Serendipity and Daring to Excel

I love it when things just seem to happen spontaneously and it all links together into a wonderful Celtic Knot of a pattern! As I review the last five months or so, I am almost blown away at the way things have worked out for me and my audacious plan. (LOL--one more example: the puppy for today is a husky mix!! I saw that when I reviewed this post after writing it Perfect.)

In March I conceived the idea of going to Alaska and almost at the same time of doing a book about the women who pursue the challenging and amazing sport of sled dog racing, especially the long distance endurance type races like the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest. There is now also one in Norway that at 1,000 km is the longest of all. (One meter you may recall is about 39" as compared to 36" for the English yard we use and k stands for 1,000, so you can figure the distance roughly!)

Anyway, at first it seemed impossibly expensive and so far out of reach as to be pie in the sky. But it has proved to be very possible and in just over a week I will be off on the journey with air fare paid, places to stay, and appointments to meet at least a few of the lady mushers who have become major heroines of mine and will headline my planned book.

Along this progression, more ideas for the book began to take shape as well. I met and talked to Joe Runyan, who has won the Iditarod once and writes about it, covers for some of the major sporting goods firms and blogs on the ITC website and elsewhere. He has also co/ghost written the stories of some of the male mushers. So an idea emerged for me to perhaps do the same for any of the women who are hesitant to tackle that project on their own. More on that later!

Then Sunday I was listening to the local PBS radio station and heard a program called "Making a Champion." The interviewer was talking to an author of a book by the same title (I need to research who and all and I shall) and several women athletes were interviewed or quoted in the course of the program. The bottom line was the determination, dogged pursuit and especially exceeding one's personal limits are what make a true champion. If this does not apply to the lady mushers I am not sure what does!  Then surviving members of the Girls Baseball League of the WWII era have been at a reunion in Albuquerque and they too offer inspiration about rising to challenges. They were the reality behind the movie some years back called A League of Their Own. Though now in their eighties they are still feisty and proud.

Perhaps it is a bit like when you get a new car and suddenly see others of that make or model everywhere when you had never noticed them before. This subject and notion has so taken over all my spare moments of thought that I am 'hearing' related things almost constantly! Has it always been out there or is it a theme whose time has come? If the latter, I hope I am not too late to contribute another chapter to it.

Some of Amy Purdy's remarks on Making a Champion especially resonated. She is the snowboarder who had the world by the tail and then was stricken with a life-threatening disease and lost both her lower legs. She is now a champion Para-Olympic athlete and came in second in the last iteration of Dancing With the Stars. This is one amazing woman! She said she was not truly competitive with others but with herself--constantly striving to do more, better and to exceed her previous best by breaking through her own self-imposed limits. That philosophy got her from her hospital bed to championship and now serving as an inspirational speaker and  beacon of light for all who aspire and seek. to achieve.

Some of the lady mushers have similar if less dramatic stories. Deedee Jonrowe, for example, raced and finished, I believe in the top ten, shortly after undergoing post breast cancer chemo and radiation! She has finished the race at least 32 times and placed second more than once.

It comes down to the fact you have to be willing to hurt, to sacrifice, to struggle and never to give up if you want to excel. Also on the same radio program, there was a discussion of success versus mastery and the bottom line was nearly the same. Mastery requires the extra effort, the ultimate exertion of will and a no-surrender approach. Success may be fame and fortune but only mastery is reaching that true pinnacle.

Whoo hoo--it works!

I did it. I can download pix to the little netbook and that means I can share some of them while I am on my trip!! I downloaded just what was in the camera--I had pared it down to a mere 80 very fave images--and they zipped across neat as you please. I am so stoked!

It isn't even dampened despite the fact we had a horrendous storm last night. I think two thunderstorm cells drew together and merged and the varying wind currents really caused a blow. We estimate there was about a half hour of sustained winds near or at the lowest hurricane and tornado strength. That means 70-80 mph!! We had damage to our cooler--now fixed and not too major--and lost shingles off both the house and garage roof. The damage is not imminently threatening but we have to get it fixed. Around town there were trees broken and blown down, a lot of roofs mangled, light metal sheds tossed around, large multi-family trash bins moved a block or more and even some block walls and other fences blown down. Of course the dogs were totally terrorized and I have to admit I would have liked to crawl under the bed myself. Wow, that was a savage and incredible storm. Oddly though we got only a little rain.

