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Posts Tagged ‘Family’

Greed, Lies and Manipulation

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2018| Leave a Comment »

The Prosecution of Paul Manafort rests, and I’ve heard that Judge Ellis III doesn’t just swing a gavel, he swings a battering ram with nails. Soon enough a jury of his “peers” will decide if this friend and former campaign manager of Mr T deserves a jail sentence for tax fraud. Oh how I wish I was at the beach last week with the Groom’s family since his father just retired from a government career holding such people accountable… Grandpa Mike might have been able to shed some light on the world of financial crime.

A world full of greed, lies and manipulation as another tax attorney described it. So, as an antidote to the escalating breaking news of the day, I offer you my two cents:

Instead of greed, altruism. I spent a good part of yesterday with The Love Bug, and on our morning Ms Bean walk she happened to find some pennies. In a few weeks she will turn 6, and so she is starting to learn about money. Later, in the car with her Mama, she asked me to look for homeless people so we could give them some money! That was the sweet news, but unfortunately in Nashville, we have our fair share of homeless.

Instead of lies, truth. Differentiating between lying and truth-telling begins at about this age, which is why the Catholic Church chose 7 as the age for Communion. But some people never quite get it, they conflate and exaggerate the truth, or ignore it altogether. Our L’il Pumpkin is almost 4 and loves super heroes, so whenever I play Wonder Woman to his Batman I throw my invisible lasso of truth around the bad guys (usually a big stuffed bear). I believe in brutal honesty, and so does that bear!

Instead of manipulation, role-modeling. If you want someone to change their behavior, particularly a child, bribery does help but modeling the behavior you desire works best. I would always bring soup to new moms when the Bride was little, and I was happy to see she has continued this tiny tradition with her friends. Whenever I watch the Love Bug pick tomatoes from their garden, I think back to the Berkshires and the short growing season our tomatoes endured – the love of garden “candy,” of eating healthy, real food is being passed down to the next generation.

I could care less what Omorosa has to say, but I DO care that Mr T called her a “dog” this morning in a Tweet. Do you remember when a radio personality lost his job for calling the hair of the Rutgers women’s basketball team “kinky?” Can the racist, misogynistic hate please stop! It seems like our level of discourse may never recover from this presidency.

But for a final bit of good news, did you know there’s a large group of “Grannies” who have made their way to the Texas/Mexico border to protest the separation of families? They boarded two big vans in NY and picked up almost 2,000 more seniors heading south!

Like most others on board, Ms Mellen’s motivation for joining – a belief in the “designed, intentional cruelty” of the administration’s immigration policies – was deepened by maternal experience.

“Being a mother and a grandmother I know the incredible connection I feel toward my children and my grandbabies, and you put their faces on these children,” Ms. Mellen said.

“I can’t imagine the pain.” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45174891

No human is illegal, and every grandma is a gift.  IMG_3121

 

 

 

 

 

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A New Niece

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on August 10, 2018| 1 Comment »

Ever since Great Grandma Ada and Hudson moved to Nashville, Bob and I have been busy with the myriad friends and relatives who have come to visit them. First it was Hudson’s son-in-law, then his daughter from Arkansas.  Next up, Kathy and her ex from NC went to the museum with all of us. Then an old friend, Toni from FL came by, and she and Ada Facetimed with Toni’s new grandbaby.  But the last visitor stole the show!

We finally met Dickie’s daughter, Tamara.

When Ada first heard the news during rehab she was ecstatic. It made all her hard work after hip surgery bearable. Dickie was her middle son, the handsome desperado who went to Mexico for medical school and in some ways never returned. He died too young. In fact, the Rocker’s Bar Mitzvah was just a few weeks later. His very first band played at the beach party we threw for all the Eighth Grade! Dickie would have loved that evening.

Why he didn’t tell us about Tamara we’ll never know. He wrote to her, and her birth mother Kathy, once she found him. By that time his daughter was in her early 20s. Maybe he just wasn’t ready to meet Tammy; it must have been a shock to find out that twenty years ago you went to Woodstock but somewhere in NC, in one of those horrible homes for young pregnant girls, your baby was born. And against Kathy’s wishes, Tammy was given up just days later for adoption.

