I am a novelist. An observing and curious mind prompts me to look through the lens of “what if” for answers to the big questions of life. Sometimes “what if’s” are long in coming. Other times they smack you in the head before you know what happened…
It was Wednesday August 11th , Delta flight 1192. I was seated at 28 A waiting for take-off at Reagan National Airport in Washington DC.
“Hello this is Maggie, your flight attendant and we are experiencing some unexpected delays due to weather conditions…” She continued but my heart skipped an immediate beat to a youth dance in 1971.
“Mike, where did you find that looker you brought to the dance?”
“My older sister. Don’t even think about it.”
“I like dancing with older girls.”
He shrugged, a little disgust evidenced with a nod of the head.
I nervously ventured forth and being fickle, lost my heart on the dance floor to “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes.” She thanked me, whispered something to Mike and left.
“Where is she going?” I asked.
“No guys old enough.”
“What does she do?”
“Stewardess for the airlines,” he replied.
“Hello, this is Maggie again. It looks like we will be at least another thirty minutes. We have complimentary headsets for those who would like to watch a show. We’ll turn the video monitors on momentarily, then…”
The “what if” advanced in my mind as my heart sought rescue from the awful truth which was easily melting my manly composure.
I last heard from Mike in 1973. He was enjoying a McDonald’s burger in San Salvador, he had written me in the letter that arrived to General Velasco’s socialist controlled Republic of Peru that day in April. I was starving for any kind of food that resembled a hamburger, but enjoyed the typical jesting as he also wrote about another girl who was keeping in touch with him; a “win” he had over me from another dance the prior year.
We assumed we would reconnect back home in Southern California after our volunteer duties in Latin America, and just maybe I’d get another chance to dance with his sister; an older and wiser man then.
Mail call on a June night in 1973 caught me off guard. I opened a card my Mom slipped in an envelope. It simply showed his smiling face with this under the photo: “In Loving Memory of Michael Alan Carlisle.”
“Hello, this is Maggie again. We know you are eager for more information, and just as soon as we can we will report the cause of the continuing delays. Thank you for your patience.”
Memory is a funny thing. Sometimes on the surface it dances across the mind without a minor delay. Other times it just sits and broods, inviting you to fix the unfixable.
I looked out through the glass separating me from the downpour which had grounded us and saw Mike, and the 1970’s, and his sister, and time evaporated as tears squeezed from eyes that had seen a lot of changes since then.
She passed by 28A. Though older, she was also energetic and graceful, revealing something in her eyes, smile, and manner recognizable…
“This is Maggie again. Federal law requires we return to the gate after three hours. We apologize for this inconvenience she said,” as the plane rolled back to Gate 19.
We’d be given a chance to stay overnight or continue on waiting for final clearance of flight 1192 to take off again later. My heart raced as I got closer to confronting the death of a young friend, confront my own mortality, and revisit all I once felt as a young man.
In minutes I stood before her. Eyes searched and recognition sparked as I asked, “Are you Maggie Carlisle from Newbury Park?”
Her eyes filled instantaneously as a shy girl inside her nodded, tried to smile, and finally squeaked out “yes.”
“I’m Jim Pratt, Mike’s friend,” is all I could muster. Awkwardness followed as she and I recalled the dance, and Mike seemed to stand there as well, instantly bringing it all back to both of us.
Wiping at the tears she said, “I’m sixty now.”
I nodded. “Fifty-seven.”
We briefly caught up, I offered my love for her mother, still alive, the other siblings; all friends of mine.
“I think I’ll catch up on my sleep here in DC rather than take the flight back with you guys,” I said casually as if forty years had not just slipped by. I then walked away, found a cab, a hotel and slept.
I dreamt of Mike that night and blubbered all sorts of youthful stuff about life, love, and important stuff. Nothing political.
When I awoke I imagined a dialogue I’d have with him if he were to step off a flight from 1973 instead of the casket he was delivered home in.
“Saw your sister last night,” I’d start with.
“I know,” he’d answer. “A dance?”
“No, at the airport,” I’d say.
“So how are things? Much changed at home since I’ve been gone?”
“You wouldn’t believe it,” I’d answer.
“Catch me up,” he’d reply.
Next Post: Mike 2010
James Michael Pratt is a New York Times bestselling novelist and non-fiction author, CEO of PowerThink Publishing, public speaker, Op Ed writer for The Daily Caller, and Founder of Reagan Revolution 2. Email: james@powerthink.com.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
THE DAY CAPITALISM DIED
FREE ENTERPRISE vs. Socialism
A lesson from our past for our present day politicians and citizens,this movie clip, the final scene in the movie TUCKER, says it all.
There is Hope: Read Op Ed Column at THE DAILY CALLER:
"Reading Tea Leaves - Why American Free Markets Will Win and American Socialism Fail"
http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/28/reading-tea-leaves-americas-free-market-will-win/
Keeping faith and hope alive,
James Michael Pratt
A lesson from our past for our present day politicians and citizens,this movie clip, the final scene in the movie TUCKER, says it all.
There is Hope: Read Op Ed Column at THE DAILY CALLER:
"Reading Tea Leaves - Why American Free Markets Will Win and American Socialism Fail"
http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/28/reading-tea-leaves-americas-free-market-will-win/
Keeping faith and hope alive,
James Michael Pratt
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Golden Rules of Love - Post 1
Post 1 in a series created for a gift book I am writing called "The Golden Rules of Love, Life, and Meaning"
THIS THING WE CALL...LOVE
“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.” -Voltaire
Real love is the most sought after prize in all human endeavor. To understand it requires a lifetime of pondering, practice, and patience. Seekers and those who possess the quality of heart and soul thank God every day for this thing called love. We have witnessed its touch bring renewed hope to the disheartened, pleasure to the eye, a quickening to the soul; for love sustains mankind.
It leads to commitment, then marriage, on to families and as such creates the social bond we call community. It is The Dalai Lama of Tibet who has said: Without the human community one single human being cannot survive.
Love is the glue to every worldly society for it ultimately calls the mother and father home to nurture the rising generation, to hold it together.
True love beckons the brother, sister, friend to give, serve, lift, and care for one another. It calls out to a comrade to risk everything to save another. Of all virtues, true love is the greatest.
No other emotion so powerfully affects us day to day. Love feeds the starving, clothes the naked and cares for the poor, homeless, widowed and fatherless. Love, like fire, burns at different degrees in all of us. The most hardened criminal can be touched by it, given the right mix of feelings and compassion.
I first started reading on the philosophy of love in 1974 when a college student, I found professor of philosophy and comparative religion, Truman Madsen's words. This simple phrase has stayed with me all these years:“Love is divine fire, with a large F.”
Over two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Plato said: “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
And the eighteenth century sage, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin put it eloquently in free style verse;
The day will come,
after harnessing space, the winds,
the tides and gravity
we shall harness, for God, the energies of love.
And on that day, for the second time
in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire.
Love.
Written of.
Spoken about.
Reviled and reveled in.
Played out on screen and stage.
Philosophers have written tomes to fill libraries on it. The religious have enjoined it to the grand purposes of the Gods. Nations have fought wars in the name of it, and men have risked their lives to seek but a taste of its sweet and addictive flavor.
When “making love,” in the vernacular of the day, a man and women may reach the zenith of life’s pleasures through physical intimacy. In a committed marriage there is rarely anything to compare with the feeling physical intimacy may bring. Because it is done in the spirit of loving their companion in every way, it strengthens and bolsters the marriage, and increases the pleasure of the experience.
If marriage is sacred, then love making is sacred...
Happiness does not come cheaply, and perhaps there’s the rub. We often find in our present condition that the luster of fidelity has faded. Some film and publishing has elevated sexual intimacy alone to the position where real love had always reigned. As long as the uncommitted “hero” is the one engaged in the “love making” it is seen as a sweet and never ending thing.
When the theatre curtain falls and the lights come on, we awaken and are brought to reality again - life is real, earnest, with commitments to be made and kept.
Is a kiss prelude or postlude? Is the touch of skin meant to be used or shared? What if the Gods arranged sexuality (as I suppose it is) to not only be for propagation of the species but absolutely fulfilling and to be anticipated?
"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous." -Ingrid Bergman
Sexual intimacy in the committed path, the path of action that blends the passions with the “harnessed energies of love,” as De Chardin put it, works to bond and build and never destroy.
Do I sound like a prude or unrealistic? I'm a man...quite normal and have given this some heart-felt consideration for decades. The bottom line? I love romance and...
I believe sexual intimacy to be sacred, and "love-making" is equally had in the touch of a hand, a kiss, and emtions wrapped in faithfulness; all this to be enjoyed most fully, not the other way around.
An agent and film producer in Hollywood, once considering one of my books for a film project, came to the conclusion, "Hollywood wants hard love stories James, not soft. Sorry."
"I didn't know love was hard," I answered.
Love is a verb and a noun. To explore its dimensions in literature, song, dance, worship, art and service, is to touch the hand of the Divine Creator of the Universe and partner with him in creating a piece of heaven on earth.
Love is vital...food to the soul.
It is an elixir to the spirit.
It quenches spiritual thirst and puts a quicker beat into the heart of one experiencing its taste. The human heart so affected sends life giving fluids at a more rapid rate, bursting through and to every part of one’s being.
To love truly is to be truly alive. It excites and stimulates creativity. It is loud, happy, noisy at times.
It is also the expression of silence in deference to the bereaved.
It is reverent awe at the realization that there exists a benevolent power greater than us all to comfort us in mourning.
It is the joyful sound of children at innocent play.
It is renewal at the first sounds of birth.
