation rose up to greet him and thank him for his service. Star struck girls hung about him, the men who hadn’t gone envied him, and young boys wanted to be just like him when they grew up. Now he comes home after a long day of aching joints, battling to get boxes in the trunk of his car, standing honour guard at a funeral, or quietly being Santa to a bunch of children who won’t even know to thank him. There’s no spotlight for him now. No cheering crowds and no metals like he deserves. But in my eyes, he’s just as much a hero as he ever was… and this Christmas season, I want to thank all of you who make Christmas beautiful for Wadsworth and for America. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to have Leonard Sobie as my Christmas hero; and my Grandpa.