Wandering Toward My Shifting Self

War Memorial

Remember Pearl Harbor! I do. Sunday, December 7, 1941.

Sunday's my sister and I got to plan, prepare and serve an 'International Supper'. We had a good one. Mexican - a can of chili con carne and a bag of chips. Our server costume consisted of straw hats from summer at the farm, bright towels from the linen closet  and red rope ties from my bedroom curtains.

Bummer! Mom and Dad didn't want to eat. They wouldn't turn away from the radio.

When Dad came to tuck us in for the night, he told us he wouldn't be there in the morning. He had to go and fight the enemy that attacked our country. My sister and I had talked about this and we had it figured out. We told him to hide behind a tree and shoot each bad guy as they came off the boat. Then he could come home.

Don't laugh! I was nine, my sister seven. All our young lives we had seen soldiers come off trains one by one before forming military formations. We had been down to the port and watched sailors come down the gang plank one by one. We knew our Dad could win the war in short order if he just followed our battle plan.

We grew up during the four long years of war fought on two battle fronts. Everyone labored in the war effort. In December, our church offered prayers for the dead at Pearl Harbor and their grieving families. This happened with dispiriting regularity after Iwo Jima, Bataan, Corregidor, Anzio, D-day, on and on.

After the victories in 1945, my sister and I came of age as our nation labored mightily to renew the neglected infrastructure. Interstate highways were built. New housing sprang up like mushrooms in the spring. Airports rose out of corn fields. TV's began to take pride of place in thousands of living rooms. We were a nation on the move into a brave new world.

Always during the painful sacrifices of war and the frantic rebuilding of victory, there was time for the Fourth of July. We stopped long enough to celebrate our nation's vision. We sang along with bands playing songs about the land of the free and the home of the brave. We'd OOH! AAH! at fireworks that painted the night sky with the joy of living with liberty and justice for all.

Memorial Day began May 30, 1868 when freed slaves placed flowers on the graves of Union Soldiers in Charleston, SC. They had disinterred a mass grave of Union captives in a Confederate Prison camp, re-interred the bodies in individual graves and built a fence around them designating hallowed ground.

Memorial Day finally became an official national holiday on June 28, 1968. Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Act in order to create convenient three-day weekends. Memorial Day was designed to kick off summer vacation fun.

That was then, this is now.

We're urged to celebrate 9/11 as our nation's defining holiday. Solemn public ceremonies lay flowers at the rubble of bombed office buildings and school massacres. We're encouraged to rejoice at hi-tech SWAT teams for every village and hamlet. We OOH! AAH! in approval of building and filling ever more jail cells.

How does a land of the free choose to remember the death and destruction of war?

Greed

In 2005 Pixie came running out of school all excited. He climbed in the car, clutched his backpack to his chest and demanded 'Go your house!'

Whoa! What's going on? Our normal procedure was to fling the backpack in, buckle up and start the mantra, 'Get hamburger - fries?' After a stop at McDonald's, we'd watch cartoons until Mom or Dad picked him up.

Clutching the backpack, we got home. He dumped the sack on the dining table. Without taking off his hat and coat, he started sorting Valentines. 'I like' a valentine with candy attached went in one pile. 'Don't like' another with candy attached went in a different pile. When all that was left were forlorn cards without candy, he put the good stuff in a bowl and turned on cartoons. Ensconced in his favorite chair, he devoured the candy while cheering on his afternoon band of heroes.

I asked him about the remaining pile of candy valentines. "For Bria, Mommy, Daddy". Clever Pixie! He ate all the good stuff before Mom could ration it. He graciously shared the bad stuff and earned extravagant praise as 'such a generous boy'.

In 1776 Adam Smith published 'Wealth of Nations' in America. A Scottish moral philosopher, he declared greed is good. He believed the invisible hand of self-interest would sort out the good merchants from the bad ones on a competitive main street.

His idea was that greed is an engine of empowerment. He looked around and saw a bunch of isolated villages on the edge of a lush continent locked in combat with a great Colonial Power. They wanted freedom. Free Market Capitalism would prove to be the engine that got the job done.

Behold! We are the richest, strongest, freest nation on earth. Of course with a bit of gumption, you can have a mountain ski lodge, an island retreat, a country weekend house and a downtown condo with Lear jets, yachts, helicopters and limos to access them at will.

In 1313 Dante Alighieri, a politician from the city-state of Florence, Italy ended up on the losing side of a war to establish a new Holy Roman Empire. In his book, 'Divine Comedy' he describes greed as bad. His image was people lying face down in the muck because they were afraid to look up at verdant new vineyards on the hills.