I’d been on pins and needles, waiting to meet her. We saw pictures of Tammy and her family – Ada now has two new Great Grandsons – and I kept trying to see Dickie in their eyes. I just wasn’t sure, until I walked into Ada’s new apartment and looked at both of them, Grandmother and Grand Daughter together. I realized Tammy takes after Ada’s family, like Bob and Jeff. Dickie looked like his father, blonde and fair, it didn’t occur to me that of course DNA can do extraordinary things!

She has Dickie’s wavy hair and his smile, but the rest is pure Ada. Those dark Russian eyes, and the sparkle to go along with them. She loves history and music. Her voice is honeyed by her Southern roots. She is beautiful, smart and sensible, and lucky for her, she grew up in a loving, intact home. Unlike most adopted children, Tammy didn’t seek out her birth parents, so this rag-tag team of Yankee Jewish relatives was a big surprise. For most of her life she thought she was Italian!

We laughed, we ate, we shopped at Talbots, we talked, we celebrated our good fortune. We added another link to our family totem; our tree of life has sprouted a new branch.

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The First

Posted in an expository essay, Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on August 1, 2018| 3 Comments »

First of all, Happy Happy Birthday to my firstborn son. He is kind, talented and fearless. He’s been laser-focused on all-things-music since he was seven years old. Last year he married his first love, then won two Cleos, and then, this year, he started his own company! If we parents can’t brag about our own children, well who will? Sorry Sister Mary Claire, being humble had its place once upon a time.

IF I’d thought of it, I would have put up a “Happy Birthday” billboard in LA.

Because we Americans can say whatever the heck we please in public right? Well, not exactly – that First Amendment is tricky. It uses an archaic verb to say what the government can’t do to our freedom of speech; it cannot “abridge” speech…which doesn’t mean legislators can stop a person from speaking.

Abridge comes from the word abbreviate, so it refers to: shortening/omitting/diminishing/depriving.

In other words, let’s have a civil discourse and not interrupt each other with opinions that at times might fly far from facts, and incite violence. I’ll be watching closely the court case this week against Alex Jones, the Austin based mogul of Infowars media. He spread rumors that the Sandy Hook massacre of elementary school children and their teachers was a hoax, causing the parents of Noah Pozner to move SEVEN times because Jones also reported their new address to his conspiracy-obsessed-gun-toting followers.         https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/alex-jones-defamation-suit-sandy-hook.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

And in Germany, the government has decided to send out Holocaust educators and bullying experts into its schools since it has seen a rise in Anti-Semitic, Holocaust denier rhetoric, something that country takes very, very seriously. In this case it seems that, unlike Mark Zuckerberg, hate speech will not be tolerated.

“…a brutalised climate now, in which more people feel emboldened to say anti-Semitic things on the internet and in the street”. “Previously that was unthinkable, but the threshold has dropped.”  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44725066T

We walk a serpentine line today as the soap box in the town square has turned into the world wide web – every paranoid schizophrenic or malicious Neo-Nazi can broadcast their misleading, patently false, absurd speech to anyone with a phone. And today, we came very close to being able to 3-D print a gun anywhere at anytime without a background check.

Let’s raise the threshold this November. Look for the “Gun Sense” symbol of approval on a candidate’s resume. And don’t be fooled by the GOP’s “I’m not a politician” rhetoric, that just means they will do Mr T’s bidding. It’s like saying, hey he’s not a brain surgeon but I want him to operate on my brain anyway. I borrowed that from Bob, my first love!

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A Day at the Museum

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on July 20, 2018| 4 Comments »

“You have a beautiful family,” the guard at the Frist Museum said, as she opened the door to a hot summer day in Nashville. And I remembered maitre d’s in NYC saying the same thing to the Flapper as we’d exit a swanky restaurant. A family I felt barely belonged to me; I was all of thirteen but my big brother Dr Jim was studying at Columbia and my stunning Upper-East-Side sister Kay would smile warmly. Now I know how my Mother felt surrounded by her brood. She’d done it – she raised them right, despite the poverty and the challenges.

“From 94 to 5,” I said. What the museum guard didn’t know was that yesterday our family turned a corner. We found the amazing woman, Kathy, who had given up her child back in the 60s, only to create an amazing life apart from my late Brother-in-Law. And now she’d completed the circle, searching always for her adopted daughter and finding out that our sweet Dickie, her first love, had died.