It is the final kiss at the brink of death of one beloved.
It is the courage of a soldier for his comrade, and a fellow man offering safety to one he does not know.
It is the flower from the garden to brighten the table and the rose on the grave as if in soliloquy petals have a voice and can whisper for the deceased to hear the word; “I love you.”
...and it is the feeling coming from an unseen world that the deceased love you still.
The Holy Bible says; “God is love.”
Men have fashioned idols to gods they have named for love. If man alone were the final authority his very testimonial in written form and art spanning six millennia of the recorded history of worship suggest he had enthroned love as the ultimate quality divine.
And if divine, love is more than a special way of feeling...
Love is a way of being.
James M Pratt
THIS THING WE CALL...LOVE
“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.” -Voltaire
Real love is the most sought after prize in all human endeavor. To understand it requires a lifetime of pondering, practice, and patience. Seekers and those who possess the quality of heart and soul thank God every day for this thing called love. We have witnessed its touch bring renewed hope to the disheartened, pleasure to the eye, a quickening to the soul; for love sustains mankind.
It leads to commitment, then marriage, on to families and as such creates the social bond we call community. It is The Dalai Lama of Tibet who has said: Without the human community one single human being cannot survive.
Love is the glue to every worldly society for it ultimately calls the mother and father home to nurture the rising generation, to hold it together.
True love beckons the brother, sister, friend to give, serve, lift, and care for one another. It calls out to a comrade to risk everything to save another. Of all virtues, true love is the greatest.
No other emotion so powerfully affects us day to day. Love feeds the starving, clothes the naked and cares for the poor, homeless, widowed and fatherless. Love, like fire, burns at different degrees in all of us. The most hardened criminal can be touched by it, given the right mix of feelings and compassion.
I first started reading on the philosophy of love in 1974 when a college student, I found professor of philosophy and comparative religion, Truman Madsen's words. This simple phrase has stayed with me all these years:“Love is divine fire, with a large F.”
Over two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Plato said: “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
And the eighteenth century sage, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin put it eloquently in free style verse;
The day will come,
after harnessing space, the winds,
the tides and gravity
we shall harness, for God, the energies of love.
And on that day, for the second time
in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire.
Love.
Written of.
Spoken about.
Reviled and reveled in.
Played out on screen and stage.
Philosophers have written tomes to fill libraries on it. The religious have enjoined it to the grand purposes of the Gods. Nations have fought wars in the name of it, and men have risked their lives to seek but a taste of its sweet and addictive flavor.
When “making love,” in the vernacular of the day, a man and women may reach the zenith of life’s pleasures through physical intimacy. In a committed marriage there is rarely anything to compare with the feeling physical intimacy may bring. Because it is done in the spirit of loving their companion in every way, it strengthens and bolsters the marriage, and increases the pleasure of the experience.
If marriage is sacred, then love making is sacred...
Happiness does not come cheaply, and perhaps there’s the rub. We often find in our present condition that the luster of fidelity has faded. Some film and publishing has elevated sexual intimacy alone to the position where real love had always reigned. As long as the uncommitted “hero” is the one engaged in the “love making” it is seen as a sweet and never ending thing.
When the theatre curtain falls and the lights come on, we awaken and are brought to reality again - life is real, earnest, with commitments to be made and kept.
Is a kiss prelude or postlude? Is the touch of skin meant to be used or shared? What if the Gods arranged sexuality (as I suppose it is) to not only be for propagation of the species but absolutely fulfilling and to be anticipated?
"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous." -Ingrid Bergman
Sexual intimacy in the committed path, the path of action that blends the passions with the “harnessed energies of love,” as De Chardin put it, works to bond and build and never destroy.
Do I sound like a prude or unrealistic? I'm a man...quite normal and have given this some heart-felt consideration for decades. The bottom line? I love romance and...
I believe sexual intimacy to be sacred, and "love-making" is equally had in the touch of a hand, a kiss, and emtions wrapped in faithfulness; all this to be enjoyed most fully, not the other way around.
An agent and film producer in Hollywood, once considering one of my books for a film project, came to the conclusion, "Hollywood wants hard love stories James, not soft. Sorry."
"I didn't know love was hard," I answered.
Love is a verb and a noun. To explore its dimensions in literature, song, dance, worship, art and service, is to touch the hand of the Divine Creator of the Universe and partner with him in creating a piece of heaven on earth.
Love is vital...food to the soul.
It is an elixir to the spirit.
It quenches spiritual thirst and puts a quicker beat into the heart of one experiencing its taste. The human heart so affected sends life giving fluids at a more rapid rate, bursting through and to every part of one’s being.
To love truly is to be truly alive. It excites and stimulates creativity. It is loud, happy, noisy at times.
It is also the expression of silence in deference to the bereaved.
It is reverent awe at the realization that there exists a benevolent power greater than us all to comfort us in mourning.
It is the joyful sound of children at innocent play.
It is renewal at the first sounds of birth.
It is the final kiss at the brink of death of one beloved.
It is the courage of a soldier for his comrade, and a fellow man offering safety to one he does not know.
It is the flower from the garden to brighten the table and the rose on the grave as if in soliloquy petals have a voice and can whisper for the deceased to hear the word; “I love you.”
...and it is the feeling coming from an unseen world that the deceased love you still.
The Holy Bible says; “God is love.”
Men have fashioned idols to gods they have named for love. If man alone were the final authority his very testimonial in written form and art spanning six millennia of the recorded history of worship suggest he had enthroned love as the ultimate quality divine.
And if divine, love is more than a special way of feeling...
Love is a way of being.
James M Pratt
Sunday, April 4, 2010
EASTER 2010 - Hope, Happiness, New Beginnings
On another Easter Sunday long ago, my family posed for this photo on Garfield Ave in Southgate, CA. You may guess the little boy in the front row teasing his older sister? Yep, moi.
Life was a long journey to be enjoyed, filled with adventure, love, perhaps do like my father had done; save America in another war worth sacrifices...
NOW... It has been an adventure, and filled with love, sorrow, pain, fear, freedom, service, learning, loss, fulfillment, and pleasure. The totality of it all which I look for to sum it up? Happiness.
EASTER provides a day of reflection and new beginnings. If one word comes to mind most readily it is hope. Hope for...?
New life, new beginnings, gratitude for the meaning of a risen Christ for believer and non-believer. For hope is what starts the journey, one step in front of the other toward faith, growth, fulfillment, and finally arriving to what a sometimes elusive word sums up: "Happiness."
Sometimes life's road is strewn with boulders, and other times you find you must simply fight adverities and adversaries for cherished dreams. Which brings me to where I've been, what I'm doing, and why I care about the freedom to "hope" which Easter always resurrects. Bear with a political observation. The reason for making it will become apparent...
"Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness:" This phrase from the Declaration of Independence was wrongly quoted by US Congressman Hare of Illinois two days ago as the reason he voted for a nationalized medicine bill, which "mandates" Federal controls, purchasing upon threat of penalty to states and individuals, expressly contrary to the spirit of freedoms implied and expressed by our two founding documents.
He claimed the phrase came from the US Constitution which "I don't really care about." Here is a man who can't identify the difference between our nation's founding documents, and doesn't "care" (his words.) Here is a man whose party represents many good and loyal Americans who do "care." Here is a man willing to "force" a bankrupting concept (2.5 trillion dollars to an 8 trillion national debt)upon a people which in all opinion polls overwhelmingly rejects "force" as a road to American "happiness." I could go on with statistics and actual Constitutional law to show how far we have slipped into near "ruler" mentality. Not the point right now.
The point? Our spiritual and religious rights are inexorably linked to documents which a "ruling party" insists are not as important as the people their decisions will serve. This is backwards.
Saving the Constitution: It has become apparent that if any of the hopes and dreams of the little family in the 1957 photo have been realized, they have been based only upon freedoms our countrymen, women and wise founders sacrificed many years and lives for.
With so many doing so much, including giving even their lives for American freedoms, "could I do less?" I have asked myself. I have determined this is a fight and stand which, should I avoid in order to simply "enjoy" private peace-filled moments and my own happiness, I would later regret.
I've been "missing in action" in these "Straight From the Heart" blog posts for four months as I pursued publishing, distribution, and alliances needed for my business which is engaged in the fight for the heart and soul of America.
As publisher of the #1 Amazon bestseller THE FIVE THOUSAND YEAR LEAP with foreword by Glenn Beck, and the emerging bestselling digital software library titled, US CONSTITUTION COACH KIT, I've been buried in leadership and administration details.
Writing is my first love. I thank all my friends who have been fans of my books, posts and musings. I promise to return weekly now with insights, opinion, observations, and encouragement for life I hope will inspire the reader. I will not focus upon much in politics here, but send links to blogs on other pages where I have been invited to contribute my thoughts about political times and items of constitutional, cultural, and national interest.
Here, at Straight from the Heart I will continue to pursue my heartfelt goal; messages of inspiration and encouragement. Which brings me full circle to...
EASTER leaves me no choice but to declare unequivocally this: I believe in Christ.
I offer this because it provides me HOPE in what his life and messages offer.
HAPPINESS has not been the product of a painless life nor an easy path. It is a secret that anyone, anywhere can learn in spite of the long day of trouble they endure.
New Beginnings: Between "little boy" in the photo and newly minted "senior citizen" the freedom to believe as I desire and act accordingly, has produced satisfaction and still yields excitement to achieve new goals, with the attending "joie de vivre."
I invite you to join me. No matter where you may be in life, whatever may be your dreams, have hope, and never give up on life, our country, God, and the design and purpose for our existence; happiness.