This idea of greed as fear of the future made sense to him. A pope gave him sanctuary in exile, but Dante lost all his money and thus his political power.

Behold! For centuries greed became an instant ticket to Hell. Of course with a few extra coins in your pocket, you could buy a 'get out of Hell free' indulgence from the pope's investment brokers.

What is greed? Ticket to Hell? Engine of Empowerment? Giving yourself a treat? Bad, Good, or Ingenious Self-indulgence? You get to choose!

Paddling my Canoe

KERSPLASH! Once far away in time, but not memory my wife-to-be dumped me and my canoe into the water. Here's the story.

Her brother invited me along on a family picnic. Turns out it was at a friend's farm that bordered one of the many lakes that litter Southern Wisconsin. I dressed for a picnic in the park, not for a swim party.

While the others cavorted in the water, I wandered around and found a small canoe. The farmer said, "Sure, here's the paddles go ahead and use it." I launched it and splotched around the swimming raft. After a bit, my wife-to-be called over and said, "Give me a ride?"

When I pulled alongside the raft, she stepped in. WHOOSH! Ready or not, I joined the swimmers.

I got the water logged canoe to the beach. Wrung out my Sunday picnic clothes and sat on the sunny dock drying out. Dry enough anyway; they let me in the car back to town.

And so began an adventure that reverberated for more than fifty years.

I always teased her she did it on purpose to get my attention. She stoutly claimed not. She had never been in a canoe before.

She learned to paddle ours. Paddling a canoe is not a democratic process.

The bow paddler has a particular set of strokes used to steer and propel the boat away from rocks, sunken logs, sandbars, any impediment to immediate progress.

The stern paddler has an entirely different set of strokes designed to power the canoe forward toward a desired point on the horizon.

Practice brought the coordination necessary. We never tipped again.

True we went over a waterfall. We were both back paddling in a panic. What was needed was a straight side draw stroke to the left from the bow and a wide back sweep on the right from the stern.

Someone once said that the USA will remain the land of the free and the home of the brave so long as democracy does not overwhelm the constitution of our republic. But that's another story.

Strong Woman

My Mom had a quirky habit. Standing in our driveway saying goodbye to guests, her eyes searched the lawn at her feet. Taking the garbage out to the alley, her eyes searched the lawn along the way. She was looking for a four-leaf clover that she had overlooked before.

After she died, I cleaned out her house. On her bedside table was a Swedish Bible with loads of lucky clovers pressed between the pages. Strange!

Born in 1899, she opened her eyes on a new century. Just after graduating high school, she had a nervous breakdown. She went to live with her grandparents in a tiny prairie village.

She boarded with a trapper and his sister while teaching a one room school out in the country. She was janitor and teacher. She had vivid memories of sloughing across winter dawn on the prairie to fire up a pot-bellied stove. She loved thermostats.

She earned enough to study Botany at Northwestern University in Chicago. She came back and taught first grade in the consolidated school. At twenty-eight she married her soldier man.

They moved here and there. They had fifteen short years together. He died at the end of WW2. She raised my sister and me on a meager Army pension.

While doing the single parent thing, she served on the school board, led a Girl Scout Troop and was President of the State Garden Club.

We traveled - road trips to the Northwest and Southwest and every summer to the Prairie Homestead.

We all must cope with the ubiquitous three-leaf clover: with Cathedral bells of Good and emergency sirens of Evil; with our nurture in 'gossip and giggle' morality; with barriers and blessings, the boundaries that define justice for all under law.

She died New Year's Eve 1968 after adapting to a century of revolutions; Industrial, Mobility, Civil Rights, Women's Rights, Population Explosion, etc.

Mom had another habit. When afternoon shadows began to lengthen into dusk, she'd sit quietly alone. In winter by the west windows - often with her garden notebook on her lap. In summer in a lawn chair on the path between her flower gardens.

Mom knew who she was. She'd tested her gifts and her limits. She'd found courage to find and be herself long before lucky plants pressed in a bedside Bible.

Mom made friends with the shadows in her life. Her strength came from being able to stand with and for others in a freedom of today's joy.

This Mother's Day she would be 110 years old. Is it still true that Today is the ever moving shadow that divides Yesterday from Tomorrow?

A Digital Revolution has shortened many shadows in our life. We 'twitter' away Today about Tomorrow's bright dream. It's easy to overlook the dusty shoe reality of balancing today's limits against existing gifts.

Why struggle to cut back Yesterday's fears to provide growing room for today's flowering joy? Experts project Tomorrow's 'star war' gadgets will bring peace for all.