We women had few choices back then; many of my friends became sterile after illegal abortions. A good friend joined a cult.

It was incredible to watch my “Soul Sister” connect with Great Grandma Ada. They held each other’s hands for the longest time. They whispered secrets. My late Brother-in-Law was present, with his long hair and his big smile. It was an accident, he didn’t mean to die.

The Docent had us all look at a painting by an Israeli artist. Her parents had survived the Holocaust, but we didn’t know any of this. The Exhibition was titled “Chaos and Awe, Painting for the 21st Century.” The Love Bug was pointing to the sky, and the birds. I felt the fractured light. And Ada said that when a child dies, Jews cut a limb off a tree in the cemetery. In the middle there was blood, but nobody talked about that. It was a solemn time, a sacred visit. A newly-connected family in the presence of Art.

Maybe because I was separated from my biological family as an infant, I could relate to Kathy’s story. Still I knew both of my mothers. And my Daddy Jim was a hard act to follow! We cannot wait to meet Dickie’s daughter, and Ada’s two new Great Grandsons!

http://fristartmuseum.org/calendar/detail/chaos-and-awe-painting-for-the-21st-century

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Redheads, Lies and please God

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on July 18, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Videotapes?

As pundits are aTwitter over Mr T’s comments in Helsinki – and don’t get me wrong, they were outrageous, even traitorous – on Monday a 29 year old Russian spy named Maria Butina was arrested, or should I say indicted and taken into custody by a federal grand jury. She’s a pretty young thing, with as luck would have it, red hair. And one of the things mentioned in the slew of papers is that she attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast. TWICE.

The National Prayer Breakfast was initiated in 1953 by a Methodist minister, Abraham Vereide, who had been leading Congressional prayer groups for a decade. The annual breakfast now attracts close to 4,000 participants and is hosted by members of Congress. But the real force behind the event remains Mr. Vereide’s Fellowship Foundation, also known as “The Family,” whose fundamental mission is to create a ruling consortium of Christ-centered political and community leaders. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/opinion/maria-butina-putin-infiltration.html

Interesting right? To read about the far-reaching effects of this secretive, leave no notes behind “Family,” I give you this: “The Secret Political Reach of the Family” https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120746516

It’s enough to make a conspiracy theorist out of me! Remember that men-only/drum/circle/weekend/campout President Underwood attended in House of Cards on Netflix? That series was getting stale mostly because our reality star president was thought to be more entertaining. When he threw a soccer ball via Vlad like a hot potato to Melania on Monday, I was wondering if the secret service had pre-approved the move. And if Baron would actually ever hold that ball.

But why ask Vlad if he would deport those 12 Russian agents to America, when he already offered to send over his special cyber-security team to help us out. I hope the State Department confiscated Butina’s passport.

The intersection of a world-wide anti-LGBTQ agenda (fueled by nationalist extreme Christian right politicians) with lobbying efforts of the NRA has resulted in the spectacle we saw in Helsinki. Mr T is in Russia’s pocket, and it’s lined with sable, or maybe chinchilla? And if he’d like the American people to believe he “misspoke” about believing Putin had nothing to do with the hacking of over 500,000 votes… I am reminded of the phrase, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  Only in this case, I’m hoping there’s an independent voter who can spot a sociopathic liar in Finland.

Meanwhile, back in the Music City, I’ll be going to the museum today with the Bride, the Bug, Great Grandma Ada and our newly-found friend Kathy – the redhead will be in pre-school!

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Baby Zeppelin

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on July 13, 2018| 4 Comments »

What a week. I’ve got two broken ribs, nearly fifty immigrants infants can’t find their parents, and Mr T meets with the Queen while his baby image in a diaper floats above London like it’s the Macy’s Parade!

But first, let’s discuss Kylie Jenner on the cover of Forbes magazine. She is sneaking up on becoming one of the youngest American Billionaires since Mark Zuckerberg. Everyone, including Dictionary.com, is taking issue with the magazine’s assertion that Kylie is a “self-made” entrepreneur. So I thought, let’s dig into this one!