A big box of clothing and personal items headed for Alaska today--I got my Wasilla hostess to agree to accept it for me so I do not have to drag a huge suitcase on the plane. It was costly but I think worth it. So the reality of this trip is getting stronger all the time. It is almost out of the dream realm now and into the category of "This is really going to happen."

I'm close to having a 1 September deadline story ready to submit which will be a relief. There is another but I think I can get a little leeway on submitting it. All in all, things are coming together amazingly well. The way it has worked out and what seemed daunting obstacles have somehow been resolved and overcome make me truly believe this is something I was intended to do--that some Divine Power planted the idea in my head last March as the 42nd Iditarod was winding down and now, four months and a bit later, I am less than two weeks from 'blast off'.
I know all of you will be traveling with me in spirit and I do promise to share as much as I can while I am traveling and of course much more in the form of a book or two and some inspired fiction after it is history.

Just for fun here are two not great shots of my brother Charlie and the band he is playing with called High Mesa Dance Band. This was at a dance at the Senior Center here in Alamogordo a week ago tonight. The first is the whole group setting up and the second is Charlie--under the hat--and Joanne Casabella the lead chick singer. Just for spits and giggles!! BTW Charlie is playing one of his Telecasters. He has about 25 guitars of every size, style and kind, both electric and acoustic. He is also learning to play the pedal steel guitar, which is an amazing and complex instrument! Yeah, I am kind of proud of my kid brother! We are both enjoying retirement and doing things we have always loved or dreamed of doing!

Challenges!!

This is going to be short, sweet not so  much! No pretty pictures but that may come soon. I am playing with a new toy and you've heard me whine about the old dog and new tricks before. It was a small challenge just to get here but since I want to be able to blog while on my rapidly approaching trip, I need to get a handle on this! As I say, the pictures may come later.

I'm using a dear friend's mini Acer netbook that she loaned me for the trip which is kind of a tablet-notebook cross with full computer level power and running Win7 as its OS. I'm still learning Win7 on my big laptop and --well, no sniveling allowed!

But I am here and two weeks from this very day I will be on my way to El Paso about now with my friend Jim (Jim5 as he is called at times--he knows and knows the reason) to deliver me to the airport to embark on this great adventure. Of course I an excited!

Anyway, I am adjusting to a keyboard that is slightly larger than me semi-smart cell phone's and too freakin' many new tricks to shake one of Ginger's "flute" sticks at! I am biting my lip on the naughty words and concentrating with all my ability. It's getting  better and the trip more real by the hour.

One final thing is to see if my camera will download pictures directly to a library here--new term; I think in terms of directories and folders being an old MS DOS user from back in the dim dawn of the computer age when you saw a black screen with a white C>: or something like that blinking at you! "Gee grandma, no touch screens or anything? That was caveman stuff!"  And indeed it was. So libraries to include one called my pictures. That's where I hope to get stuff from my Kodak digital camera to end up.

I also hate taking pictures with a phone! I mean I grew up with Ansel Adams stuff like Rolleiflexes and Leicas!! Even 35mm Nikons were kinda newfangled but I did go digital, just not phone pix and only a very few selfies!!

So upward and onward and I will keep y'all posted, okay? .

Fireworks

With Independence Day coming up and Canada Day just past, the topic of fireworks comes readily to mind! To this day, three score years  and some, I still love fireworks. If I don't get to see any on the Fourth of July, I feel a real sense of loss. As well as I can remember, I was probably eleven when I first really saw them.

Anyway, my first memory of fireworks; at that time, my family lived in a little town called Clarkdale in Central Arizona. To the east across the Verde River, an "ox-bow" of the old riverbed had been cut off eons before and existed as a small lake and marsh area. It is now a bird sanctuary and closed to vehicular traffic but that's now. Back then, it was a public park and there was some fishing in the lake. It was also the site for the local holiday fireworks display.

I'm not sure how who hosted and managed the event, probably a fraternal group like the Elks, Lions or perhaps a Masonic Lodge. At any rate, they set up in the central "U" which was almost an island. From that point they fired the rockets out over the lake at about its widest spot, perhaps a quarter of a mile or so.

We could watch all the aerial display from our front steps, and from the first summer there, 1954 on, my brother--later both brothers--and I did so. Mom and Dad could care less, it seemed, and were not about to drive anywhere to watch such frivolity, From that first summer, I was an avid fan. This is my Grandpa Witt, Charlie and me on that little porch that summer.

