Good Morning All & Happy Wednesday!
Happy Birthday wishes go to my friend Paul in Deer Park WA…husband, father, grandfather, guitarist and specialty wood products dealer extraordinaire; to my friend Kathy in Spokane WA…wife, mother and wonderfully intentional friend to many, who turns 38 today; and to my friend Shelby in Boise/Meridian ID…wife, mother, grandmother of twins & partner in BRIXX Pub & Restaurant in Meridian ID, who is 46 today. Here’s to all of you on your special day of celebration! The world became a better place when you were born!
Speaking of birthdays, here’s to actor Ed Begley, Jr., who is 71 today; to actor Mickey Rourke, who turns 68 today; to magician extraordinaire David Copperfield (he can make an elephant disappear on stage!), who is 64 today and to comedienne Amy Poehler, who turns 49 today. Here’s to all of you too!
I was attending a Barre Code class at my daughter Amy’s studio the other day and noticed some cards on the reception counter that caught my eye. They are inspirational cards that clients can pick up and take with them after an invigorating session of stretching and ballet theory exercises. One of the cards I picked was “Love Your Decisions.” How true that is…I’ve found it’s important to weigh the pros and cons before making important decisions, but once you have you made a particular decision “love it” and do everything you can to press on and feel good about the decisions you make. It’s one of the keys to success, I believe. It’s important to “stay the course” and not give up on your decisions, provided they are wisely made…
Speaking of wise decisions, we accepted an invitation from my daughter Andy to have lunch at her home which she hosted yesterday. It was a fun time for us, as most of our grandchildren were there, including the newest addition to our family, little miss June Parker Cathey. She is such a sweetheart! It was terrific to get to hold her and sing to her. She is really thriving and she can follow you with her eyes now, which is fantastic. She even gave me a smile yesterday. Not only that, but I got to have a glass of root beer from the “Tap Room” in their garage. Andy’s husband David had built a couple of taps for my son Jake’s wedding some years ago and kept them in his garage. Well, he decided to set up the taps…one for beer and one for root beer. He gets a 1/4 keg of specialty root beer from “Total Wine” from time to time and has it available for family & friends. He is so clever! Not to mention, that root beer is one of my very favorite beverages…the only thing better would be to add some ice cream and make it a root beer float! David is an engineer by profession and seems to be able to fix just about everything…which proves my theory that we need to elect an engineer as our next President. They can fix things! Another example to prove my point is that the best Governor that our state (State of Washington) has had in my lifetime was Dan Evans, a civil engineer. So there you go!
I’ve been enjoying the book entitled “Crazy Horse and Custer” by Stephen Ambrose, the author of “Band of Brothers” & “Undaunted Courage” among many other books. I found it at an antique store in Post Falls, Idaho while enjoying an afternoon of antique shopping with the consummate antique shopper, my mom Chris (she really has an eye for antique deals!). Come to find out, the hardbound edition of this book was a first edition, published in 1975. It was in “like new” condition and had the original book jacket on it. Being the history buff I am, I was really pleased to find it…plus the story of Crazy Horse and Custer has always held some fascination for me. I think Ambrose captures the reason why the Native Americans were unable to effectively combat the intrusion of the white man into their way of life in this following excerpt:
“…Thus the first battle between the Sioux and the whites revealed the fatal weakness of the Indians. Without leadership, the Sioux were unable to turn a battle into a campaign. There is no doubt that they could have overrun Fort Laramie and then blocked the Holy Road (the road emigrants primarily used moving west), preventing the retaliatory force that the headmen so feared from even getting into Sioux country. The Holy Road was an extraordinarily vulnerable supply line or invasion route. There were dozens of ideal places for ambush, hundreds of spots from which the Indians could harass a moving column. The whites had no knowledge of the terrain, no maps, and no inclination to leave their supply wagons and cut overland in pursuit of enemies they could never catch anyway. The soldiers were roadbound, like most American soldiers before and since, but the Indians made no effort to exploit that weakness. Instead, having inflicted what they thought was a heavy blow (killing all 31 soldiers in Lt. Grattan’s command from Fort Laramie), the red men split their forces and retired—just as they would have done had the thirty-one dead were Crows.
