VETERAN'S DAY... AND PRIDE

Veterans' Day is just a couple of days away so "honor the vets" is showing up in newspapers, on Facebook, and in various other places.  I heartily endorse this sentiment, especially toward those men and women who have actually taken part in armed conflicts (even the dubious ones currently winding down in the Middle East).
I'm talking about it here because seeing those expressions of respect and gratitude made me feel proud because I too am a vet.  In one of his requests to me to talk about myself, your dad asked the question, "What is something that you are proud of?"  It isn't that I had a distinguished career in the military; I wasn't a volunteer. I was drafted. I stayed in only as long as I was required to and never had any desire to go back.  I reached the rank of sergeant, but was fortunate enough to never be in combat.  Nonetheless, I am proud that I served.  When I see a soldier in uniform I feel a kinship with him (or her).  I just read somewhere that approximately seven percent of Americans have served in uniform, that makes it a pretty elite group.

I am not advocating that any of you enlist.  I am glad that your grandma and I were spared the fear that comes with having a son or daughter serving in harm's way and I would like to see your mom and dad spared that same fear.  On the other hand, if any of you do choose to serve, know that you will have a proud grandpa saluting your choice.

Your grandfather is no poet, but this is as close as I can come to putting my feelings about being a vet into words. I am part of something.  I am part of a group of men and women who feel they can hold their heads just a little higher than those who have not served.  I share a bond with every soldier who ever lived.  It is that bond that makes me proud.

 

A STORY

Instead of my usual wandering thoughts, here is something from when your dad and his brothers were small.  Usually, your grandmother or I would read a story to them before bed, but once in a while I would make up a story for them. I don't suppose that most of them were very good, but the boys seemed to enjoy them, and I enjoyed making them up. This was probably the first one I did, and about the only one I really remember. Perhaps your dad will read it to you while you are still small and maybe when you are older it will give you a glimpse of your grandpa B.

The Little Doughnut

On a quiet street in a quiet little town, there was a little bakery with a jolly baker who every morning put out trays and trays of delicious doughnuts for people to enjoy with their breakfast.  There were all kinds:  cinnamon rolls and glazed doughnuts, cream filled and jelly filled bismarks, plain doughnuts and powdered sugar doughnuts and many others.  

One morning, as he set out the last tray of powdered sugar doughnuts, all white and fluffy like they were covered with snow, he saw that one was much smaller than the rest.  “Oh dear,” he said.  “I can never sell that one;  it’s much too small and it just wouldn’t be fair.”     He thought for a moment about eating it himself, but after making doughnuts since three o’clock in the morning, eating one just didn’t sound good at all.  “I guess I’ll just toss you out into the street,” he said to the little doughnut, “then some stray dog can have himself a breakfast.”  And that’s just what he did.

     The little white doughnut landed on the sidewalk and rolled a few feet before he stopped.  “I wouldn’t have minded being part of someone’s good breakfast,” the doughnut thought to himself.   “After all, that’s what I was made for, but I sure don’t want to be eaten up by a stray dog!”  But just as he was thinking this, a snarly, gruff sounding, hungry looking stray dog came wandering up the street toward him.  Having decided not to be a dog’s breakfast, the little doughnut flipped himself up onto his side and looked around for a place to hide.  Spying a nearby storm drain, he rolled to it as fast as he could and jumped in.

Out of one scrape and into another!  The little doughnut found himself swirling along in a stream of rainwater and soon felt the last of his nice powdered sugar coating melting away.  “Oh no!” he thought, feeling himself start to swell up and soften up with the rainwater.  “Now I’m starting to melt.  Soon there won’t be anything left of me.  I might as well have let that dog get me!”  But he wasn’t about to just give up.  He spun himself about and hopped up onto a ledge running along the inside of the pipe and soon felt the water begin to drain away.  He rolled along the ledge, rather squishily, until he came to the end of the drain and out into the sunshine once again.

After a few minutes, the warm sun began to bake away all the water he had soaked up.  Soon he had shrunk back to his usual rather small size and wasn’t squishy anymore.  In fact, he was rather hard now, and he certainly wasn’t fluffy white like snow anymore.  What with swimming in the drain and then rolling along the ground, he was now coated with hard black dirt.  Seeing his new, very unappetizing look, he said to himself, “Well, I’m certainly safe from stray dogs, but what shall I do with myself?  If I’m not going to be a breakfast what will I be?”  Not knowing the answer to his questions, he decided to just keep rolling along and see what he could see.

