Every year I sit down and have a heart to heart talk with one of kids I grew up with back in the hood. We grew up together, got in trouble together, cut school together...we were so close it wasn't uncommon for his mom to give me a paddling...or visa-versa. We were tight. And like all kids back then; we were invincible.
These last few years our conversation has turned to the same thing all old guys talk about...you know, grandkids, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, our A1C, BP, pulse-ox and how bad Lipitor tears up your lower GI.
I'm sure I bore him, though. He never made it past twenty. He left us in some muddy stinkin' rice paddy in Viet Nam and came home in a bag. A price we pay as a nation for our freedoms...at such a great personal cost. Sometimes it hardly seems worth it.
He never got to open that bar he dreamed about. His girlfriend eventually married and he never got to know the joys of parenthood...and eventually being a grandfather. He left us early. And I talk to him ever year about what has passed and what is probably down the road.
Here's to you, buddy. Have a somber but pleasant Memorial Day. And save us all a seat, we'll see you when we get there.
"..Four small boys playing ball in a parking lot,
A teacher, a preacher and the other became a cop.
A car skidded into the rain, making the last little one a saint.
One more light goes out in America..."
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A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. - Joseph Campbell
Same basic plan for me yesterday. Ivan and I WERE the Second Grade in our school. We had two companions in First Grade and a different one in Third Grade but in Second Grade it was just us. He was a Marine.
I had a similar conversation. My wife's son was killed in Afghanistan. He died the day after his sons third birthday and five days after Renee and I were married. I was fortunate enough to be home on R&R. Seeing two soldiers standing in your living room after a day out was the most awful experience of my life.
So, on Memorial Day, I talk to Zack. I talk, and beg, to God and pray for peace for my wife. I do that nearly every day, though.
Zack had a tattoo on his calf paraphrasing James 4:14; Life is but a vapor.
