Everything's Amazing!

I, like so many of us, take "everything" for granted. My daughter in her down to earth wisdom reminded me of this the other day when I whined to her about the length of time it was going to take to have the Beave's cell phone repaired. More than a couple of days, it was!! Can you believe that? But no empathy from Betty as she couldn't really see the importance on world events of a teenager being without his texting for a few days. Sigh, I knew there would come a time when my kids would not only think that they were smarter than me, but actually . . . were! As if in perfect timing to corroborate her feelings on the matter came this:


"We live in an amazing, amazing world, and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots"





And isn't it funny that this comes on Thanksgiving weekend, where I really should be just counting my blessings. And I am! Really we live in an amazing time. Please don't let me be like just another spoiled idiot!

A Foray Into The Youth Culture

Last night I took a walk on the wild side. Not really, it was more like a walk on the mild side . When your youngest is 15 and wants to attend a band concert that’s what happens when you are the parent elected to take the group. And I’m not driving 45 minutes to Louisville to drop my kid off and then returning 3 hours later. So it was that I got to check out the pre-rock-pop culture scene first hand.

It all started when Beave’s best friend got his first “gig” at the Bull Dog Café just up the road in Louisville last summer. They then made several trips up to play. Now the Bull Dog sounds more upscale than what it actually is, which is a hole in the wall burger joint with a mostly plywood Rube-Goldberg built staging area. It is an ideal location for garage bands to get their first taste of playing for an audience, especially since the audience is usually no more than 20-30 people, mainly friends and family, and the cover charge is five bucks, unless like last night, they get a big name, and then it’s ten bucks.

Anyway, last night was my first time at the Bull Dog. Four excited young men rode with me, and that is in itself a glimpse at the life of a teen today. I was pretty quiet on the way up, but in their excitement, they pretty much forgot I was in the car and I got to hear all of the latest buzz. Who knew guys gossip the way girls do?!

I had been forewarned about the Bull Dog so it pretty much met with my lowered expectations, maybe even a bit cleaner than I expected. Remember this is a food joint, not a bar, so it didn’t reek of old beer and cigarettes, so that was a positive sign. But as we were a bit early, I got a clear view of the mostly empty place and I was taken aback by the sight of an elderly woman in a motorized wheelchair in the corner. She was covered with a blanket, but with all of the tubes and an oxygen tank nearby, it certainly appeared she was connected to life support! And some of the wires went straight up to the television mounted above her head. My first impulse was that someone should check for a pulse! The boys must have seen the look on my face, because they smiled and said, “Oh, that’s the owner” as if that was all the explanation I needed.

For the first half hour I was the lone parent in the crowd (if you can say thirty kids is a crowd). But then I was rescued. Another Mom arrived and we sat together; she wasn’t about to leave her 15-year-old daughter who had come to meet our guys. She was an Army spouse too, whose husband had retired. Army spouses always have a lot in common so we spent the next three hours sharing previous assignments and quite a few mutual friends. After the first band played, we moved to my car. It was parked directly in front of the café where we could still see in and remarkably enough, still hear the music(?) quite well.

All in all, not a bad way to pass an evening. We allowed our kids to have a night out, enjoy their music, and even make an observation about it. When I was the Beave's age a lot of the music was pretty innocuous and mostly about love with a few commentaries on culture thrown in. Look at the top 25 songs of 1970 listed below:


1. Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel
2. (They Long To Be) Close To You, Carpenters
3. American Woman/No Sugar Tonight, The Guess Who
4. Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head, B.J. Thomas
5. War, Edwin Starr
6. Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Diana Ross
7. I'll Be There, Jackson 5
8. Get Ready, Rare Earth
9. Let It Be, The Beatles
10. Band Of Gold, Freda Payne
11. Mama Told Me (Not To Come), Three Dog Night
12. Everything Is Beautiful, Ray Stevens
13. Make It With You, Bread
14. Hitchin' A Ride, Vanity Fair
15. ABC, Jackson 5
16. The Love You Save/I Found That Girl, Jackson 5
17. Cracklin' Rose, Neil Diamond
18. Candida, Dawn
19. Thank You (Fallettin Me Be Mice Elf Again)/Everybody Is A Star, Sly and The Family Stone
20. Spill The Wine, Eric Burdon and War
21. O-o-h Child/Dear Prudence, Five Stairsteps and Cubie
22. Spirit In The Sky, Norman Greenbaum
23. Lay Down (Candles In The Rain), Melanie and The Edwin Hawkins Singers
24. Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today), Temptations
25. Love On A Two Way Street, Moments

I guess by 1970 the antiwar crowd and counter culture singers were all busy trying to make a living!