One year a few summers later, my brother and I hiked over to the lake, about a two mile walk along the dusty unpaved road where the traffic had stirred the dry dirt to a powder of tan. It seemed that half the northern Verde Valley was going there--Clarkdale and Cottonwood with perhaps a few folks from Jerome, Bridgeport or even farther away!

We sat on the grass in an area where no cars had parked and watched. It really wasn't much prettier but a lot louder and I got to watch the antics of a couple of boys, one on whom I had a crush  who chose to ignore me, the skinny weird girl who rode horses and mules.  From then on, the front steps were sufficient until I left home.

From that time on,, I didn't see any fireworks for a number of years. Not sure why--I expect Flagstaff where I attended college and lived for several years--may have had a display somewhere but then maybe not, due to the forest all around the town and the fire danger. Finally I graduated, went south to my first 'real' job at Fort Huachuca and wound up living in rent-cheap Bisbee where I soon met my future husband. That's another story for another time. But Bisbee was fireworks friendly.

Every year either the city or again a fraternal organization put on a good display atop the "Number 12 Dump" which was a huge pile of rock and dirt that had come out of the open pit when the underground mine was opened into that form in the late forties.  The stony ground was fireproof and the site was visible all over town. My new family and I watched from various viewpoints for the four years that we lived there.

This photo is not mine but I do have one similar taken in Bisbee with lightening thru the Mule Pass and fireworks closer. Apparently I have not scanned it yet. Nor any of the other attempts I made at taking photos of fireworks. It is incredibly hard to get a good one!  I may try tomorrow night to get some digital shots but it's a tricky thing to capture them. More fun just to look and oh and ah and enjoy!

Then in the fall of 1973, we moved to Colorado and another long fireworks drought ensued. We lived out at a then-rural community called Falcon and Colorado Springs was not visible due to a few low hills in between. Then another mover, this time to north central California where we lived in Olivehurst, just south of Marysville. From there we had a good view of the annual display held on Beale AFB where I worked part of the time we were there, later transferring to McClellan AFB on the north side of Sacramento. Sometimes we got up on the roof to improve the view a bit. So I had six good summers of a fireworks fix.

Finally in 1983, it was back to Arizona and the little house on Old Church Road that became home for the longest I've lived anywhere. It was in Whetstone, an unincorporated community north of Sierra Vista at the junction of highway 90 from Benson to Sierra Vista and highway 82 from Sonoita to intersect with highway 80 just north of Tombstone.

The nearest town, Huachuca City, had good fireworks as did Sierra Vista, Tombstone and Benson. Sometimes we watched both Huachuca City's and Sierra Vista's displays from the roof of our flat-topped  garage and sometimes we drove to various sites to take pictures and see at least part of almost every display around. By then it was just my husband and me and sometimes a dog or two.

In 2004, when I was again alone after Jim's passing, I found a good spot on highway 82 just west of the junction where I could see at least the displays of Huachuca City, Sierra Vista and some of Tombstone's. It was far enough the noise did not frighten my dogs so they went with me for company. It was a little lonely but also nice and peaceful with no traffic or uproar. That went on until I moved to New Mexico in the late summer of 2008.

2009 found me in Colorado Springs again. The area where I lived--moving in with the same brother who hiked to the lake with me so long ago--offered no real visibility of the display in Palmer Park nor one at the Air Force Academy so it was back to only a few neighborhood maverick displays. I didn't drive at night too much so was not about to try to fight the crowds. Although we could, if the weather allowed, see the display a group climbed to the top of Pikes Peak to fire off on New Year's at the stroke of midnight! One year that was pretty spectacular.

Then in the fall of 2011, fate brought us to a new home in Alamogordo, NM. The first July here, 2012, we had just adopted little Rojito and I discovered the local fireworks display, shot off up the hill at the Space Musuem parking lot area, was awesome! I also found our backyard provided almost a grand stand seat! But it's close enough to be pretty loud...

The dogs were not so happy with that so we put them in the house in their 'safe rooms' and cranked up the music on a radio or stereo for them to deaden some of the 'bombs bursting in air' effects. A trick my late husband and I had discovered to calm a dog who freaked out about thunderstorms also works for fireworks. It seems that a tape or CD of a British military band with lots of bagpipes really muffles the noise and most dogs seem to like ti. I know there are jokes about bagpipes making dogs howl, but maybe ours were Scots in a prior incarnation. Anyway, they dig it! That's a blessing as I can now enjoy the sights without guilt while the fur kids get their serenade indoors.

