One year ago next month we received the news that my dad had cancer. Daddy was a veteran of the Pacific theater of WWII, part of what Tom Brokaw calls the "Greatest Generation". He volunteered for the Navy when he turned 18 rather than be drafted into the Army. Daddy turned 18 on 16 November 1944 and he was a first semester junior at Clarksdale High School. He started school in the fall of 1932 and was scheduled to have graduated in May or June of 1944 just a few month short of his 18th burthday. Sickness during his younger years caused him to be held back a couple of years so he was technically not scheduled to graduate until the spring of 1946.
My grandmother Crawford told me that his sickenss was something like TB, but when asked he would deny that it was "that disease". Nevertheless, as he grew older he grew stronger but he still was two years behind his age group in school. Knowing he was probably going to be drafted he promised his mother that he would join the U.S. Navy where he certainly going be safer than in an infantry unit storming the beaches of some forsaken island in the Pacific or freezing somewhere in France. So, he joined the Navy and shipped off to boot camp sometime after his 18th birthday. Boot camp was in Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois just north of Chicago. While in boot camp you decided what "job" you would like in the Navy, so being the son of a contractor and liking the outdoors and building things...he chose the construction battalion or SeaBee's. SeaBee's go in after the island is taken and build runways and docks for ships, any buildings, etc. It was not a safety position by any means, but at leaast he didn't volunteer to be a corpsman. You see the Marines don't have their own corpsman...they get them from the Navy.
With a promise that he would keep his head down and come back to her, off to war he went. He left out Millington NAS on a train bound for San Francisco where he was loaded onto a troop carrier bound for Okinawa.
For those who don't know, Okinawa was the staging point for what was to be the battle of Japan. He would later tell me that the sight of 100,000 body bags sobered him up to the fact that he might not make it through this event. As we know the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stopped the clock on the Battle of Japan and brought Daddy and many others like him home to their families.
So, on this Memorial Day weekend I salute the one's like my dad who went and served and came home to be with their families. I also salute the one's who paid the ultimate price and gave their lives for the cause of freedom. God bless ou Daddy and all the one's who went before you and have come along since as we remember you on this Memorial Day.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
6 degrees of separation
Six degrees of separation (also referred to as the "Human Web") refers to the idea that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. (From Wikipedia).
I have been able to go back to thinking about things lately. The work project that engrossed me was suddenly complete and I found myself with some "time" on my hands. I got to looking around on Facebook and "found" some old friends on the FB pages of other friends. After making contact with these old friends, I got to thinking about that "6 degrees of separation thing". Truly we are part of a bigger "family" in the sense that we are connected in ways that we have never really pondered. It's about information or rather access to information. It is about connections..."hey, you are related to Bob...or I didn't know you knew Dave and Sally...yeah, we were in the same church for a while or our kids played soccer together....". One of the things that saddens me is the fact that many times I find about of the passing of a friend from years back. Memories are triggered of that person and then the wondering about their last days. A deeper sadness occurs if their death came by their own hand. What despair wracked them during those last days, I wonder to myself.One of my personality traitsis that of one who feels and so I feel at that moment those things that I would have felt back when the event actually happened.
34 years ago I graduated from college and I kept a core of friends from those days. We talked and wrote letters, spoke on occasion by telephone or ran into each other while visiting family or friends. In the middle 90's I got my first computer and an AOL account and suddenly email opened up a new world for me. Cell phones soon followed and then texting....computers became smaller and then we adults discovered MySpace followed by Facebook, then Twitter....well that's as far as I have gotten. There's other stuff...stuff that I don't have time to investigate. I have so much information, just a few keystrokes away. It astounds and baffles me at times. Yet, there is an element missing....
My youngest daughter recently posted a request on her Facebook page for letters. I sat down and wrote one...Lord, I can't tell you the last time I had performed that actvity. It was an effort to write a page and a half...but, I did it and mailed it to her and she was pleased. It takes little effort to do these things...handwriting letters, calling someone just to say "I'm thinking of you". It used to be that we grew up finsihed school, went off to college or the military, then came back home to work in the family business, teach school or establish a new business around people who knew us or knew our folks. Not so today. We are more likely to take jobs away from our home base unless we grew up in a major metropolitan area. Trips home are replaced with emails, texts and cell phone calls and maybe even Skype sessions. However, none of this satisfies the longing for the human touch; the hug of a family member, the soothing hand of comfort from your friend of 30 plus years, the feeling of just knowing that you are where you matter.
I enjoy my connections via social networking; I marvel at the friends that I have who know each other, but not through or because of me. I like the feeling of being connected to others. In the end it matters not how you got be friends or that you are connected in this 6 degree way...it just matters that you are!
I have been able to go back to thinking about things lately. The work project that engrossed me was suddenly complete and I found myself with some "time" on my hands. I got to looking around on Facebook and "found" some old friends on the FB pages of other friends. After making contact with these old friends, I got to thinking about that "6 degrees of separation thing". Truly we are part of a bigger "family" in the sense that we are connected in ways that we have never really pondered. It's about information or rather access to information. It is about connections..."hey, you are related to Bob...or I didn't know you knew Dave and Sally...yeah, we were in the same church for a while or our kids played soccer together....". One of the things that saddens me is the fact that many times I find about of the passing of a friend from years back. Memories are triggered of that person and then the wondering about their last days. A deeper sadness occurs if their death came by their own hand. What despair wracked them during those last days, I wonder to myself.One of my personality traitsis that of one who feels and so I feel at that moment those things that I would have felt back when the event actually happened.
34 years ago I graduated from college and I kept a core of friends from those days. We talked and wrote letters, spoke on occasion by telephone or ran into each other while visiting family or friends. In the middle 90's I got my first computer and an AOL account and suddenly email opened up a new world for me. Cell phones soon followed and then texting....computers became smaller and then we adults discovered MySpace followed by Facebook, then Twitter....well that's as far as I have gotten. There's other stuff...stuff that I don't have time to investigate. I have so much information, just a few keystrokes away. It astounds and baffles me at times. Yet, there is an element missing....
My youngest daughter recently posted a request on her Facebook page for letters. I sat down and wrote one...Lord, I can't tell you the last time I had performed that actvity. It was an effort to write a page and a half...but, I did it and mailed it to her and she was pleased. It takes little effort to do these things...handwriting letters, calling someone just to say "I'm thinking of you". It used to be that we grew up finsihed school, went off to college or the military, then came back home to work in the family business, teach school or establish a new business around people who knew us or knew our folks. Not so today. We are more likely to take jobs away from our home base unless we grew up in a major metropolitan area. Trips home are replaced with emails, texts and cell phone calls and maybe even Skype sessions. However, none of this satisfies the longing for the human touch; the hug of a family member, the soothing hand of comfort from your friend of 30 plus years, the feeling of just knowing that you are where you matter.
I enjoy my connections via social networking; I marvel at the friends that I have who know each other, but not through or because of me. I like the feeling of being connected to others. In the end it matters not how you got be friends or that you are connected in this 6 degree way...it just matters that you are!
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