Charles Schuster, a widower, called his only daughter “Cupcake.” Flush with money he made in electric insulators, Charles sent her to nursing school. As was the custom of the time this had more to do with meeting doctors than actual nursing.

In his second year of residency, Donald Sivley met Maggie during rounds at the local memorial hospital. Tall, in his mid-20s, dark eyes, strong nose, and dark hair, Don had a kind heart for his patients, yet still very clumsy around pretty, broad smiled, delicately built young women. Adding Maggie’s dry mid-western humor, this had a profound effect on the young man’s ability to stay balanced, hold coffee cups, judge distances to walls, etc.

In October of 1916 he asked her to marry him.

On April 6th 1917 the United States Congress declared war on Germany in what was then considered “The European War.”

Of course, Donald enlisted. He was sent to Fort Piedmont, just north of Aliceville, NC for warfare surgery school. Maggie didn’t see him for nearly 8 months. They wrote daily.

After receiving orders to join the Atlantic blockade aboard the medical ship “USS Legacy, moored off the legendary Cliffs of Dover, Donald sent for Maggie to join him. On the train to Greenville, a large black man, black as coal, so black you could almost see through him, played a beat up guitar, missing a few strings, and sang a song that went, “Down in the valley, valley so low, hang your head over, hear the wind blow…”

With reservations about sending his daughter so far away by herself, her father sent her along with a charm in the shape of a cupcake. Blue porcelain icing with sterling silver cup; she hung it on a silver chain around her neck.

In a tiny chapel overlooking the parade grounds they were wed. A faint scent of gin as the chaplain read the words from an army manual, “… and do you, Donald Watson Sivley, take this sweet young girl Margaret Elise Schuster…”

Donald took her down to Charleston to the county fair. They saw clowns, gypsys, and a diving horse. Donald promised after the war was over they would travel the world. “Oh Donald, do they have sweet tea in Egypt?” “Yes, and I promise we’ll have tea in the Sahara.”

Donald was lost to a German torpedo in the Spring of 1919. The Great War was over that Fall.

Mad with grief, Maggie spent her father’s small fortune traveling first to Great Britain, then wandering Europe and later North Africa, where she was lost in a haboob in the summer of ’48.

In December of 2013 “Jetman” Ferlo St. Julian was the centerpiece of the Al Habib airshow outside of Illizi, Tunisia. As he lifted off from the runway, his wash loosened and threw a bit of asphalt, striking Muhammed Ghardaia in the leg. It stung, but did not break the fabric of his bisht. Looking down, the boy caught a gleam just under his foot. A bauble, a small silver and blue cupcake, a bracelet charm. “Where in the world,” he thought to himself, “could this have possibly come from?”