Horatio Alger Jr is the fictional writer we often equate with the myth of a “self-made-man.” We can thank Harvard for this, because even though his lineage dates back to the Pilgrims, when Alger was studying at Harvard he was denied entrance into the Hasty Pudding Club due to his “…genteel poverty and less-than-aristocratic heritage.” So what did this son of a Unitarian minister do in the mid 1800s?

He wrote about young boys who pulled themselves up out of poverty through hard work and or some act of courage or honesty – thereby making the big leap, almost unheard of in Europe, of becoming solidly middle-class. Strangely enough, he was living in New York and always interested in the plight of “street boys,” immigrants fresh off the boat from Ireland or Italy and orphans who had been left roaming the Lower East Side after the Civil War. He even adopted three boys.

To be honest, we’ve all relied on the kindness of strangers or a loan from a great aunt at some point in our lives. It really does take a village to raise a child, and in the case of Kylie, it took a whole social media, world-wide circus! Still, I’d come to her defense because she didn’t just invent an App, or create an avatar of herself for some video game. She took a risk, and instead of bemoaning her accusers for using fillers on her lips, she turned that into her business model.

She made lemonade out of lemons.

Sure she came from an already famous and wealthy family, poor thing, but she figured out a way to actually create something – granted it’s not a cure for cancer but you too can have pouty rosebud lips!

I mean look at another child of privilege, Mr T. He was handed the keys to his kingdom by his father, and he turned NYC into his personal playground. Unfortunately today, he’s cozying up to dictators, and trampling on our allies while padding the SCOTUS with ultra-conservative white men; all the while concurrently dismantling our government and destroying our reputation throughout the world.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if such an entrepreneur should turn out to have squandered his family fortune and be in debt to Russia? Our serial-liar-in-chief is one smooth operator. Like Alger, who was fired from his first job as a minister for molesting young boys, I sense something dark and foreboding lurking in president-bone-spurs past.

I’d love to see Mr T baby balloons take-off over here, maybe a Halloween costume? By October those immigrant babies will have been deported back to their parents I hope…and it shouldn’t hurt when I laugh, or sneeze right? We all need a little push while growing up!

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Confinement

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on July 10, 2018| 4 Comments »

We’re invited to a baby shower! My “Total eclipse of the sun” friend’s daughter, who happened to train at Vandy with the Bride, is having a baby. The new mama-to-be is a Pediatric Orthopedist who has gone on hunting trips with her father. I wonder if anyone is going to ask her how long her “confinement” will be?

That’s what Great Aunt Bertha wanted to know when I was waiting for the Bride to come into this world. And even today, in some cultures, cocooning the new mom/baby couple at home for the first month is de rigeur. A rite of passage when grandparents and aunties lived in the same village, or around the block.

While finally watching The Handmaid’s Tale on Netflix, I’ve found myself drawn to certain news stories about the myriad ways women have been constrained throughout herstory: binding the feet of high caste Chinese girls to resemble hooves; ever increasing chokers to lengthen the necks of African women; and the latest tortuous injustice in Nepal – banishing menstruating women to a small hut every month because of a superstition that they will bring bad luck to their families.

Young women have died from the cold, from a snakebite, from smoke inhalation. Last year Nepal passed a law criminalizing this practice, yet it is rarely enforced. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/world/asia/nepal-women-menstruation-period.html

  • In many world religions, women are seen as impure during their periods
  • They are restricted from entering places of worship and following religious rites
  • The chhaupadi tradition followed by Hindus in western Nepal is the most extreme version where women are banished outside during their monthly cycle
  • In India, women are not allowed to enter some Hindu temples and Muslim mosques while menstruating but there have been court cases to overturn this
  • In southern India, a girl reaching puberty is celebrated with a party and presents
  • In the Dogon tribe in Mali, women of the village also live in a hut during their periods

So this morning, as the world celebrates the rescue of all 12 pre-pubescent Thai boys and their soccer coach from a cave, I can’t help noticing that buried at the bottom of the NYT’s front page is a small piece about immigration. Today is the deadline imposed by a San Diego federal judge for the Trump administration to reunite all migrant families with their children who are less than 5 years of age.

The reunions will be carried out today for about HALF of the children under extreme secrecy with the Department of Homeland Security. As we look away, as we turn to Thailand, some South American families will be reunited and immediately deported. But what about the other children under 5, where are their parents? Where are they? What about the children over 6? The Love Bug will turn 6 this summer.