The Sioux failure to follow up their advantage, however, was inevitable. They could not have done otherwise. To have mounted a sustained campaign they would have had to delegate real authority to one man, or at most a small group of men, who would have had to have the power to give orders and see to it that they were enforced. It would have required putting small groups of men along the Holy Road, there to wait in endless boredom for the white columns to come along. It would have meant attacking in concert, Brules and Oglalas and others acting together with the object of destroying the enemy, not winning personal honors. It would have required specialization, with some men hunting all the time in order to support those who were full-time soldiers.
A sustained campaign, in short, would have meant an end to the Sioux way of life just as surely as defeat at the hands of the whites meant an end to the old life-style. The Sioux could not simultaneously be free and be effective soldiers. They chose to remain free…”
—Stephen E. Ambrose, “Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors” (1975)
I find it helpful to read about historical events and people who helped shape history to gain some insight in finding a way forward, realizing that we can, indeed, learn from history. A case in point, given the current turmoil over race relations, is the life of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Here’s an excerpt from the recently released book “Frederick Douglass: Prophet Of Freedom” that captures how Douglass contributed to racial reconciliation and inspired others to look beyond the color of one’s skin in treating each other with respect, understanding that each of us was made in the image of our Creator:
“If slavery and race were the centerpieces of American history through the nineteenth century’s rise, fall, and then resurrection of the republic, no one represented that saga quite like Douglass. As the modern poet Robert Hayden so beautifully put it:
“When it is finally ours, this freedom, this beautiful and needful thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all…when it is finally won…this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is hunted, alien, this man superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric, Not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, But with the lives grown out of his life, the lives…Fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.”
Douglass was the prose poet of America’s and perhaps of a universal body politic; he searched for the human soul, envisioned through slavery and freedom in all their meanings. There had been no other voice quite like Douglass’s; he inspired adoration and rivalry, love and loathing. His voice and his words still wear well. What shall we make of “our Douglass” in our own time? The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonizingly and enduring combination of legacies bleeding forward from slavery and color lines. Freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity’s most universal aspiration. Douglass’s life, and especially his words, may forever serve as our watch-warnings in our unending search for the beautiful, needful thing…”
I came across another collectible card on airplanes from the late 1950s & early 1960s…This one featured the “Fouga CM. 170 Magister,” a 1950s French two-seat jet trainer aircraft, developed and manufactured by French aircraft manufacturer Fouga. This plane utilized the newly developed jet propulsion technology after World War II. While primarily operated as a trainer aircraft, the Magister was also frequently used in combat as a close air support platform by various countries, such as Israel, Finland, France, El Salvador and The Congo. The collectible card I have states that “The twin-jet Magister is a basic trainer, developed for the NATO Air force. The Vee tail and slender fuselage make it easy to identify….Although a trainer type, it can be armed with machine guns and rocket missiles for combat duty.” It saw action during the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt & Syria; the Salvadoran Civil War in Central America, the Western Sahara War between the French and Algerian revolutionaries and the Congo Crisis. After its retirement by the French Air Force, Magisters were purchased by several private-owner pilots in the US and have since been operated in the experimental category.
Here’s the trivia question for the day:
Q: Which actor was the very first actor to portray James Bond (007) on T.V. or in the movies?
A: An hour long “Casino Royale” episode aired on American T.V. on October 21, 1954 as a live production and starred Barry Nelson as secret agent James Bond, with Peter Lorre in the role of Le Chiffre and was hosted by William Lundigan. Barry Nelson is the only American actor ever to portray James Bond…and now you know! (Of course, there will never, ever, be a James Bond like Sean Connery, in my humble opinion!).
Here is the word definition for the day:
“Confabulate”: An early 17th century Latin word meaning “Engage in conversation; talk.” “Fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory.” This is one thing I love to do…to “confabulate”!
Here is the thought for the day:
Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted—i.e. keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone. You are in the right way. Walk—don’t keep on looking at it.”
—C.S. Lewis, “The Collected Letters Of C.S. Lewis”, as quoted in “C.S. Lewis’ Little Book Of Wisdom: Meditations on Faith, Life, Love, and Literature” (2018)
Here’s to a great Wednesday and lots of love and good wishes always!
Press on,
Papa ‘a (Dad, Uncle Mark, Mark, etc.)