As he had been rolling along, drying himself in the sun and seeing the sights, he had rolled into a rather shabby neighborhood with not so nice houses and untended yards.  In one of these yards was a little boy trying to play with an old toy truck.  Trying, but not having much luck because the truck had only three of its four wheels.  The corner with the missing wheel kept digging in to the dirt and made the toy truck very hard to push.  The little doughnut noticed that the wheels still on the truck were just about his size.  He also saw that after his adventures in the drain and the dirt he was exactly as black as a tire.  This gave him an idea.  He rolled into the yard and flopped over onto his side right next to the toy truck.  Sure enough, the little boy picked him up and placed him on the truck where the missing tire had been.

“This is where I was meant to be!” he thought joyfully as the little boy started pushing his toy around the yard.   “I was meant to make someone happy and now I’ve done it!”

A CHILD OF THE SPACE AGE

Willy Ley and Werner von Braun were among my childhood heroes.  I was thrilled by the first faint beeps from Sputnik.  Alan Shepard and John Glenn took me with them into space.  I will remember to my dying day where I was when I watched Neal Armstrong take his one small step.  Those feelings and memories are of enormous importance to me.  They help define me. I am a child of the space age.  If we turn our back on space, what will my grandchildren have to take its place?  We NEED to be explorers!  It is our birthright and our legacy.  Please do not allow it to be taken from us.

I wrote the above paragraph as an attachment to a letter to the president of the United States from the Planetary Society.    http://www.planetary.org/     By the time you, my grandchildren, read this it will be apparent whether or not the efforts of the society and the others who support the space program were successful.  What I want to talk about here is that one sentence, "I am a child of the space age."

The space age is usually defined as beginning on October 4th 1957 with the launching of the first man-made satellite.  I was six weeks shy of my thirteenth birthday.  For me it began even earlier.  Along with cowboy shows like "Roy Rogers," kid's TV at the time included "space operas."  When I was eight or nine years old I was thrilled by the adventures of "Captain Video" and "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet." Never mind how quaint or even silly those names sound today, they evoked a sense of wonder and the belief that there were no limits to what we could do.  Science fiction was by far the biggest part of my pleasure reading for many years.  My ship of imagination didn't just take me across oceans, it took me across the universe.

I grew up in a wonderful, terrible, time.  "Wonderful" because science and technology were making the world a better, richer place every day.  Television was just beginning to bring the world into our living rooms. Terrible diseases like polio were succumbing to the power of medicine.  The commercial jet airplane made travel something anyone could do. "Terrible" because that same science and technology had created the power to end civilized life through nuclear war.  The Cuban missile crisis occurred the same year I graduated from high school, and in grade school I did take part in those ridiculous "duck and cover" exercises.

Through it all, more than anything else, it was the effort to get man into space that held my imagination.  I grew up believing that we would have colonies on the moon and be on our way to the stars.  I have to admit that my belief that those things will happen has diminished, but it still remains a part of me.  I hope that you have a "space race" to inspire you to believe we can still reach for the stars, and that nothing like the threat of nuclear war exists for you.  "Go in peace" is an often heard benediction.  May you have peace, and also the opportunity to "go."

" I GOT HALF-A-DOZEN PAINTINGS FROM THAT SHATTERED PLATE.".

The quote that titles this essay is from Georgia O'Keefe.  For any who don't know, she was an artist from the American Southwest.  At first, I couldn't quite get what the quote was about. Finally, I figured out that she was observing that an event (a broken piece of dinnerware) that most people would have been mildly upset about, or more likely would have dismissed out of hand, was for her a source of inspiration.

Every day, along with the little triumphs and occasional moments of serenity and joy, we deal with small tragedies like a broken plate. If only I could, like Ms. O'Keefe,  use them for something good.  I guess the message is a lot like, "Every cloud has a silver lining," except we all know that one is a load of crap.  Some clouds are just clouds.  Not every shattered plate yields half-a-dozen of anything.  But some do.  It's our job to find them. 