Anyway after all these years, I still love fireworks. They seem to be more and better every year and it is said that Alamogordo has one of the best displays in the state. The paper boasted 7,000 items to be fired this time! The Powers-That-Be willing, I will have eyes to see them and a patriotic home to celibrate them with until I leave this life. I wonder if they have fireworks on the other side?

Happy Independence Day to one and all and never forget that Freedom is not Free!!

Pit Bulls and Chihuahuas

I read on Yahoo a day or two ago that some states have an official state pet! Most seemed to be dogs. No surprise perhaps although the cat lovers may object! Of course I skimmed down the  list but there was no New Mexico or Arizona listing.

Anyway, if I were to hazard a guess as to what my current home state would have for their official mascot pet, I would say either the Pit Bull or the Chihuahua. Most of the young couples seem to have a Pitty or two and most of the older folks seem to have a Chihuahua. Now on the surface you could not get much more different but then there are some similarities as well.

While they may be small, most Chihuahuas are very defensive or ever aggressive little critters and the 'ankle biter' term fits them very well. They seem to have no notion how little and fragile they really are and do not hesitate to go pick a fight with a buzz saw or a Rhino! Many Pit Bulls are aggressive or at least very defensive, too. I don't think it is really a breed trait but a lot of them are specifically bred and trained to be aggressive, both as a kind of guard dog and --deplorably!!--to be 'pitted' against other dogs in a fight ring. (Pun intended.) But in recent times the rescue people have been equally aggressive in trying to save many of these hapless animals and teaching the public that Pits can be good, loving, loyal and trustworthy dogs. And I know they can.

I have to admit to a bit of prejudice, though, and I just do not really like the way they look. However that is not to say I would never take one under any circumstances! I may well end up a Pit Bull owner some day for all I know. Chihuahuas less likely; they really are tooooo little! I would be afraid of stepping on one or hurting it in some other way because they are so very small. Little Rojo is small enough to be of come concern but at least he weighs sixteen or seventeen pounds and is fairly canny about staying clear of big feet. Chihuahuas can be maybe five to eight pounds!

As for my official personal 'state' dog--well, there would be three in a row: one Aussie, one Border Collie and one Blue Heeler!! Although I could also make room for a Husky or a Malamute (which BTW is the Alaska state dog, no surprise!) And I also have a huge weak spot for the good old Heinz 57 all-American mutt. Especially a maybe doxie-spaniel cross of a red hue...

And below are Belle, Ginger and Wiggles, the late and beloved Blue Heeler of my dear friend Julie Smithson. She now has Good Boy, also a Heeler and also blind.

Adventures on Wheels

This is a little long and I have added a few pix but it's the mini-essay I wrote at the Writer's Group on Friday. May evoke a few memories or chuckles from the younger ones here!

*** 

            Cars did not play a big role for me until I was a teenager. However, they've always been there and a way of getting from here to there and especially to various adventures. The first one I vaguely remember was the 1939 Ford coupe (two door passenger car for you youngsters!), black of course. It carried my parents, with toddler-aged me, from Kansas City, MO, then my father’s family home, to central Arizona in the early weeks of 1946. I really do not recall the trip as I was not quite three. It was a long journey but we arrived in Cottonwood, AZ perhaps in February or March. A few weeks later we landed in Jerome, the old mining camp on the hill above the Verde Valley.

            For another year or two the old Ford served us well but then in about 1948 it was traded for a much more exotic set of wheels!  Dad got a 1949 Willy’s Jeep Universal, one of the first sold for commercial use after the vehicle had been

created for the military during World War II. It, too, was black but also had a tan canvas top and kind of cab that zipped and snapped over a frame, almost a convertible of sorts. There were two bucket seats in front and a small bench seat in the back but it was usually out of the vehicle to make room for supplies, camp gear, luggage etc. That meant I sat between the buckets on a pillow or two straddling the gear shifts. Not the most comfy spot. No radio, no air, and not a lot of frills. There may have been a heater; I'm not sure.

            Thus I hated long trips of which we took quite a few. I was too short to see out and my seat was lumpy and hard.  Already I knew better than to whine but I suspect that is about the time I began to make up stories to entertain myself. I do recall I always got a terrible headache and cried quietly for many miles with my eyes squeezed closed.

            That car took us camping, out to southern California where Dad’s sisters had moved, and then out to Camp Wood, a tiny settlement miles out of Prescott where dad taught the one room school for the 1951-52 and 1952-53 school years. It even went up to the North Kaibab in the intervening summer where the folks ran a fire lookout tower for the Forest Service.