James M. Pratt
Next Week: "Opposites Attract - Why happiness is aways right around the corner."
Thursday, January 21, 2010
MORE or LESS GOVERNMENT - You Decide
EVERY NOW AND THEN...Humor Identifies the Real Problem
RONALD W. REAGAN supported a lean government, less bureacracy, more cooperation between what already existed in lieu of creating "more." Watch this, enjoy the obvious, and invite the humor to clarify the underlying problem:
RONALD W. REAGAN supported a lean government, less bureacracy, more cooperation between what already existed in lieu of creating "more." Watch this, enjoy the obvious, and invite the humor to clarify the underlying problem:
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
FREEDOM, A NEW YEAR & WE THE PEOPLE
A STORY OF LOYALTY TO AMERICA & FREEDOM!
For two centuries people from all over the world have considered it a privilege to be called an "American." In this first post of the New Year 2010, I want to take you back to my nephew Grant Pratt's second deployment to Iraq and a letter he wrote home.
Consider our American freedom as you read; a freedom which I believe is under assault by fellow Americans in our nation's capitol. I speak of those liberties and fundamental citizen rights and guarantees built into the US Constitution by the Founding Fathers who, with wisdom, looked forward to our day hoping we might appreciate and safeguard their thoughtful work and sacrifices.
Read with gratitude for freedom, but also ponder on what you must do in a new war, here at home. This war is one of idealogy and fundamental principles requiring American citizens to stand up with a constitutional education, and tell elected leaders what "We the People..." Expect of them as their "employers."
"BURY MY HEART IN AMERICA"
Sergeant Grant Pratt, III is tonight on his third tour of duty in Iraq. At the time of this touching diary entry he was on his second tour, a Platoon Sergeant with the 1s Cavalry supervising 23 other medics and an aid station in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Baghdad. This letter home was sent September 11, 2007. In his own words he describes how one Iraqi has given him hope:
I wanted to take this opportunity to let everyone know of an experience I had here that really affected me.
I have wondered over the last seven months of my deployment if this war can be won militarily, or if there is any hope that this country can embrace a democratic government. In my eyes the people seem more intent on themselves and their contempt for other each other than making things work here.
With the things I have seen, experiences, and watching friends die I kind of believe that our endeavor here is pointless. I did not believe that there was a single Iraqi in this country that really cared if the violence stopped or that there were any that did not want to kill every American they see. Then I had something happen the other day that (did not change my mind necessarily) gave me some hope.
About a month ago an Iraqi came to my aid station; he is one of the Iraqis that works with us as an interpreter. His name is Sam and he is 20 years old. He came to my aid station with a severely broken and lacerated finger after it was shut in the 300 pound door of an armored vehicle. I spent about two hours cleaning his finger and suturing it, all the while making small talk. He continually told me how he wanted to come to America and join our Army so he could come back and do more for Iraq. He told me of how he loved Americans and all he wants is to become one.
I listened and talked with him until I was finished with my procedure and wished him well, and in my mind dismissed most of what he said as just words and never thought much else of it.
On September 9th it came across the radio that one of our vehicles had been hit by an explosion and we had one soldier killed, two wounded, as well as the interpreter that was with them. I put my gear on and went with the squadron commander to the hospital to check on our injured men.
It was quite a gruesome sight. First I saw my medic, who had minor wounds, then went to the young man who had served as the gunner. He had received blast wounds to the leg which had torn away a majority of his outer thigh. I then went to view the body of our fallen brother who died due to a head injury. We helped console the other members of the platoon as this was the second Soldier they had lost in five days. Overwhelmed by the experience, we walked in to see the interpreter, which turned out to be Sam.
Sam had suffered severe lacerations to the head, resulting in over 40 sutures and staples. He had a small skull fracture and a small brain hemorrhage. Despite his severe injuries he would only ask how the others were doing. He was covered in blood and in extreme pain and just wanted to be sure that the soldiers he was with were okay.
Once satisfied they would be taken care of, he took my commanders hand and said, "If I die please take my heart to the United States and bury it there." We assured him his injuries were not mortal and left him in the care of the doctors at the hospital and told him we would be back the next day to see him.
The next morning I received a call from the hospital telling me that Sam was going to be released to an Iraqi hospital, but that he did not want to go. He feared that because of his ethnic background that he would be denied treatment and sent away. I told them I would call back in a few minutes and that we would come and get him and continue his care at my aid station. After 20 minutes of talking to the commander and making arrangements, I called the hospital and told them we would be there shortly to pick him up when they informed me that they had already released him, and had given him money to get to the Iraqi hospital. Needless to say, we were a little upset.
We began searching the area around the hospital and could not locate Sam. We were worried that he would fall into the wrong hands as any Iraqi that works with the Americans are often killed because they are aiding the enemy.
Three hours later we got a call from the gate to our base that Sam was there. He had walked from the hospital to our base, about seven miles in flip flops and pajamas, despite fairly significant injuries. My medics brought him to the aid station and as we laid him on the bed I looked at him and said "You are a pretty tough guy." He grabbed my hand and looked me in the eyes and said, "I knew if I got here you would take care of me, Sergeant."
Tears filled the corner of my eyes and I replied "You bet I will." He then said, "I had to get back here for two reasons. First the memorial service for Johnson (the soldier we had lost a few days prior) is tonight and I cannot miss that. We also have an important mission tomorrow and they need me." I informed him he would make it to the service, but would not be going on patrol anytime soon. He argued for a short time then agreed that it would be in his best interest to relax for a couple of weeks before going outside the wire, but still insisted his guys (the U.S. Soldiers from his platoon) needed him.
Later that night I sat two rows behind Sam as we paid tribute to our fallen brother and watched as he mourned and cried with the rest of us. I realized he is as committed as the rest of us and is considered a brother to us.
I just got done rechecking his wounds and talking with him. He still insists on going back out with his guys because they need him. He talked about his dreams of living in California some day. I have to say I admire this guy. He displays courage like no other Iraqi I have seen and in some ways made me think again of my views.
Despite what you see and hear on the news, there are Iraqis like Sam that are dedicated to seeing their country succeed. There may not be many, but some sacrifice along side us with a simple dream of their country being better off, or like Sam of being an American citizen. It gives me some hope that things will eventually work out here, and that someday Sam will be an American citizen, because he has earned that right.
Grant
For two centuries people from all over the world have considered it a privilege to be called an "American." In this first post of the New Year 2010, I want to take you back to my nephew Grant Pratt's second deployment to Iraq and a letter he wrote home.
Consider our American freedom as you read; a freedom which I believe is under assault by fellow Americans in our nation's capitol. I speak of those liberties and fundamental citizen rights and guarantees built into the US Constitution by the Founding Fathers who, with wisdom, looked forward to our day hoping we might appreciate and safeguard their thoughtful work and sacrifices.
Read with gratitude for freedom, but also ponder on what you must do in a new war, here at home. This war is one of idealogy and fundamental principles requiring American citizens to stand up with a constitutional education, and tell elected leaders what "We the People..." Expect of them as their "employers."
"BURY MY HEART IN AMERICA"
Sergeant Grant Pratt, III is tonight on his third tour of duty in Iraq. At the time of this touching diary entry he was on his second tour, a Platoon Sergeant with the 1s Cavalry supervising 23 other medics and an aid station in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Baghdad. This letter home was sent September 11, 2007. In his own words he describes how one Iraqi has given him hope:
I wanted to take this opportunity to let everyone know of an experience I had here that really affected me.
I have wondered over the last seven months of my deployment if this war can be won militarily, or if there is any hope that this country can embrace a democratic government. In my eyes the people seem more intent on themselves and their contempt for other each other than making things work here.
With the things I have seen, experiences, and watching friends die I kind of believe that our endeavor here is pointless. I did not believe that there was a single Iraqi in this country that really cared if the violence stopped or that there were any that did not want to kill every American they see. Then I had something happen the other day that (did not change my mind necessarily) gave me some hope.
About a month ago an Iraqi came to my aid station; he is one of the Iraqis that works with us as an interpreter. His name is Sam and he is 20 years old. He came to my aid station with a severely broken and lacerated finger after it was shut in the 300 pound door of an armored vehicle. I spent about two hours cleaning his finger and suturing it, all the while making small talk. He continually told me how he wanted to come to America and join our Army so he could come back and do more for Iraq. He told me of how he loved Americans and all he wants is to become one.
I listened and talked with him until I was finished with my procedure and wished him well, and in my mind dismissed most of what he said as just words and never thought much else of it.
On September 9th it came across the radio that one of our vehicles had been hit by an explosion and we had one soldier killed, two wounded, as well as the interpreter that was with them. I put my gear on and went with the squadron commander to the hospital to check on our injured men.
It was quite a gruesome sight. First I saw my medic, who had minor wounds, then went to the young man who had served as the gunner. He had received blast wounds to the leg which had torn away a majority of his outer thigh. I then went to view the body of our fallen brother who died due to a head injury. We helped console the other members of the platoon as this was the second Soldier they had lost in five days. Overwhelmed by the experience, we walked in to see the interpreter, which turned out to be Sam.
Sam had suffered severe lacerations to the head, resulting in over 40 sutures and staples. He had a small skull fracture and a small brain hemorrhage. Despite his severe injuries he would only ask how the others were doing. He was covered in blood and in extreme pain and just wanted to be sure that the soldiers he was with were okay.
Once satisfied they would be taken care of, he took my commanders hand and said, "If I die please take my heart to the United States and bury it there." We assured him his injuries were not mortal and left him in the care of the doctors at the hospital and told him we would be back the next day to see him.