I never thought my country would break up families and put children in cages on our Southern border. And today, as this administration defies a court order of reunification because (insert some reason here for losing about 50 children and babies) I wonder what our legislators will do. Because doing nothing is no longer an option.

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Cars and Stars

Posted in an expository essay, Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, journal, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 6, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Hope y’all had a Happy Fourth! The Bride and Groom imported an 8′ bouncy water slide onto their lawn, so that even on a 96 degree day all the kids had outside fun! I whipped up a pesto pasta primavera and Great Grandma Ada helped bake some mini-white-chocolate-lemon cheesecakes adorned with strawberries, blueberries and bits of broken white choco-lusciousness. Sprinkled amidst the watermelon and hot dogs were voter registration forms, just in case!

Because as we were celebrating our first Fourth with all the Grands in Nashville, the Rocker and Aunt KiKi were visiting two museums in Amsterdam, and this was his takeaway: “incredibly powerful visit to the national holocaust museum and memorial and the dutch resistance museum today on our last day in amsterdam. some sobering reminders of the dangers of fascism and what human beings are capable of. the dutch resistance museum was particularly intriguing, as it continually asks you, what would you do in the face of a rising wave of fascism? adapt and ignore, collaborate, or actively resist?”  

Could this just be the last, gasping, dying breath of racism dressed up as white nationalism? Yesterday, James Fields Jr pled “Not Guilty” in a Charlottesville courtroom to multiple federal hate crime charges. He was the Ohio man who decided he would drive his car into a group of counter-protestors at the “Unite the Right” rally last August on the Historic Downtown Mall. The very weekend we were moving from the Blue Ridge, Fields injured many and killed Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old young woman who believed in love and not hate.

The judge asked him if he suffered from mental illness… is that because if you’re white and run into a group of people with your car you couldn’t possibly be a terrorist? Fields said he suffers from depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety and ADHD…and I nearly choked on the bile of his audacity.

That, and the news about Justice Kennedy had us all wondering when this assault on democracy might end; if we are going to resist, NOW is the time. Block a vote on filling the Supreme Court vacancy – there should be NO vote until Mr T is no longer the subject of a federal investigation! Here is what Cory Booker had to say :

“If we’re not going to thoroughly discuss what it means to have a president with this ongoing investigation happening, who is now going to interview Supreme Court justices, and potentially continue with his tradition of doing litmus tests, loyalty tests, for that person, we could be participating in a process that could undermine that criminal investigation,” Booker said yesterday. “I do not believe [the Senate Judiciary Committee] should or can in good conscience consider a nominee put forward by this president until that investigation is concluded.”   http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/booker-no-supreme-court-vote-until-resolution-trump-investigation

But the best thing about this last week, to end on a high note, is that Bob and I bought a new car! As many of you know, I dread driving on the Fourth of July, because that was the holiday that found my family fractured by a drunk driver in 1949. We had just lost our father to brain cancer, and now our mother, the Flapper, and Nana were hospitalized leaving baby me in the care of their friends. I’m a nervous wreck generally in any car, but Bob’s old Acura had lived a good, long life. It was time, it was past time.

We now have so many driver-assist doo dads, I’m feeling almost comfortable driving again. So keep the faith, register young voters, and start calling your legislators again people! Get on the Booker train, it’s time to pick your torch – the one in our Lady’s hand on Liberty Island, or the Tikki torches that marched on Thomas Jefferson’s campus. Patriotism is an active noun.

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Or is It Fantasy?

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on July 3, 2018| 1 Comment »

Is this the real life, or must we upload a picture to social media in order to “Make it so?” The famous Freddie Mercury song, Bohemian Rhapsody, has been swirling around in my head. First of all, the Rocker scored the incredible trailer for the biopic about Mercury https://www.cbsnews.com/news/see-the-first-trailer-for-queen-biopic-bohemian-rhapsody/

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see

And then of course we have our first Reality Show President, working tirelessly behind the scenes to encourage Chief Justice Tony Kennedy, his buddy, to retire NOW. Everyone knows there’s business as usual, and then outside the boardroom all the deals are made in advance. Thank “The Apprentice!” Ivanka takes her daughter on a tour of the Supreme Court courtesy of Tony. Turns out the Donald worked closely with “Tony’s boy” at Deutsche Bank, arranging for loans when other banks wouldn’t touch him.