Now the songs are innocuously whining about life. Though I couldn’t really understand many of the slurred lyrics, I imagine their being something like this . . . ‘I need a better cell phone, oh yeah, cuz texting is my life, uh huh, my parent’s won’t get me a new IPOD and this one’s really old, la la la. All I wanna do is rant about you, oh yeah!”

It's Time For a Poem

A Psalm of Life
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(What the heart of the young man said to the psalmist)

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
"Life is but an empty dream!"
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
"Dust thou art, to dust returnest,"
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Finds us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, -act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.

Canine 9-1-1

If only James Herriot lived in the neighborhood I could have called him and he could have treated our golden retriever, Emma, and also gotten a good chapter for a new book!

But, it seems I was on my own this afternoon! It went down like this: I had run to the store and been gone about 30 minutes. Upon my return I noticed several strange things. First in my bathroom I noticed a guest soap wrapper on the floor, and then there on the bathroom rug were several bits of soap "crumbs." As Emma likes to go into my bathroom and lay next to the tub, I thought "stupid dog, why are you eating soap?!"

Then not five minutes later I go into the living room and notice another torn up wrapper of some sort. I'm blaming the Beave for leaving a microwave popcorn bag out but then on closer inspection I see that it is something entirely different . . . and then with horror I see a half-eaten "Ready-Start" fire log on the carpet. OMIGOSH! Alarms are going off in my head. If that doesn't beat all . . . Well, it hasn't been that long, but I am sure that that log is loaded with toxins, so we've got to get it out of her.

I go to my old standby home remedy given to me by a veterinarian I called when Emma had eaten an entire bag of Dove Chocolate. That is the hydrogen peroxide bring-it-up-chuck mixture of 1 part hydrogen peroxide to 1 part water, and for a dog Emma's size about 1/3 cup should do it. Trust me though, easier said than done. Note to self: get some disposable plastic medicine syringes and keep them on hand.

With the Beave's help we got enough of the mixture down Emma's throat to do the job. Ten minutes later, a frothy mixture (remember that bar of soap she had was in there too) along with lumps of fire starter log all made its way back up and out. What a relief!!

So if you have pets please keep those easy start logs where they can't get to them. It must be the hickory BBQ like aroma that convinced Emma it would make a nice snack. Though I can't really figure out the soap chaser, unless she was just feeling funky. No I'm at a loss why she would go there, but I guess I'm really going to have to "dog-proof" my home.

Authors I Have Known (Really!)

While looking for books for Ward to read in his spare time while in Iraq (LOL) and as Christmas gifts, the first place I perused was the History section. There I stumbled across the title of a relatively new release written by an old friend from West Point, COL James Scott Wheeler. The title alone is a bit of a dissertation: The Big Red One: America’s Legendary 1st Infantry Division from World War I to Desert Storm (Modern War Studies). I’m out of breath just saying it! But I was so tickled to find it that I immediately ordered it, not just because it got good reviews, but how cool is it to actually know the author?!

Then I got to thinking that we know several published authors. Our good friend Dana Mangham wrote the tome (well it is large!) Oh For The Touch Of A Vanished Hand: Discovering a Southern Family and the Civil War. Is that not the most poetical, romantic title, Ann with an E? And it was I who commiserated with Nan on how much time Dana spent away from home on research! But what fun we had when it was finally published and we attended one of his first book lectures in Atlanta.

Another friend, Steve Eden wrote, Military Blunders: Wartime Fiascoes From the Roman Age Through World War I.

Then there is the author of Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam,John Nagle, who came to our home for dinner with a PCC group a few years ago. He and Ward stayed up half the night discussing the new type of warfare.

Of course the common thread with all of these books and authors (other than their all having excessively long titles) and myself is that we met through the Army connection. It is not surprising that what they write about is military in its scope, but what is surprising is that they are very good reads. Fiction cannot compete with real life drama or history.

That brings me to the another author that I remember from West Point, Wesley Allen Riddle. He has published mostly articles of a political nature, and I’ll never forget when he and Ward stayed up almost all night tracking Clinton’s second win. What a heartbreak that turned out to be.

But how appropriate this quote from Wesley is in the light of today’s political climate:

If some do not recognize their impending slavery, it is because the tyrant who steals our freedoms is subtle, multifaceted, sometimes benevolent, and wears the mask of a smiling bureaucrat and government social worker, who has your supposed best interest in mind... The liberty we have gotten is not the sort the Founders intended. It serves no purpose nor ends but our own destruction. We witness now the onset of social chaos sanctioned by government, without the consent of the people to do it.
"Secession and the Moral Compact", Vital Speeches of the Day, Wesley Allen Riddle, August 1, 1995, pWest Point is USA equivalent of Sandhurst military officers academy in the UK.