The next morning I received a call from the hospital telling me that Sam was going to be released to an Iraqi hospital, but that he did not want to go. He feared that because of his ethnic background that he would be denied treatment and sent away. I told them I would call back in a few minutes and that we would come and get him and continue his care at my aid station. After 20 minutes of talking to the commander and making arrangements, I called the hospital and told them we would be there shortly to pick him up when they informed me that they had already released him, and had given him money to get to the Iraqi hospital. Needless to say, we were a little upset.
We began searching the area around the hospital and could not locate Sam. We were worried that he would fall into the wrong hands as any Iraqi that works with the Americans are often killed because they are aiding the enemy.
Three hours later we got a call from the gate to our base that Sam was there. He had walked from the hospital to our base, about seven miles in flip flops and pajamas, despite fairly significant injuries. My medics brought him to the aid station and as we laid him on the bed I looked at him and said "You are a pretty tough guy." He grabbed my hand and looked me in the eyes and said, "I knew if I got here you would take care of me, Sergeant."
Tears filled the corner of my eyes and I replied "You bet I will." He then said, "I had to get back here for two reasons. First the memorial service for Johnson (the soldier we had lost a few days prior) is tonight and I cannot miss that. We also have an important mission tomorrow and they need me." I informed him he would make it to the service, but would not be going on patrol anytime soon. He argued for a short time then agreed that it would be in his best interest to relax for a couple of weeks before going outside the wire, but still insisted his guys (the U.S. Soldiers from his platoon) needed him.
Later that night I sat two rows behind Sam as we paid tribute to our fallen brother and watched as he mourned and cried with the rest of us. I realized he is as committed as the rest of us and is considered a brother to us.
I just got done rechecking his wounds and talking with him. He still insists on going back out with his guys because they need him. He talked about his dreams of living in California some day. I have to say I admire this guy. He displays courage like no other Iraqi I have seen and in some ways made me think again of my views.
Despite what you see and hear on the news, there are Iraqis like Sam that are dedicated to seeing their country succeed. There may not be many, but some sacrifice along side us with a simple dream of their country being better off, or like Sam of being an American citizen. It gives me some hope that things will eventually work out here, and that someday Sam will be an American citizen, because he has earned that right.
Grant
Thursday, December 31, 2009
TRUTH...A New Year Gift We All May Embrace
Wishing all my friends, old and new.. a HAPPY NEW YEAR!
And you know...2010 will be as we share truths as our absolute standard and motto in our communications.
Truth always triumphs, never disgraces, lifts and inspires, emboldens and encourages.
May we embrace all truth in our minds, and internalize it in our hearts. In a day of political rivalry and crisis we would do well to consider as the futurist George Orwell declared:
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
And you know...2010 will be as we share truths as our absolute standard and motto in our communications.
Truth always triumphs, never disgraces, lifts and inspires, emboldens and encourages.
May we embrace all truth in our minds, and internalize it in our hearts. In a day of political rivalry and crisis we would do well to consider as the futurist George Orwell declared:
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
Friday, December 25, 2009
GOD BLESS US, EVERYONE & A REAL US PRESIDENT
During these days of national peril, where Presidential Christmas trees of 2009 carry ornaments celebrating the communist mass murderer Chairman Mao and those expressing hope that sexual deviancy may be approved, we can take heart and go back and hear the words of faith from a REAL AMERICAN PRESIDENT.
GOD BLESS US EVERYONE...
GOD BLESS US EVERYONE...
Sunday, December 20, 2009
A Personally Correct "MERRY CHRISTMAS!"
I don't know if we ever needed real hope more than we do this Christmas of 2009. We are living in a world filled with godlessness in political leadership, the media, and personal lifestyles. On the flip side of godlessness, God is used to promote terrorism and fear around the world.
Of course these conditions also bring out the best in people. Many are prompted to come forth and proclaim their faith and take a stand. The readers of my blogs, books, and those like them are those fearless ones, who know they can't stand alone, but must find like-minds and stand for Christ...his birth, mission, and message of everlasting hope.
SO... In the face of opposition: from the media, the education boards, the city councils, the Federal and State government, the commercial enterprises who are afraid of the now politically incorrect refrain: "MERRY CHRISTMAS," we stand together and proclaim it loudly with joy!
This Christmas I share Chapter 1of my latest novel, THE CHRIST REPORT.
Though fiction, and created from my imaginings of that evening where people flocked to their cities of birth to be counted in a Roman tax census, I ask you to see if you can relate to the pressures of a young innkeeper, and an equally young couple destined to play the role of parents to the newborn Prince of Peace; parents desperate for clean lodgings for the eminent birth of their firstborn son, even Emmanuel.
For those who may believe in Christ, yet are not taking time to seek or “find” Him, I share the following story as found in my just released novel, THE CHRIST REPORT.
From… THE CHRIST REPORT Chapter One
Bethlehem – Eve of the Roman tax census
“More wine. And more loaves!” a legionnaire growled.
“See to it Phinnias,” the innkeeper whispered.
“Yes, Master Cleophas.”
The usual mix at occasions of celebration and feasts in the land round about Jerusalem brought all sorts to this place but the inn filled to the brim this night.
The Emperor’s edict, the Roman tax census, added the pressure that caused his dining hall to fill beyond capacity. The required reporting of each head of house to his home town or village of birth caused the inn of Cleophas at Bethlehem, not many furlongs from mighty Jerusalem itself, to be a loud place, shoulder to shoulder at the dining tables, and to overflowing with all-night boarders.
“The fool thinks this is old wine. See how he pretends at drunkenness,” Phinnias whispered into the ear of the server boy Asa, while pointing to the raucous legionnaires. Asa nodded and hurried past him with the fresh loaves for each table.
People Cleophas had never seen before were coming to Bethlehem to be counted. He himself would venture to Emmaus on the morrow. Some three score furlongs from the capital city in the opposite direction, and the place of his birth, he would be counted tomorrow and pay the tax of a single man, and then hurrying back, he would manage the crowds here again.
He longed to stay in Emmaus, be with her, but crowds also filled the purse; brought revenue. The people filling his dining hall and small inn eased their purse strings as they merrily consumed more wine, ate more victuals. His job was to insure that merriment—keep it going strong late into the evening. He would have the dowry required by Jarom for her hand in marriage soon. The sound of payment for his services in coins of copper, silver, and gold too, made this night of anticipation more bearable. He would rather be in Emmaus now, with her, but for this...
And, there was another kind of pressure this night. Jarom, his future father-in-law, would be here any minute. He wondered if he would measure up to the man’s expectations. He had already proven adept at turning a copper penny into a good shekel.
Barely twenty years old, recently inheriting this inn and boarding house from his uncle Simeon, he’d never experienced these demands before. Like a father, Simeon had brought him up to learn a trade and be an observant Jew in all the laws of the prophets. Although originally from smaller Emmaus, Simeon brought him here when his parents died.
He had worked here from his eighth year, attended school, made his offerings, and observed the Sabbath here. So close to Jerusalem, he had also picked up on the cosmopolitan pretenses of travelers from the big city who often stopped for refreshment on their way to the cities and coasts in other lands.
Cleophas had learned the art of the smile, the art of compromise. The patron is always right, Simeon reminded him along with: Satisfy thy guest and thy purse shall never be empty.
Simeon had made him this promise, he Cleophas had tested it, and so it was.
Cleophas had proven shrewd for business. It pleased Simeon greatly. On several occasions before his death Simeon would trust the young man to the hospitality enterprise on his own. Cleophas had never let him down. Simeon’s wife had died of the fever years before, and childless, Simeon’s last wish was for Cleophas to inherit the inn. With his final breath he uttered: “And remember my son, there is always room at the inn for the least to the great. Walk with God. Peace be unto you, my son.”
So here he was now; young, on his own, and he swore to make this property even more prosperous, more famous for service than his well-respected uncle Simeon had. “More wine I say! Innkeeper! The loaves! Where in the name of Jupiter, Zeus, and...and...” The unruly legionnaire turned to another soldier, now pretending to be too drunk to know the difference between the question and the answer. “What is the Hebrew’s name for their God?” the stammering soldier laughed to his company of friends. He bellowed his question to the room full of guests when his comrades shrugged the question off.
No answer. The room went silent as the diners wondered what the irrational man might do with his sword.
“No matter,” he cackled loudly. “Bring the meats!” He slammed his fist upon the table and sat, creating noisy ribaldry in his native tongue.
A soldier. But not just any soldier. These were the most despised of the Roman Legion. Provincials. And they were late. They always left for the Fortress Antonia at dusk before. Perhaps they were camping in the fields this night, manning the census tables on the morrow. Yes, perhaps, Cleophas grumbled.
You could never tell about the occupiers though. Uncertainty was one thing, he Cleophas, had learned he could come to count on. And these were of the crude Syrian band of legionnaires. Conscripts. No lovers of the Jew, even if the Roman saw the Jew as a mere conquered people, the crass Syrians from the north and the Jews from the land of Israel went back many generations to great wars and strife. Now both the Syrian and the Israelite were under the dominion of the Roman. The Syrian gladly picked up the sword for the Roman Legions, happily took his pay, a fine uniform, respect as a fellow conqueror, and occasionally the opportunity to kill a Jew.
The Jew picked up the sword for no conqueror. This Syrian sort was the most vulgar guest Cleophas had known for many months, and easiest to madden. Cleophas knew he must attend to this one, or the entire room of guests would know his wrath.
“Now!” he barked louder, standing and pounding his fist even louder now against the long table.