            Late in 1951, the family got an addition when my first brother was born. For that winter Mom stayed home in Jerome with the new baby and I did part of the time as well. Mom and Dad decided they needed a better vehicle to safely transport an infant and the little Jeep was traded. The new car was another Jeep but a pickup this time, and gray instead of black. It had a nice wide bench seat and definitely a heater. Wow. Still no radio or air but it was a big improvement for me. We kept it for several years and then acquired another, very similar, that was with us into the latter part of the 1950s. I’d have to check when we traded it off.

            Those two trucks took us on many adventures and pulled a trailer to take horses and mules to the end of the road from which we rode off here and there. They appeared in a number of illustrations for articles Dad wrote for outdoor adventure magazines. After the Jeeps there were two very similar white Ford pickups and the second one was the car I learned to drive with. However, the first car I ever drove was a dusty gray-green coupe --maybe a Chevy?--of about mid 1930s vintage that belonged to the brother of a girl friend of mine. He and I dated a few times and once he let me drive the car. Another wow. It was a long while before I finally got my license, a fact I resented greatly for a time.

            About this time a local doctor got one of the new sporty little Fords called a Thunderbird! It was white and had the round windows, one on each side  behind the doors. Now a teen, I suddenly got car conscious! I wanted one of those fast, fancy and sexy little cars in the worst way and dreamed I would paint it turquoise or lavender, my favorite colors.

            I was always a Ford girl but my loyalties wavered for a bit. A boy I got a crush on had a refurbished older Corvette, screaming red, that I coveted and then a 1957 Plymouth Fury, both ‘cool’ cars in a teen’s eyes. About the same time, Ford debuted the Ranchero pickup and I really wanted one of them. They are still neat in my estimate!

            Finally, still license-less and car-less, I went off to college. No longer able to drive a ranch truck on back roads, I did drive a few roommates’ cars to keep my hand in. Then it was time to move on and start adult life with a job. I needed to rent an Econoline type van to carry my stuff from Flagstaff after four years at NAU to Sierra Vista. To do that, I had to have a license. I used my friend and current roomie’s blue Maverick, aced the written test and squeaked by on the road test part. At  last, a bona fide legal driver!

            Shortly after I began my first formal job at Fort Huachuca, I realized I needed a car. I rented one in Sierra Vista and drove to Tucson. I believe it was Earnhart, but at any rate, a Ford dealership was my first stop. The young salesman saw me eyeing the Pinto in the show room and did not have a lot of trouble selling me one. The two available were a white and a lime green. I drove the white one home. He promised to handle the rental car for me and I guess he did as they never came after me! My own wheels and freedom at last! It was a wonderful heady feeling even though my princely new salary of $8.098 a year was taxed with renting an apartment, buying personal necessities and now a car payment and gasoline—well under $1.00 a gallon at that time but still not cheap if you drove a lot, which I did.

           I know Ralph Nadar said the Pinto was unsafe but mine never caused me any concern. It did eat starters though and unless you loosened the engine mounts and jacked the engine up a few inches you had to pull a five-inch object through a three-inch hole which was a painful challenge. But otherwise it was a great little car and well loved. I drove it for several years and put about 100,000 miles on it.

           Since then there have been many. In the fall of 1971 I married and acquired part ownership of an Opal Kadet and use of an old blue GMC (1957?) along with a spouse and three step children. A year or two later the paid-off Opal was traded for a green Chevy pickup of early 60s vintage and the old GMC went back to my father-in-law. About that time we moved to Colorado with the Chevy and my Pinto.

            In 1975 when my father-in-law died as an odd result of a minor accident, we acquired his little Datsun (now Nissan) pickup. That’s what my middle stepson learned to drive and flipped once, luckily without harm to himself or his buddy. They were not drunk or high but just took a gravel road corner a little too fast. When it was fixed we had it repainted from olive to blue. After we endured a blizzard for some eighteen hours in the Pinto we decided to trade the Chevy in on a Plymouth Trailduster SUV, which is a clone of the Dodge Ramcharger made for the Canadian market but also sold some in the USA. We got it in the spring of 1977 and that fall ended up moving to California. I passed the Pinto along to my brother’s then girlfriend who needed a car for herself and her two little kids. I've kicked myself ever since.

