Honey...Don't Water The Cactus

Actually he can do whatever he wants. This child is just too adorable.

Remembrance of Things Past

Today he would have been 59.
Joe Marasco, a high school friend, was the only close aquaintance of mine to be killed in Vietnam. He took a leave from Springfield College, sometime before graduating to join the army. I never quite understood why.
He was a wrestler in high school, not a big guy but very strong and very principled.
In Vietnam, he was a dog-handler – the person who takes a dog out into the jungle to sniff out the enemy. I looked on the Internet and found this account of his death.

After a long night we had a Mad Minute just before daybreak. It seems to me that I was sitting on the berm of a foxhole looking in and 2LT Hendrixson was facing out. It was then he said that he thought he saw a gook climbing down a tree. Sure enough, mortars came soon after.

A Tracker Team was called in. I remember working forward with the tracker (he did not have a dog with him.) A break was called, and just as I sat down the tracker was hit by AK fire. He was only 10 feet in front of me. I believe I was with 3rd Platoon when this went down. I remember helping to give first aid. The tracker had 17 days left in country. However, he was Line One upon arrival to Tay Ninh. ( Line One meant killed in action.) (Source: Charlie Dickey) PFC Joseph A. Marasco died while attached to C 2/5 Cav, and we consider him one of our own.

Joe died on July 22, 1969.

I Really Do Hate These

I would rather delete by hand the stupid generic advertising and anonymous comment posts, that land on occasion on my blog, than put people through the maddening task of typing nonsense security words. I hate these nonsense words and I have great difficulty typing them because at heart I am a no-nonsense person.
Fact: I have composed more than a few comments that never got posted because when I mistype the security word once, I will NOT try again.

Weeds

Every year I tear the violet clumps out of my garden. They really do take the place over.
Every year they grow back. I'm never sorry.
They are some of the prettiest weeds.

Let's Go Met-sies

Every now and then you come across something that ...well...makes you feel happy. MacTech-Son, a loyal Mets fan - like his mom sent this to me. I know at least one blog-friend who will want to see this animation.
I love the Internet.
1986
If you want to know about the person who made this little animation read this.
Creator

Renewal

When our kids were young, the family tradition on Easter weekend included an egg hunt. From the mid-seventies through the mid-nineties there were plenty of young cousins happy to scramble about some relation's yard in pursuit of plastic eggs filled with candy or money. Then it stopped. There were no young ones around. Easter time morphed into spring break for the college crowd.
The oldest cousins now have kids of their own.
2006 saw the hunt revived with five descended from three of the original crew.
The day couldn't have been more beautiful. Everyone was a winner. When all the eggs had been retrieved, each got a present to boot. It was like Easter, Christmas and Halloween all melded into one intense potentially legendary memory.
The bittersweet undercurrent to the day was this – it was the first anniversary of my nephew's death.
As the sun set, we all gathered around the tree where his ashes had been buried earlier that day. His mother and father spoke of their certainty that he was present – still communicating. Their pain is raw and wildly palpable.
Joan Didion who also lost her daughter last year, sent a note that was read aloud under the tree.
Celebrate and cherish the living for it is in that celebration that our love for those lost becomes clear.

Click here for a slide show Easter Saturday

A Little Trip

The picture above is of many thousand year old cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, NM. A while back Unwellness posted a link to a color-in map of the states - a record of those you have or have not visited. My map was appalling. I could only color in the edges. So last week we took a little trip to New Mexico. It could have been the moon. I can't say that I've ever seen anything quite like this geography. But what really struck me was the emptiness of the place. Hundreds of miles of sand and hills as far as one could see. It was very quiet. Listo? Is there any baseball there? Of course, as empty as the place was, wouldn't you know, I ran into a Burpie Cow Wow family in a restaurant in Sante Fe.

On the way back we stopped in Chicago to visit the boy for a few days. Good weather and good food and funny stories. That's all I need to keep me going for a few weeks at least.