“Coming sir! Yes sir! I am bringing a fresh loaf, a warm loaf, direct from the hearth. The best loaf and the finest wine! Be assured sir, I want only the best for you,” Cleophas answered equally loud. “Coming even now!”
The room went still. Quiet to the sound of a rattle of a dish, a cough, any noise at all, all eyes were now upon the Syrian. How he would react would determine the fate of this warm hall and the foods spread before each boarder and diner.
The slovenly soldier wiped at his mouth, now dripping with the last ounce of wine in his cup and stuffed with the last morsels of meat on his plate. He grunted, the soldier next to him spoke in the foreign tongue, and they both laughed. A snarl, a wave for the boy to hurry, and the look of contempt for this crowd was the answer from the trouble-maker to Cleophas.
“Take this wine, take this bread, and satisfy the dogs,” Cleophas whispered to Phinnias. “Do not be far from them. Be there when the Syrian pig grunts, mutters any word of aggravation. Our night, this very busy night, the gifts left upon the tables after the meal, our reputation, depends upon the satisfaction this entire room has for an evening warm and filling. The rest; look at them. They are as eager as you and I to make sure these barbarians, these uncircumcised curs are well attended to.”
Phinnias nodded.
Cleophas shook his head, trying to jolt away the sleepiness, that wearing him down now, was causing him to increasingly lose his smile, his act; the happy host, glad to be a servant to all these, his guests. He had but three hours sleep the night before, arising early to go to the market and start the fires in the long corridors of the sleeping quarters, in the hearth for cooking the morning fare, for warming the bread stones.
Cleophas gazed to the door. The words in Hebrew carved into the white fir plank that had started life in a forest in Lebanon hung over the entrance to this inn. It was long ago. A grateful and youthful family and kin to Simeon, father and son, former Bethlehem residents but now carpenters from upper Galilee, had not only repaired tables and chairs for their room and board during Passover that year, but also created the wood plaque. A gift, though simple, Simeon had cherished the plaque and had instructed that it hang above the door forever, so that when a boarder entered or left, he or she would be compelled to read it.
Cleophas had been a table boy, a server, one week into his eighth year when they had visited. Distant cousins of Simeon, the man and his son had made the pilgrimage at the Passover in the year the boy had become a man. Cleophas recalled the name of the boy who carved these words into the soft rectangular piece of fir-wood. His name was Joseph, who was the son of Jacob, also a carpenter, and would be four years older than him now. Simeon cherished these words from the Koheleth; words from him who was simply called “the Preacher.” He strained to read them now. Tired eyes studied the words to remind him of his duty.
“Go thy way, eat and drink with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, for God now accepteth thy works. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest...for that is thy portion in this life.”
He wasn’t sure if God accepted his works or not, but he was sure that his inn, situated on the road into and bypassing Bethlehem would be the inn of choice for the weary traveler, one that would provide for his future bride, Mary daughter of Jarom of Emmaus, a fellow innkeeper, a first cousin to uncle Simeon.
He had long loved the slender, but comely young lady. Flaxen, her crown was made of soft, silken braids with tresses so fine, yet falling so loose upon delicate shoulders, as if to accentuate the sculpted beauty of the face one expected of a princess. Wispy locks with a hint of crimson, they seemed willing to fly easily in the soft spring breeze along with songs she so effortlessly sung with such gaiety. Every mannerism, all of her earthy beauty beckoned, called to him to touch, yet he could not. Not yet.
He yearned to have the girl, now a woman of legal age to marry. He visualized her eyes, those unusual eyes, a tint of olive, dark yet penetrating, gazing out from a face with the purity of an angel. Fair skin, soft skin, in need of tender care, he longed to hold her hands in his, sit and marvel at the woman who would bare him sons and daughters.
A living gem, she was granted these refinements and qualities by the God of Israel to stand out for him, Cleophas, to see and love. Mary was her name, and Mary was the morning sun, bright, full of shine, a sparkle to please those who came near. “Dear Mary,” he breathed, unaware of his day-dreaming solitude. “I must have her,” he said quietly to himself. “And soon.”
But first he must prove himself to Jarom, a stubborn man who no doubt would want proof that he was capable to the task Simeon had left to him.
“The door! Answer the door, Asa!” Cleophas ordered, awakened from his reverie by the urgent pounding. “If it be Jarom, usher him quietly, and without hesitation to the quarters reserved for him. But there is no room! No room in the inn for anyone else! Tell them there are victuals, but they must eat outside. No room! Make it clear Asa!”
He hurried to the kitchen to see if the porridge was ready for the kettle, the mutton for the skewer. He would gladly accept another boarder, any night but this. He had, in fact, kept it secret. One single room, his best, fit for the High Priest, or a Roman Tribune if need be. New, it was fitted with a bathing receptacle. Filled urns of fresh water from the deep well too. One for drinking, one with a basin for washing. A bed fit for a King. Ample, off the floor, with posts of cedar, side rails as well. Forgiving bedding of lamb’s wool, not straw, not common padding, but real and expensive quantities of fleece which allowed the traveler’s tired body to find its most satisfying sleep. The room was large, almost one half the size of the dining hall. And two separate chambers resided on either side of the main room. His wife and children would occupy these one day.
And something else this room had, which no ordinary home in Bethlehem possessed; a window with glass! The only room to let in the light of the mighty city, God’s City, so close, with the temple and its golden fiery dome. The glory of God resting there, and in such plain sight, would always remind them of their eternal love. It could be seen just across the valley through the fired and molded silica, a gift from an artisan whose glass-blowing craft was prized throughout finer homes in Jerusalem. He was from the far east and occasionally traveled with the caravans of friend Artemaus who, when passing this way, often camped his people in the hilly fields throughout Bethlehem’s boundaries, but resided in the inn during his sojourn in the land around Jerusalem.
Now Cleophas had just finished these rooms. Chambers for a Prince, he had considered. Jarom would be pleased. And the master chamber would be her room one day; his Mary’s room. He would serve her every want, every wish. This night would prove to Jarom, her father, that he Cleophas indeed could make his daughter a suitable husband.
Cleophas paced, working a path into the hard wood floor. He was eager to please and while this night was to impress Jarom, surely by morning the family of Jarom would follow. Like everyone else, they were commanded to be here for the census. A half day’s ride upon donkey, a full day’s walk from Emmaus, Jarom would be tired for he would have suffered the same vagaries of this Roman edict –- the Jews of Israel were to return to the town or village of birth to be counted. So Jarom would be here any time after laying out the busy work for his hirelings. And so his family would finish duties at the Inn of Emmaus and follow before first light.
“Master Cleophas,” Asa said handing a message to him. “From Jarom.”
Cleophas rolled his eyes. He read the small parchment again. So much was riding on the impressions he would make upon Jarom. “He’s not coming. The morrow will see him by last hour, before twilight. He will come with his family to do his reporting for the census and return immediately. He cannot stay,” Cleophas sighed.
“Master, what does it mean?” Asa ventured, knowing full well the anxiety Cleophas had for this night. Asa was but five years younger, a lad without family, an apprentice, and so what might affect this business and the life of Cleophas had an effect upon him.
“No need for worry, Asa. See the man there. The smartly dressed one? Notice his robes and the delicate refined lady he accompanies?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Make inquiries of him. He dresses after the manner of the publicans; a lawyer perhaps. Inquire whether he is staying in Bethlehem for the tax reporting, if he should need a room. I may as well profit from this. Hurry. Go!”
Cleophas could make quite a sum, perhaps as much for the single elegantly adorned room he had reserved for Jarom as he would make on all ten of the sleeping rooms together. He nervously watched as Asa explained the amenities. The richly clothed man smiled and arose, speaking softly to his female companion. Husband and wife, he reasoned. Reporting for the census no doubt, Cleophas silently concluded. From Caesarea, used to the finest. They probably have a plain and drab room with mother and father here in town. We’ll see, he thought as he watched Asa spread the curtain open to the hall leading to the suite. Good. They will not be able to resist.
A few nervous moments lapsed. Asa should be back by now, he said to himself. He paced, watching the servers fill the needs of his guests. Listening to the clanging of the pots, dishes, goblets, the crude talk of the Syrians, Phinnias standing by attending to their whims, the merchants, some regular diners too, all were the sounds of money being made, and he was addicted to that sound.
A knock at the door.
“Phinnias!” Cleophas pointed urgently to the door as he called out to the table waiter.
Phinnias shrugged. His hands were filled with plates and the soldier was pounding the table with fists once more, speaking to him in a stern manner while the soldier’s companions laughed. Cleophas shook his head. He understood, had told Phinnias to stay with the barbarian.
“Oh, stop. Yes, yes, I’m coming!” he shouted. He could barely hear himself speak, even though he shouted at the top of his lungs. The noise of the crowd, the laughter, the raucous behavior of the soldiers, all of it only increased with the wine being poured.
He unlatched the thick door and opened it. The man in rough homespun tunic appealed to him with an expression of panic, hurried speech. Cleophas saw the fear, desperation in this man’s eyes, and knew what he would have to say to the man, but he let him go on.
“Sir. I beseech you. This is our third stop of the evening. My wife is with child. Is Simeon in? Can I speak to him?”
“You know Simeon?”
“I have not seen him for many years. But I once stayed here with my father, the year I reported to the temple, the year I became a man.”
“Simeon is with God. Just one year ago now. I am Cleophas. Simeon was my uncle. I came to dwell with him in my eighth year.”
“Then you are kin,” the tired man sighed with comfort. His look registered relief. “You are the serving lad I remember,” he added. “But such a fine man now. I am Joseph ben Jacob here to report for the census. This is my wife…”
Cleophas forced a smile, held his hand up citing no need for the man to continue. “I am Cleophas.”