            We took the Datsun and the Trailduster to California and used them until we moved back to Arizona in 1983. Finally I needed a new car to get to work–back at Fort Huachuca again—and had in succession a white Ford Escort, a golden-tan Plymouth Reliant K-car, and finally a blue gray Buick Century after I had retired. My husband and I took some fun trips with it during the next few years. It was a nice car. By the way the Plymie was the first car with air conditioning that I ever owned!

            When the DH passed away in 2003, I soon sold the old Trailduster which had wiring issues and would sometimes spark or smoke in odd ways and scared me. The Datsun had been sold earlier. I soon decided I wanted a truck and got a good deal on a 2002 Mazda B3000 on which I assumed payments and soon paid off. Then, when my youngest brother died suddenly from an aneurysm in 2005, I got his little white Ford Focus wagon, a 2000 model. My other brother took the old 1969 white F-250 pickup which our dad had gotten from El Paso Gas in Farmington, NM in about 1971. It is a family heirloom now and will stay in the family until we are gone!

            At one point, about 2006, I even had a Thunderbird, a 1966 model which

was too new and too big but I could not resist. It had been partly restored with most of the mechanical work done but needed body and interior work. I finally realized I could not afford to have it done and sold it for what I had paid for it. I hardly drove it at all but at least it decorated my yard for awhile!

            I've loved the little red Mazda, especially since it is a clone of the Ford Ranger, and put about 60,000 miles on it with many good trips, even if I am not a fan of red cars. As a joke, because I was writing ‘steamy’ romance novels by that time, I named it “Red Hot Mama”—not me, but the truck, I hasten to add! As for the Focus, it became “the Pattie Wagon” when I lived for a few months in Hurley, NM on Pattie Ave. The names of all the others have faded but I still have and drive those two and probably they will be my last cars.

            As there have been a number of guys named Jim in my life, there have been a lot of white vehicles with the Ford logo on them. Coincidence or something else? Who knows!

Marking D-Day

Seventy years ago today the allies stormed the beach at Normandy and World War II began to stagger toward VE day. I was just over thirteen months old so I knew nothing about it personally. It did not become significant to me until some years later when I was taking American History in school.

At that time, wars were not my favorite part of studying history but I did see they form many mile markers in the course of world events. It's probably been so since an early cave-man clan got on the outs with another bunch and they beat each outer with the shinbones of mammoths and stabbed with sharpened sticks. Humanity is a contrary and contentious bunch. We've always fought but our weapons get increasingly long-range and deadly, weapons of mass destruction if you will. Yet civilians have always suffered as much or more than the combatants, at least in the war zones.

We are rapidly losing the veterans of that war for most of them are in their nineties now. The last of the Navajo code talkers passed away this last week and I've read of several other World War II vets' passing in recent days. Called the "last great generation," the folks of that era were very different. from us now True, vets were cheered and honored, at least to some extent, when they came home but they struggled, too. At that time we did not know about PTSD or traumatic brain injuries--and I am sure there were some in soldiers who were near bombs landing and other concussive violence. Many were also subjected to poison gasses--less than in WW I but there still were some used. There were horrible wounds, both physical and mental/emotional that marked many lives.

On the home front, almost everything was rationed, speed limits were set at thirty MPH to conserve fuel and long trips or vacations were not encouraged. Many women went to work in industry for the first time and the image of Rosie the Riveter came to be. And like they say, how can you get them back on the farm after they've seen Paree? There was no going back. Thousands of troops had seen the world or strange new parts of it at least for them and women were not about to go back and forego the freedoms and independence they had gained with their war-related jobs. So it is valid to focus on wars as major implements of social change and watershed points in the course of a nation's or even humanities journey.

Like the treaties that ended WW I set the stage for World War II, so those agreements left room for future conflicts right up to this day. Someone is always the 'winner' and those who are not feel they got the short end of the stick and eventually want to claim their own back. I'm reminded of that sixties era protest song: when will they every learn? It seems the answer is never, at least not until we become a great deal more spiritually advanced, which is sad.

Most of the worlds' main religions preach peace and brotherhood among all mankind but that seems to break down when we are dealing with those who are a different race, color, creed or agenda than we are. And that makes me sad. So, D-Day seventy years on and we still have not really learned or changed or progressed. Still, I appreciate the well-meant sacrifices of those who died that day and honor their memories just as I do the veterans of all our wars. If the leaders and politicians had to go out do the fighting, there might be fewer deaths and less mayhem. It is too easy to say, "Let's you and him fight."