Impossible Vicissitudes

I never really liked this painting. But now it captures the exact way I am feeling today. Much like these lines from Wordsworth's Michael Angelo:

Do not call up to me those days departed
When I was young, and all was bright about me,
And the vicissitudes of life were things
But to be read of in old histories,
Though as pertaining unto me or mine
Impossible.


Now I have reached the age where I know better. Untenable things happen to me and mine, and recently to friends of mine. Things that make a heart cry out WHY? They are real and present and how we cope with them tells more about our character than we sometimes wish to know.

What do you say to a family who loses their three year old baby girl to brain cancer after fighting the battle for over 13 months?

What do you say to a family whose father just found out he has an inoperable brain tumor?

The horrible human truth is that you feel guilty that your family is whole and healthy. You feel relief that it’s not you going through the ordeal.

But you want to help. Help in any way possible, beginning but not ending with constant prayer.

International Thanksgiving Dinner

Each year we host our foreign students to an early Thanksgiving Dinner at our Leader's Club. This is a real turkey dinner, with mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, yams, and home made pies (among many other home made goodies).

We begin by telling the students what that first Thanksgiving was all about. We have an invocation and follow that with a song, Come Ye Thankful People Come. I really wish we had a better song. Not many people are familiar with that one, I'm certainly not, and I've attended a variety of chapel services from Episcopal to Baptist and that's just not one I remember either growing up or from any recent hymnal. In fact, it reminds me of a creepy movie and I have no idea why!

Then we serve the dinner. Now we had 180 people in attendance but we serve this family style. Though it's at a club, there is a more informal connotation only with no kids table and no Uncle Joe telling off-color jokes in the living room. So at all of our different tables we had the opportunity to tell the guys from Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Saudi, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Slovenia, Thailand, Morocco, Senegal, Korea, Belgium, Hungary and Canada to "please pass the turkey."

My dinner partner to the right had just arrived from Saudi two days ago. Well, not actually Saudi. He had come from Texas where he spent nine months at the language school in San Antonio. In a way that is unfortunate because they come saying how great San Antonio was, and then Fort Knox is a bit of a disappoint, and cold right now to boot. In our conversation I asked if he was staying in Kentucky through the holiday break in December, but he said no, they were headed to Florida to warm up!

After dinner a chosen group of foreign students puts on a Thanksgiving play. We have the pilgrims depicted on their hard journey to the New World. And their meeting with the Indians, and finally the first celebration of Thanksgiving. Some of them are given lines that they deliver with great accents and some prompting, but it always supplies hilarity for the audience.


My friend Abdullah was there with his two boys. But the Saudi spouses were conspicuously absent, though it is understood why.



I dragged the Beaver with me, though he was not thrilled. He surprised me by speaking with the Saudis at our table, but he bailed on us right after dessert, so he missed the wonderful performance!

Campfire Diplomacy with S'Mores

A picnic in November? This was my third International Group Fall Picnic, and the weather cooperated, thankfully. Still it was in the mid-50s range, so our menu of hot soups, hot cider, hot tea was a good idea.

The students arrived, we had our introductions, and the fun began. I'm beginning to think our friends don't trust us though, because we got a lot of "what's in this?" So after many reassurances of "No Pork!" they began to chow down.

The hot cider was a big hit. Many had never tasted anything like it. My recipe was so simple. Pasteurized cider warmed with those little dot sized cinnamon candies, a handful per 1/2 gallon. It beats all of the spices floating on top. I also attempted some chai, made the old-fashioned way with tea, spices and then adding warmed milk and sugar. It went over well too. The officer from Pakistan said it could have been a little stronger.

Our soups were potato, lentil, cabbage, and vegetable beef. We then had traditonal American desserts; apple pie, cookies, and pumpkin bread.

The picnic was held in what we call the "pit" which is directly in back of my home. The post just recently renovated it and it was clean with new outdoor lights and freshly painted picnic tables. It also has a fire place, so we started a nice roaring fire.

One of the ladies had thought to bring marshmallows, graham crackers and Hershey chocolate bars.

I was the lucky one chosen to demonstrate to our foreign students the art of making a S'More!

HOW GIRLS MAKE S'MORES --
(1) Place Hershey bars on graham crackers. (2) Toast marshmallows. (3) Place toasted marshmallows on Hershey bars to melt chocolate.

HOW BOYS MAKE S'MORES --
(1) Eat Hershey bars. (2) Eat marshmallows. (3) Throw graham crackers at other boys.

