Tonight while Notre Dame is burning

French people gather around it and softly sing Ave Maria

And the whole world cries

And my mind drifts back to long ago

When I was 20 years old, I went into the service

A boy from Staten Island in the army corps of engineers

And I got shipped off to sunny Honolulu

And I trained and played golf every day in sunny Honolulu

And my future brother-in-law from

The Bronx was in Patton′s army in Europe

Two boys from the big city so far away from home

One day, I was playing golf in Honolulu

When an airplane came and it picked us

Up and I didn't know where we were going

And it took us to an island called Iwo Jima

And I set up communication lines for the soldiers there on Iwo Jima

We′d already taken the island, so I didn't see much fighting

Soon I was running short of things to do on Iwo Jima

One night, I was wandering around and I walked into a dark cave

And my eyes water as I tell this story to my

Children, and my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren

But I found a dead Japanese soldier lying there

And I poked him, and he was dead, and I looked at him

And I found a picture in his shirt pocket of a young child

And I put it back in his shirt pocket, and I wept

And I took his hand grenade, and an unexploded shell, and I left

And I took the shell back to the

Quonset hut, and when no one was around

I emptied out all of the gunpowder

And later, I brought that shell back

Home, back when people used to smoke

People used it for an ashtray

And when the war was over

I married my soldier friend from the Bronx's sister

We moved into a little house near where I grew up on Staten Island

And every week, we had milk and beer delivered to our front door

We had five children, one right after the other

And they played in the yard, and in the summers we went up to the lake

And in August, we would go back home to Staten Island

And our oldest daughter had a baby when she was just 18

And then she got sick

And she died when she was 27, and nothing was ever the same

But she left behind her 8-year-old daughter

So my wife and I, we adopted this girl and we raised her

A quiet little girl in a world of old people

We took her to the Nutcracker and the

Catholic Church and we played lots of cards

And she dyed her hair pink in the 8th

Grade, but we dyed it back the next day

And the fella singing this song is her

Husband now, and he idolizes me for some reason

And these days, in the summers

He leaves his daughters at the lake with us

And they garden with me

And I sing soldier songs to them when they go to bed

While he′s home in New York trying

To write funny songs for TV commercials

Last summer at my 96th birthday in August

I looked at my children holding their

Children, and their children′s children

I sipped a cold beer

And ate peanuts on the porch with my brother-in-law

We talked about old friends and gardening and the wives we'd both lost

And my old heart was overcome with both joy and sadness

End