Bob and I have been helping the Great Grands turn their apartment into a home and dreaming about our own real estate dynasty. What if we, Baby Boomers, the last of a dying breed with secure financial futures thanks to pensions,  401(k)s, and Social Security, were to reinvent retirement? I know I’ve mentioned this before but hear me out: How about a Reality Show for Alta Kakas!?! If you are new to Yiddish, this is an endearing swear word for old people.

I know I know, The Golden Girls. Thanks to Women’s Liberation, we are now dying off in similar numbers so we have to think about the guys right – plus, that was then, when everyone went to Florida. And even though Betty White is an icon, that was a sit-com; I’m talking reality baby, like “Big Brother” only with seniors. Can you see it, a food fight breaks out in the dining room with rice pudding flying everywhere. I would call it “Golden Disrupters.”

Or maybe film this reality show on the water. Did you know there are retirees called “Great Loopers” who put their boats in the water and spend their last days cruising the intercoastal waterways of the South. They bisect Florida on the Okeechobee canal, thereby avoiding the Keys. It’s kinda like Glamping, and definitely not yachting.

Whatever we end up doing on our Golden Pond, I suggest to you that indeed we CAN escape reality, in fact we MUST in order to save our sanity! And Art has always been a great way to circumvent conflict and chaos. In true Adalisciousness, we have turned a second bedroom into an art studio. Here the Bride joins her to paint lilies from a neighbor’s garden.

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Grand Marshall

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , on May 27, 2018| 1 Comment »

I have two brothers, both Vietnam Vets, who will not be marching in a Memorial Day Parade tomorrow. One step-brother Eric, a dentist in St Louis, has been involved with the “Take Me Home Huey” traveling helicopter memorial and documentary film:

Steve Maloney’s mixed-media sculpture Take Me Home Huey is composed of a transformed boneyard U.S. Army Huey helicopter that served as an air ambulance during the Vietnam War.  The historic helicopter was shot down in 1969 during a medical rescue in Vietnam. The serial number of the Huey is 67-17174; the aircraft is commonly known as #174.  The crew chief Gary Dubach and the medic Stephen Schumacher died bravely during the medical rescue attempt.  https://takemehomehuey.org

Eric had returned home to the states for a one month leave when his Med-Evac helicopter was shot down. Two men lost their lives; in fact, my brother, who was the Aircraft Commander/pilot, and a Gunner are the only two from his unit who are still alive.

Dr Jim, my psychologist brother in MN, told me this morning he was over there (in Vietnam) “Keeping us safe from Communism,” while Bob and I were protesting the war and trying to get him back home – and NOT in a body bag. It was our modern day Civil War, re-electing Richard Nixon nearly killed me. I can imagine Jim smiling as he recounted this – he was a First Lieutenant, an Intelligence Officer. He spoke a few languages and was stationed in Saigon. Jim rarely talks about the past and will be preparing a spare bedroom tomorrow for his sisters’ visit in the near future.

And although they didn’t grow up together as brothers, they have grown closer over the years partially due to their combat brotherhood. Our older brothers, Mike, a Korean Vet and Brian, career Air Force, have been gone for a few years now.

In our hometown, Great Grandma Ada’s husband, Hudson Favell, will be sitting in the lead Jeep for the Memorial Day Parade. A Navy Vet, he served in the Pacific during WWII; 92 years old now, he was the only grandfather my children ever had. And he’s been a doozy! Always carving wood totem poles and helping us out on any half-baked renovation project we could think of. They married when the Bride turned two under the same tree as our wedding, in the same parking lot, in front of Ada’s house.

Everywhere he goes people thank him for his service. In an elevator in the rehab a woman shouted into his ear that she’s a history teacher and was just teaching her kids about WWII. She bent down to his wheel chair and shook his hand. Vietnam Vets never really got a thank you, the Korean Conflict wasn’t even considered a war, I wonder what our Afghanistan and Iraq Vets are hearing.

On this Memorial Day, I will toast all those who served honorably and less than honorably. Those who committed suicide and those who died in combat or at the side of a road, those who came home with scars we can see as well as the scars we cannot see.

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