He realized his only room was a costly one, being admired even this moment, by one that would pay a small fortune, a King’s ransom, to take proper care of the lovely lady at the table.
“Can you spare a room for one night? We can pay. I am from the Galilee and she cannot ride another furlong. We must find a room, a midwife... Kind sir...dare I say kin? I don’t know what to do.”
“I...” Cleophas stumbled.
Joseph struggled in search for his purse. “I have...”
Cleophas raised his hand to calm the man and turned to see Asa nodding. Good. Now I can honestly tell this man there is no room at this inn. Cleophas started with mild tones, apologetic words.
“But she is giving birth. Please sir. You are kin of Simeon. We have no other family here. I must find shelter immediately. Simeon surely would not have...”
“Friend! I will not stand here and have you invoke the sentiments I have for my deceased uncle, sentiments close to my heart,” he said pounding with a closed fist upon his chest for emphasis. “As I said, there is no room at this inn, this night. Look for yourself.” He stood back and held the door open wide.
Cleophas nodded toward the finely dressed lawyer and his lady. The lawyer held out his hand and his wife reached up. He whispered something that pleased her greatly, and then with Asa leading the way, entered beyond the curtain separating the dining hall from the sleeping quarters. The tables were loud, and the hired servers were frantically trying to keep goblets filled, delivering bowls hot with soups, stews of mutton.
“Sir...” the voice of the man choked. “Mary cannot ride another minute. See her pain,” he gestured. “Give us a place outside the kitchen, anywhere...please?”
“Mary?” he asked. I have a Mary, he thought. She was to be here in the morning. “Mary you say?”
“Yes. Mary, my wife. She is young. I must attend to her needs with dignity,” he pled.
Cleophas’ compassion was overcoming his reason. Perhaps he could let them have his room. No, I must be here for the lawyer now. Close to attend to his whims, coax more for the service I will provide. I cannot...
He himself had slept in the stable before. The straw was clean. He was a man who would rent his own room for that extra shekel that would bring him closer to his goals of providing the expensive dowry to Jarom for the hand of his daughter. Mary, he thought.
“Sir look above your door. I hung it there myself.”
The desperate man’s words broke Cleophas from his mental wanderings. He stood back and read the hand-carved sign that Simeon had insisted stay forever.
“It is rented,” Asa whispered in Cleophas’ ear. “And for twice the asking price,” he proudly added. “Master there is no room,” Asa reminded him, noting him standing in silence, considering the couple, door ajar, as if Cleophas might not be aware.
“Shut that door, Innkeeper!” growled the Syrian. “Are you a fool? I said...”
Cleophas was in that space where people go sometimes –- the narrow corridor of conscience, a place where memories remind one of similar times and their outcomes. What would Simeon do? Give up his room? He considered what that meant. How many days? Simeon was kin. That makes me kin. I am a business man, not a charity, he reminded himself.
He pictured the woman he loved, looked at the weeping woman seated upon the donkey, the fearful man. “Asa, take care of this place. I am going to the stable. Send one of the servers for the midwife Anna. Have her report to the stable immediately. Have the server then bring cloth, and bedding, any extra bedding from storage.”
“But Cleophas, Master, I...”
“Asa! Do as I say now!”
The boy nodded and retreated.
“Come,” Cleophas urged and reached for the arm of the man. “I have shelter to give you without cost. There is clean straw and I am ordering adequate bedding for you.”
The Galilean replied gratefully blessing the name of Simeon, Cleophas and all his household as he led the animal with his quietly sobbing wife away from the boarding house.
Joseph ben Jacob of Nazereth. Well... He knew Simeon would have wanted him to keep peace at the inn. And, under ordinary circumstances, not these pressures of the Roman census, he would have found some accommodation, even if it were his room. But this is no ordinary night, he assured himself.
***
This chapter, taken from my novel THE CHRIST REPORT, creates a more complex character out of the first man, an innkeeper, to reject the Christ. Here I represent him as a young man in a hurry. Here was a young man accustomed to noise and accommodating those who could pay for his services. Here was a young man who was not bad at all, just so caught up in the day to day cares and under pressure this night of the Roman census that he listened to his head, and not his heart. He couldn’t see Jesus because he was not seeking to find Him.
As THE CHRIST REPORT tale carries on, we begin to understand Cleophas better as he ages, especially on the eve of Christ’s crucifixion. Now the questions we must each ask ourselves is this: Does He knock on our door or do we on His? If He should knock on my door tonight, what choice would I make? Would I be so busy and caught up in other things that I would not recognize the knock? If I answered the knock would I actually “see” the Christ standing there? And most importantly would I be eager to…
“…let him in?”
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
James
www.powerthink.com
Of course these conditions also bring out the best in people. Many are prompted to come forth and proclaim their faith and take a stand. The readers of my blogs, books, and those like them are those fearless ones, who know they can't stand alone, but must find like-minds and stand for Christ...his birth, mission, and message of everlasting hope.
SO... In the face of opposition: from the media, the education boards, the city councils, the Federal and State government, the commercial enterprises who are afraid of the now politically incorrect refrain: "MERRY CHRISTMAS," we stand together and proclaim it loudly with joy!
This Christmas I share Chapter 1of my latest novel, THE CHRIST REPORT.
Though fiction, and created from my imaginings of that evening where people flocked to their cities of birth to be counted in a Roman tax census, I ask you to see if you can relate to the pressures of a young innkeeper, and an equally young couple destined to play the role of parents to the newborn Prince of Peace; parents desperate for clean lodgings for the eminent birth of their firstborn son, even Emmanuel.
For those who may believe in Christ, yet are not taking time to seek or “find” Him, I share the following story as found in my just released novel, THE CHRIST REPORT.
From… THE CHRIST REPORT Chapter One
Bethlehem – Eve of the Roman tax census
“More wine. And more loaves!” a legionnaire growled.
“See to it Phinnias,” the innkeeper whispered.
“Yes, Master Cleophas.”
The usual mix at occasions of celebration and feasts in the land round about Jerusalem brought all sorts to this place but the inn filled to the brim this night.
The Emperor’s edict, the Roman tax census, added the pressure that caused his dining hall to fill beyond capacity. The required reporting of each head of house to his home town or village of birth caused the inn of Cleophas at Bethlehem, not many furlongs from mighty Jerusalem itself, to be a loud place, shoulder to shoulder at the dining tables, and to overflowing with all-night boarders.
“The fool thinks this is old wine. See how he pretends at drunkenness,” Phinnias whispered into the ear of the server boy Asa, while pointing to the raucous legionnaires. Asa nodded and hurried past him with the fresh loaves for each table.
People Cleophas had never seen before were coming to Bethlehem to be counted. He himself would venture to Emmaus on the morrow. Some three score furlongs from the capital city in the opposite direction, and the place of his birth, he would be counted tomorrow and pay the tax of a single man, and then hurrying back, he would manage the crowds here again.
He longed to stay in Emmaus, be with her, but crowds also filled the purse; brought revenue. The people filling his dining hall and small inn eased their purse strings as they merrily consumed more wine, ate more victuals. His job was to insure that merriment—keep it going strong late into the evening. He would have the dowry required by Jarom for her hand in marriage soon. The sound of payment for his services in coins of copper, silver, and gold too, made this night of anticipation more bearable. He would rather be in Emmaus now, with her, but for this...
And, there was another kind of pressure this night. Jarom, his future father-in-law, would be here any minute. He wondered if he would measure up to the man’s expectations. He had already proven adept at turning a copper penny into a good shekel.
Barely twenty years old, recently inheriting this inn and boarding house from his uncle Simeon, he’d never experienced these demands before. Like a father, Simeon had brought him up to learn a trade and be an observant Jew in all the laws of the prophets. Although originally from smaller Emmaus, Simeon brought him here when his parents died.
He had worked here from his eighth year, attended school, made his offerings, and observed the Sabbath here. So close to Jerusalem, he had also picked up on the cosmopolitan pretenses of travelers from the big city who often stopped for refreshment on their way to the cities and coasts in other lands.
Cleophas had learned the art of the smile, the art of compromise. The patron is always right, Simeon reminded him along with: Satisfy thy guest and thy purse shall never be empty.
Simeon had made him this promise, he Cleophas had tested it, and so it was.
Cleophas had proven shrewd for business. It pleased Simeon greatly. On several occasions before his death Simeon would trust the young man to the hospitality enterprise on his own. Cleophas had never let him down. Simeon’s wife had died of the fever years before, and childless, Simeon’s last wish was for Cleophas to inherit the inn. With his final breath he uttered: “And remember my son, there is always room at the inn for the least to the great. Walk with God. Peace be unto you, my son.”
So here he was now; young, on his own, and he swore to make this property even more prosperous, more famous for service than his well-respected uncle Simeon had. “More wine I say! Innkeeper! The loaves! Where in the name of Jupiter, Zeus, and...and...” The unruly legionnaire turned to another soldier, now pretending to be too drunk to know the difference between the question and the answer. “What is the Hebrew’s name for their God?” the stammering soldier laughed to his company of friends. He bellowed his question to the room full of guests when his comrades shrugged the question off.
No answer. The room went silent as the diners wondered what the irrational man might do with his sword.
“No matter,” he cackled loudly. “Bring the meats!” He slammed his fist upon the table and sat, creating noisy ribaldry in his native tongue.
A soldier. But not just any soldier. These were the most despised of the Roman Legion. Provincials. And they were late. They always left for the Fortress Antonia at dusk before. Perhaps they were camping in the fields this night, manning the census tables on the morrow. Yes, perhaps, Cleophas grumbled.