I chose the way girls make them! So we rounded up some nice long sticks and I proceeded to cook the first marshmallow. I am the "brown not burn" school of marshmallow cooking thought, and as I was roasting the marshmallow the students lined up to watch. Then the comments started, "Oh, I saw this on a movie, please may I try one?" "Yes, I did too, may I also." So before a few minutes had passed we had a circle of S'More makers. Then I asked them which movie . . . and they all said some horror movie! Oh my! So that's why I hadn't heard about that scene, though if you think about it, I'm sure there are lots of movies that have a S'More making scene . . . Sandlot comes to mind.

Anyway they had fun literally tasting a bit of American culture.

But the whole movie thing got me to thinking, do our foreign students take their views of us from the movies they watch? I shudder to think!

Tie a Yellow Ribbon

Today we put a new record in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest man made, I mean literally, yellow ribbon. Yeah!

I remember my first time dealing with the yellow ribbon and what it symbolized. It was back in the day of the Iran Hostage Crisis. (This was premilitary assignment for Ward.) I was a member local organization and we wanted to show that we cared and bring recognition to the plight of these prisoners, so American wouldn’t forget them. We folded little yellow grosgrain ribbons and fastened them with straight pins. We made up bunches of these and just stood outside of a local supermarket and asked people to wear them. It was purely symbolic, but people said time and again, that, yes, they would be happy to wear this ribbon, thank you for reminding me to think of them!

That little yellow ribbon packs a great symbolic punch!

Then when Ward went into the military I found that spouses would use that yellow ribbon when their husbands were deployed. The first time I tied yellow ribbons around trees was for the first Gulf War. That symbolism carried a lot more weight for us then . . . it was heavy with fear for our guys’ safety and longing for them to return home unharmed.

Now Ward is deployed again and I wear a little metal yellow ribbon pin and I marvel that something so mundane as a little yellow ribbon can hold all of the following meanings of love and pride and faith and honor.

So when our group of over 2000 wives, children and soldiers stepped out onto Godman Airfield on Fort Knox this morning to form a giant yellow ribbon with our yellow t-shirts and caps, we knew that it meant all that it has ever meant; we are proud of our soldiers and we can’t wait for them to come home!

Prop 8 and The Big O

California voters approved a ban on same sex marriages this past Tuesday, but it is already being challenged in the courts. So much for the will of the people!

What is the argument for legalizing marriage really about? Try talking to a gay friend from a Christian perspective and you will likely go in circles, for the argument becomes a circuitous one; due largely to two unyielding and polarized worldviews. I call that argument: The Big O.

The conversation goes as follows:

Friend, “We lost this round, but we will never give up the fight for equality.”

Me, “In what way do you feel unequal?”

Friend, “Well, we should be able to marry, legally, like any other couple.”

Me, “But you are allowed to have civil unions, and legally you can have just about any other legal contract, what is it about legal marriage that would make you equal, I mean what rights are you lacking?”

Friend, “We want to be recognized as normal in this culture, that our lifestyle choice is equivalent to heterosexuals’.”

Me, “Well, our cultures’ values are largely based on Judeo-Christian values. This is an age old arrangement put in place by G-d for the benefit of children and women, for their protection.”

Friend, “Yeah, but I’m tired of being judged! I don’t believe in G-d! Who are these sanctimonious people to tell me what’s right or wrong about the way I feel!”

Me, “So you’re saying you want to be accepted by a culture whose G-d you reject, whose values you reject? Yet you want them to sanctify a union that their value system cannot allow them to.”

Friend, “Yeah, what is the big deal?”

Me, “The big deal is that sanctity means the quality or condition of being considered sacred, it implies a holiness of life; G-d is the author of one man, one woman for marriage. How then, could we honor something that G-o-d explicitly condemns?”

Friend, “Geesh, I’ve said we should leave religion out of it! I want to be accepted as equal in this culture, as legitimate. Why is that so hard to understand?”

My friend and I will continue to argue in this circular manner, but we will never convince each other that the other one has a valid point.

No matter how good it makes me feel, I cannot go against what G-d has ordained.

And that is likely to remain true for as long as we’re friends. For as long as our culture maintains its Judeo-Christian beliefs, there will be no “normalizing” gay marriage. How long that will be remains to be seen, for I also see that what was once a solid Judeo-Christian value system is being eroded, even within the church. How sad, that Christ’s bride cannot hold true and fast. I remember what He said about being lukewarm!

A Mighty Wind

"I feel like we got a righteous wind at our backs here, but we're going to have to work. We're going to have to struggle. We're going to have to fight." - Barack Obama, Virginia 2008

Hmmmmmmm. sounds familiar...

"The righteous wind of socialism is on the rise. By the end of this year the victory of socialism will be greatly assured. Naturally there will be many struggles ahead and we must struggle hard." - Mao Zedong, The Writings of Mao Zedong Volume 1