Just so you know, I don't have all these quotations just queued up in my head waiting their turn to be put in my blog.  Usually, I just happen across them or I remember a fragment and look up the rest.  If I have an encyclopedic mind, it's a Funk and Wagnalls, not a Brittanica. 

I don't suppose there is any chance you understand that metaphor.  Before the internet, the most used reference source was the multi - volume encyclopedia with articles about every subject imaginable.  Preeminent among these was the Encyclopaedia Britannica, more than twenty massive tomes crammed with articles by leading authorities in every field.  The EB was huge, and so expensive that it was owned almost exclusively  by libraries and schools.  It was the Rolls-Royce of reference books.  At the other end of the encyclopedia spectrum there were the sets such as Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia, that could be purchased one volume at a time at the supermarket.  With pasteboard covers and fewer articles (mostly by uncredentialed authors) they sold for about a buck a volume and were probably worth somewhat less than that.  Still, they were something that even poor families could afford and the set my mother bought for us did get a fair amount of use.  As I am writing this, the most used reference source in the world is probably Wikipedia and the traditional encyclopedias are either gone or struggling to survive.  Every piece of information you could possibly want is as close as the keyboard, but somehow we have still lost something.  The physical presence of the books, just sitting on the shelf, was always just a bit tantalizing; "There's knowledge in here.  Don't you want to come sample it?" seemed to be what those volumes were saying.  It was fun to pull one down at random and let it fall open to a page just to see what was there.  Even more often, looking for one thing you would happen across something else that would grab your interest for a few minutes.  I do not get much of that from having a computer sitting on my desk.  I can't just let it "fall open to a page," I have to follow a "link" to what the computer thinks I want to see.  An Ebook tablet certainly doesn't have the presence of a five foot shelf of leather bound books even though it can hold their entire content and a whole lot more.

It just occurred to me that my great grandparents probably had similar thoughts about how the automobile might be more efficient than the horse and buggy but it didn't have a personality like old Dobbin and couldn't find it's own way home late at night.  I wonder what you kids will feel that way about when you are my age.  Any guesses?

SHARING THE EXPERIENCE

In keeping with Zak's wish that these chronicles help you know a little more about me, I want this time to write about something I'm doing now instead of about long long ago.  For a while now I have been spending Tuesday afternoons at the White County jail talking one on one with inmates who are looking for help in dealing with their alcohol and /or drug problems.  I'm not a psychologist or licensed addictions counselor or anything like that, simply an alcoholic who has been in recovery for a long time.  In the parlance of the recovery program that saved my life, I am trying to "share the experience, strength and hope" that I have found to help others.  Talking with these, mostly young, men does a great deal for me. The feedback that I get from them and other people associated with the jail says they are benefiting as well.  My hope, of course, is that I will play a part in their beginning a lifelong recovery from their addiction.  What I know is happening is that I am getting the opportunity to give back something, no matter how small, in exchange for the multitude of blessings/gifts that recovery has granted to me.

Those blessings and gifts are the core of what I talk about in these sessions.  I know it is useless to tell these guys, "You should do this," or "You should do that."  Instead, I try to tell them what I have done to overcome my addiction to alcohol and what the rewards have been. Rewards such as: I am still married; your grandmother and I just celebrated our 38th anniversary.  It is not possible that she would have continued to put up with me the way I was when I was drinking.   Thanks to recovery, I have a positive relationship with your dad and his brothers.  They even sometimes ask for my opinion or advice.  I was able to finish a thirty year working career at Caterpillar so that I now have a comfortable retirement.  Last but not least, I have not died of some alcohol related cause.  I surely would have been dead years ago if I had not found recovery.

Talking about the benefits of recovery will, I hope, encourage the guys I'm talking with to continue their own efforts to recover.  I know it helps me to appreciate the life that I now have.  I embrace life the same way that someone who has survived a life threatening disease or near fatal accident does.  Every day is a gift and every smile and friendly word a reward.  I love the life I have now and am grateful every day for the blessings that I have been given.

Of course I hope that none of you ever have need of a recovery program.  On the other hand, I would love for you to be able to see the world as I do. 

THOUGHTS ON SOME FAVORITE QUOTES

"Tell me I've been a good man."