You could never tell about the occupiers though. Uncertainty was one thing, he Cleophas, had learned he could come to count on. And these were of the crude Syrian band of legionnaires. Conscripts. No lovers of the Jew, even if the Roman saw the Jew as a mere conquered people, the crass Syrians from the north and the Jews from the land of Israel went back many generations to great wars and strife. Now both the Syrian and the Israelite were under the dominion of the Roman. The Syrian gladly picked up the sword for the Roman Legions, happily took his pay, a fine uniform, respect as a fellow conqueror, and occasionally the opportunity to kill a Jew.
The Jew picked up the sword for no conqueror. This Syrian sort was the most vulgar guest Cleophas had known for many months, and easiest to madden. Cleophas knew he must attend to this one, or the entire room of guests would know his wrath.
“Now!” he barked louder, standing and pounding his fist even louder now against the long table.
“Coming sir! Yes sir! I am bringing a fresh loaf, a warm loaf, direct from the hearth. The best loaf and the finest wine! Be assured sir, I want only the best for you,” Cleophas answered equally loud. “Coming even now!”
The room went still. Quiet to the sound of a rattle of a dish, a cough, any noise at all, all eyes were now upon the Syrian. How he would react would determine the fate of this warm hall and the foods spread before each boarder and diner.
The slovenly soldier wiped at his mouth, now dripping with the last ounce of wine in his cup and stuffed with the last morsels of meat on his plate. He grunted, the soldier next to him spoke in the foreign tongue, and they both laughed. A snarl, a wave for the boy to hurry, and the look of contempt for this crowd was the answer from the trouble-maker to Cleophas.
“Take this wine, take this bread, and satisfy the dogs,” Cleophas whispered to Phinnias. “Do not be far from them. Be there when the Syrian pig grunts, mutters any word of aggravation. Our night, this very busy night, the gifts left upon the tables after the meal, our reputation, depends upon the satisfaction this entire room has for an evening warm and filling. The rest; look at them. They are as eager as you and I to make sure these barbarians, these uncircumcised curs are well attended to.”
Phinnias nodded.
Cleophas shook his head, trying to jolt away the sleepiness, that wearing him down now, was causing him to increasingly lose his smile, his act; the happy host, glad to be a servant to all these, his guests. He had but three hours sleep the night before, arising early to go to the market and start the fires in the long corridors of the sleeping quarters, in the hearth for cooking the morning fare, for warming the bread stones.
Cleophas gazed to the door. The words in Hebrew carved into the white fir plank that had started life in a forest in Lebanon hung over the entrance to this inn. It was long ago. A grateful and youthful family and kin to Simeon, father and son, former Bethlehem residents but now carpenters from upper Galilee, had not only repaired tables and chairs for their room and board during Passover that year, but also created the wood plaque. A gift, though simple, Simeon had cherished the plaque and had instructed that it hang above the door forever, so that when a boarder entered or left, he or she would be compelled to read it.
Cleophas had been a table boy, a server, one week into his eighth year when they had visited. Distant cousins of Simeon, the man and his son had made the pilgrimage at the Passover in the year the boy had become a man. Cleophas recalled the name of the boy who carved these words into the soft rectangular piece of fir-wood. His name was Joseph, who was the son of Jacob, also a carpenter, and would be four years older than him now. Simeon cherished these words from the Koheleth; words from him who was simply called “the Preacher.” He strained to read them now. Tired eyes studied the words to remind him of his duty.
“Go thy way, eat and drink with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, for God now accepteth thy works. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest...for that is thy portion in this life.”
He wasn’t sure if God accepted his works or not, but he was sure that his inn, situated on the road into and bypassing Bethlehem would be the inn of choice for the weary traveler, one that would provide for his future bride, Mary daughter of Jarom of Emmaus, a fellow innkeeper, a first cousin to uncle Simeon.
He had long loved the slender, but comely young lady. Flaxen, her crown was made of soft, silken braids with tresses so fine, yet falling so loose upon delicate shoulders, as if to accentuate the sculpted beauty of the face one expected of a princess. Wispy locks with a hint of crimson, they seemed willing to fly easily in the soft spring breeze along with songs she so effortlessly sung with such gaiety. Every mannerism, all of her earthy beauty beckoned, called to him to touch, yet he could not. Not yet.
He yearned to have the girl, now a woman of legal age to marry. He visualized her eyes, those unusual eyes, a tint of olive, dark yet penetrating, gazing out from a face with the purity of an angel. Fair skin, soft skin, in need of tender care, he longed to hold her hands in his, sit and marvel at the woman who would bare him sons and daughters.
A living gem, she was granted these refinements and qualities by the God of Israel to stand out for him, Cleophas, to see and love. Mary was her name, and Mary was the morning sun, bright, full of shine, a sparkle to please those who came near. “Dear Mary,” he breathed, unaware of his day-dreaming solitude. “I must have her,” he said quietly to himself. “And soon.”
But first he must prove himself to Jarom, a stubborn man who no doubt would want proof that he was capable to the task Simeon had left to him.
“The door! Answer the door, Asa!” Cleophas ordered, awakened from his reverie by the urgent pounding. “If it be Jarom, usher him quietly, and without hesitation to the quarters reserved for him. But there is no room! No room in the inn for anyone else! Tell them there are victuals, but they must eat outside. No room! Make it clear Asa!”
He hurried to the kitchen to see if the porridge was ready for the kettle, the mutton for the skewer. He would gladly accept another boarder, any night but this. He had, in fact, kept it secret. One single room, his best, fit for the High Priest, or a Roman Tribune if need be. New, it was fitted with a bathing receptacle. Filled urns of fresh water from the deep well too. One for drinking, one with a basin for washing. A bed fit for a King. Ample, off the floor, with posts of cedar, side rails as well. Forgiving bedding of lamb’s wool, not straw, not common padding, but real and expensive quantities of fleece which allowed the traveler’s tired body to find its most satisfying sleep. The room was large, almost one half the size of the dining hall. And two separate chambers resided on either side of the main room. His wife and children would occupy these one day.
And something else this room had, which no ordinary home in Bethlehem possessed; a window with glass! The only room to let in the light of the mighty city, God’s City, so close, with the temple and its golden fiery dome. The glory of God resting there, and in such plain sight, would always remind them of their eternal love. It could be seen just across the valley through the fired and molded silica, a gift from an artisan whose glass-blowing craft was prized throughout finer homes in Jerusalem. He was from the far east and occasionally traveled with the caravans of friend Artemaus who, when passing this way, often camped his people in the hilly fields throughout Bethlehem’s boundaries, but resided in the inn during his sojourn in the land around Jerusalem.
Now Cleophas had just finished these rooms. Chambers for a Prince, he had considered. Jarom would be pleased. And the master chamber would be her room one day; his Mary’s room. He would serve her every want, every wish. This night would prove to Jarom, her father, that he Cleophas indeed could make his daughter a suitable husband.
Cleophas paced, working a path into the hard wood floor. He was eager to please and while this night was to impress Jarom, surely by morning the family of Jarom would follow. Like everyone else, they were commanded to be here for the census. A half day’s ride upon donkey, a full day’s walk from Emmaus, Jarom would be tired for he would have suffered the same vagaries of this Roman edict –- the Jews of Israel were to return to the town or village of birth to be counted. So Jarom would be here any time after laying out the busy work for his hirelings. And so his family would finish duties at the Inn of Emmaus and follow before first light.
“Master Cleophas,” Asa said handing a message to him. “From Jarom.”
Cleophas rolled his eyes. He read the small parchment again. So much was riding on the impressions he would make upon Jarom. “He’s not coming. The morrow will see him by last hour, before twilight. He will come with his family to do his reporting for the census and return immediately. He cannot stay,” Cleophas sighed.
“Master, what does it mean?” Asa ventured, knowing full well the anxiety Cleophas had for this night. Asa was but five years younger, a lad without family, an apprentice, and so what might affect this business and the life of Cleophas had an effect upon him.
“No need for worry, Asa. See the man there. The smartly dressed one? Notice his robes and the delicate refined lady he accompanies?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Make inquiries of him. He dresses after the manner of the publicans; a lawyer perhaps. Inquire whether he is staying in Bethlehem for the tax reporting, if he should need a room. I may as well profit from this. Hurry. Go!”
Cleophas could make quite a sum, perhaps as much for the single elegantly adorned room he had reserved for Jarom as he would make on all ten of the sleeping rooms together. He nervously watched as Asa explained the amenities. The richly clothed man smiled and arose, speaking softly to his female companion. Husband and wife, he reasoned. Reporting for the census no doubt, Cleophas silently concluded. From Caesarea, used to the finest. They probably have a plain and drab room with mother and father here in town. We’ll see, he thought as he watched Asa spread the curtain open to the hall leading to the suite. Good. They will not be able to resist.
A few nervous moments lapsed. Asa should be back by now, he said to himself. He paced, watching the servers fill the needs of his guests. Listening to the clanging of the pots, dishes, goblets, the crude talk of the Syrians, Phinnias standing by attending to their whims, the merchants, some regular diners too, all were the sounds of money being made, and he was addicted to that sound.
A knock at the door.
“Phinnias!” Cleophas pointed urgently to the door as he called out to the table waiter.
Phinnias shrugged. His hands were filled with plates and the soldier was pounding the table with fists once more, speaking to him in a stern manner while the soldier’s companions laughed. Cleophas shook his head. He understood, had told Phinnias to stay with the barbarian.