In the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” Ryan the old man, while visiting the graves of the men who fought alongside him, turns to his wife and says, “Tell me I’ve been a good man.”  It’s really a question.  Face to face with the sacrifice represented by the grave markers of his fallen comrades , he is asking if he has been worthy of that sacrifice.  What a profoundly brave question.  The answer will sum up in one word whether his life has been a success or a failure.   Success in life is not best measured by trophies in a case, certificates on a wall, money, property, or even how many “friends” we have on face book.  “Have I been a good man?”  Only if the answer is “Yes,” has our life been a success.  I wish I was brave enough to ask that question out loud, and I fervently hope I would like the answer.  Being too aware of my weaknesses and shortcomings makes me fear that I would not.  When I am at my best, I can use this hope and fear to drive me to do more to earn that right answer.  Asking myself the question is the first step.

 “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

This quote, usually attributed to Edmund Burke, has long been a favorite of mine.  I try to remember that while it will be up to others to decide if I have been “a good man,”  whether or not I “do nothing” is up to me. 

“God is love.”

I was probably introduced to this Bible verse from 1^st John when I was in the Nursery class at the Reynolds Methodist Church Sunday school class.  I have no memory of learning it, so I must have first heard it before my memories started to form.  The thing is, I have known the words all my life but never thought about what they mean until I read them in a book by Andrew Greeley.  He actually begins the book with them, “God is Love.”  He then goes on to explain that his interpretation of this verse is that it requires no interpretation;  it is simply a literal fact.   Love is the substance of God, what He is made of.  To me, this means that when we love we become part of God.  Of course, there is a danger here because it also means that if we are unloving we are ungodly.  When we hate, when we cause hurt, we separate ourselves from God.   When we try to do good, when we try to “love our neighbors as we love ourselves,” we move closer to Him.   A caveat here;  “God” is a term I use because it is a convenient shorthand for a concept that I cannot really define.  I know my human mind is not capable of framing an image of that concept.  The ancient Jews expressed this inability by saying that no one could look upon the face of God and live, not a bad analogy.  Nonetheless, if I know that “God is Love,” I know what I need to know about God.  I have the ability and the obligation to have God in my life; in a sense, to be a part of God.  All I have to do is love and act with love toward those I come in contact with.  I am also vulnerable to separating myself from God, by refusing to love and by failing to act lovingly.  When I am not good, when I am not kind, when I take when I should not take, when I do not give when I should give, I separate myself from what is good; I am no longer a part of God.

TWO ROADS, MANY, NO ROAD AT ALL?

" Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..." If there is a poet who speaks to me, it is Robert Frost.  In spite of being an English Lit major in college I find most poetry tedious and pretentious.  But that's a subject for another time.  Today I want to reflect on my life using "The Road not Taken" as a jumping off point.  Frost's poem ends with "...and that has made all the difference."  I have always taken that to mean he likes where he has wound up or at least believes he made the right choice when he "took the one less traveled."  But there is ambiguity in that line.  We do not know for certain that that is what he means.
     My thoughts about my life as I reflect on this poem are that I did not choose any road.  I have gone through life rather like a hitchhiker who doesn't care where he goes but must keep traveling.  I didn't choose a career at Caterpillar.  I took a job there because it best suited my needs at the time.  I needed to work nights so I could go to school during the day to get that degree in English Literature and Cat offered better pay than anyone else.  I became an English Lit major because first chemistry and then religion didn't work out.  I never "chose" to fall in love; it was something that happened when it happened and was literally beyond my control.  
    I'm not sure there is a lesson here, or if there is, if it is one I should be passing on.  The consensus seems to be that we are not supposed to just let life happen to us.  We tend to, or at least claim to, admire the person who chooses the road less traveled.  The "rugged individual" is an American icon.  We all like to think we are unique and in charge of our destinies.  Another poet cried out, "I am the master of my fate!  I am the captain of my soul!"  I don't know if he believed that or just wished it were so.  The cynical part of me thinks that being one of several hundred million "unique" individuals is something of an oxymoron.  I know that I for one have never been that rugged individual, master, or captain.  But, my journey along the road more traveled has been largely a pleasant one with good companions and plenty to see along the way.  For me that is enough.