“Oh, stop. Yes, yes, I’m coming!” he shouted. He could barely hear himself speak, even though he shouted at the top of his lungs. The noise of the crowd, the laughter, the raucous behavior of the soldiers, all of it only increased with the wine being poured.
He unlatched the thick door and opened it. The man in rough homespun tunic appealed to him with an expression of panic, hurried speech. Cleophas saw the fear, desperation in this man’s eyes, and knew what he would have to say to the man, but he let him go on.
“Sir. I beseech you. This is our third stop of the evening. My wife is with child. Is Simeon in? Can I speak to him?”
“You know Simeon?”
“I have not seen him for many years. But I once stayed here with my father, the year I reported to the temple, the year I became a man.”
“Simeon is with God. Just one year ago now. I am Cleophas. Simeon was my uncle. I came to dwell with him in my eighth year.”
“Then you are kin,” the tired man sighed with comfort. His look registered relief. “You are the serving lad I remember,” he added. “But such a fine man now. I am Joseph ben Jacob here to report for the census. This is my wife…”
Cleophas forced a smile, held his hand up citing no need for the man to continue. “I am Cleophas.”
He realized his only room was a costly one, being admired even this moment, by one that would pay a small fortune, a King’s ransom, to take proper care of the lovely lady at the table.
“Can you spare a room for one night? We can pay. I am from the Galilee and she cannot ride another furlong. We must find a room, a midwife... Kind sir...dare I say kin? I don’t know what to do.”
“I...” Cleophas stumbled.
Joseph struggled in search for his purse. “I have...”
Cleophas raised his hand to calm the man and turned to see Asa nodding. Good. Now I can honestly tell this man there is no room at this inn. Cleophas started with mild tones, apologetic words.
“But she is giving birth. Please sir. You are kin of Simeon. We have no other family here. I must find shelter immediately. Simeon surely would not have...”
“Friend! I will not stand here and have you invoke the sentiments I have for my deceased uncle, sentiments close to my heart,” he said pounding with a closed fist upon his chest for emphasis. “As I said, there is no room at this inn, this night. Look for yourself.” He stood back and held the door open wide.
Cleophas nodded toward the finely dressed lawyer and his lady. The lawyer held out his hand and his wife reached up. He whispered something that pleased her greatly, and then with Asa leading the way, entered beyond the curtain separating the dining hall from the sleeping quarters. The tables were loud, and the hired servers were frantically trying to keep goblets filled, delivering bowls hot with soups, stews of mutton.
“Sir...” the voice of the man choked. “Mary cannot ride another minute. See her pain,” he gestured. “Give us a place outside the kitchen, anywhere...please?”
“Mary?” he asked. I have a Mary, he thought. She was to be here in the morning. “Mary you say?”
“Yes. Mary, my wife. She is young. I must attend to her needs with dignity,” he pled.
Cleophas’ compassion was overcoming his reason. Perhaps he could let them have his room. No, I must be here for the lawyer now. Close to attend to his whims, coax more for the service I will provide. I cannot...
He himself had slept in the stable before. The straw was clean. He was a man who would rent his own room for that extra shekel that would bring him closer to his goals of providing the expensive dowry to Jarom for the hand of his daughter. Mary, he thought.
“Sir look above your door. I hung it there myself.”
The desperate man’s words broke Cleophas from his mental wanderings. He stood back and read the hand-carved sign that Simeon had insisted stay forever.
“It is rented,” Asa whispered in Cleophas’ ear. “And for twice the asking price,” he proudly added. “Master there is no room,” Asa reminded him, noting him standing in silence, considering the couple, door ajar, as if Cleophas might not be aware.
“Shut that door, Innkeeper!” growled the Syrian. “Are you a fool? I said...”
Cleophas was in that space where people go sometimes –- the narrow corridor of conscience, a place where memories remind one of similar times and their outcomes. What would Simeon do? Give up his room? He considered what that meant. How many days? Simeon was kin. That makes me kin. I am a business man, not a charity, he reminded himself.
He pictured the woman he loved, looked at the weeping woman seated upon the donkey, the fearful man. “Asa, take care of this place. I am going to the stable. Send one of the servers for the midwife Anna. Have her report to the stable immediately. Have the server then bring cloth, and bedding, any extra bedding from storage.”
“But Cleophas, Master, I...”
“Asa! Do as I say now!”
The boy nodded and retreated.
“Come,” Cleophas urged and reached for the arm of the man. “I have shelter to give you without cost. There is clean straw and I am ordering adequate bedding for you.”
The Galilean replied gratefully blessing the name of Simeon, Cleophas and all his household as he led the animal with his quietly sobbing wife away from the boarding house.
Joseph ben Jacob of Nazereth. Well... He knew Simeon would have wanted him to keep peace at the inn. And, under ordinary circumstances, not these pressures of the Roman census, he would have found some accommodation, even if it were his room. But this is no ordinary night, he assured himself.
***
This chapter, taken from my novel THE CHRIST REPORT, creates a more complex character out of the first man, an innkeeper, to reject the Christ. Here I represent him as a young man in a hurry. Here was a young man accustomed to noise and accommodating those who could pay for his services. Here was a young man who was not bad at all, just so caught up in the day to day cares and under pressure this night of the Roman census that he listened to his head, and not his heart. He couldn’t see Jesus because he was not seeking to find Him.
As THE CHRIST REPORT tale carries on, we begin to understand Cleophas better as he ages, especially on the eve of Christ’s crucifixion. Now the questions we must each ask ourselves is this: Does He knock on our door or do we on His? If He should knock on my door tonight, what choice would I make? Would I be so busy and caught up in other things that I would not recognize the knock? If I answered the knock would I actually “see” the Christ standing there? And most importantly would I be eager to…
“…let him in?”
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
James
www.powerthink.com
Saturday, November 21, 2009
THE GIPPER WOULD APPROVE
All American Beliefs
Ronald Reagan is a leader for our time, and he loved football. My governor as a teen, and the President who rescued an economy in shambles, a captured Embassy in Iran, and a world in extreme Cold War when I was a young struggling married man with one kid, was part Hollywood and part politician, but ALL AMERICAN.
WARNING: DO NOT SEE THE MOVIE RECOMMENDED BELOW IF... well read on.
That's almost all you need to know when I say: "The Gipper would approve."
What would he approve of? INFORMATION; relevant truth, substance, and a reality check on what every citizen needs to know to save our country and make of him or her an ALL AMERICAN.
It was a good day, yesterday. I know that my business partner in PowerThink Publishing, world leader in ebook development,Carlos Packer, and I have created the educational equivalent to the 'A Bomb' when used to inform oneself in defense of our republic against all enemies foreign and "domestic."
THE US CONSTITUTION COACH Kit - RONALD REAGAN LEADERSHIP EDITION, over 60,000 critical documents of US history and politics on dvd/cdrom plus 32 video, mp3, and text speeches by the greatest President of the last century.
Launched both on the San Diego talker station, Rick Robert's Show 760 KFMB and presented to the Reagan Presidential Library in my hometown; Simi Valley, CA.
Check it out at www.powerthink.com and watch the surreal video of Reagan speaking in 1964 as if he were witnessing our day.
To top the day off, I went to our favorite theatre and watched the best movie I've seen all year: THE BLIND SIDE. I love football, but that is not why I went. (It was Sandra Bullock at first, just didn't tell Jeanne)
WARNING: DO NOT GO SEE THIS MOVIE IF: You enjoy true stories of overcoming adversity, kindness, mercy, love, faith, humor, and heart-filled triumph.
The "Gipper" would approve. Glad he is part of my life again and part of restoring American confidence in the US Constitution. And part Hollywood he would have loved this movie and taken Nancy out to enjoy it as a man of faith,optimism, hope, football, and what ALL AMERICAN means. Enjoy this trailer:
Ronald Reagan is a leader for our time, and he loved football. My governor as a teen, and the President who rescued an economy in shambles, a captured Embassy in Iran, and a world in extreme Cold War when I was a young struggling married man with one kid, was part Hollywood and part politician, but ALL AMERICAN.
WARNING: DO NOT SEE THE MOVIE RECOMMENDED BELOW IF... well read on.
That's almost all you need to know when I say: "The Gipper would approve."
What would he approve of? INFORMATION; relevant truth, substance, and a reality check on what every citizen needs to know to save our country and make of him or her an ALL AMERICAN.
It was a good day, yesterday. I know that my business partner in PowerThink Publishing, world leader in ebook development,Carlos Packer, and I have created the educational equivalent to the 'A Bomb' when used to inform oneself in defense of our republic against all enemies foreign and "domestic."
THE US CONSTITUTION COACH Kit - RONALD REAGAN LEADERSHIP EDITION, over 60,000 critical documents of US history and politics on dvd/cdrom plus 32 video, mp3, and text speeches by the greatest President of the last century.
Launched both on the San Diego talker station, Rick Robert's Show 760 KFMB and presented to the Reagan Presidential Library in my hometown; Simi Valley, CA.
Check it out at www.powerthink.com and watch the surreal video of Reagan speaking in 1964 as if he were witnessing our day.
To top the day off, I went to our favorite theatre and watched the best movie I've seen all year: THE BLIND SIDE. I love football, but that is not why I went. (It was Sandra Bullock at first, just didn't tell Jeanne)
WARNING: DO NOT GO SEE THIS MOVIE IF: You enjoy true stories of overcoming adversity, kindness, mercy, love, faith, humor, and heart-filled triumph.
The "Gipper" would approve. Glad he is part of my life again and part of restoring American confidence in the US Constitution. And part Hollywood he would have loved this movie and taken Nancy out to enjoy it as a man of faith,optimism, hope, football, and what ALL AMERICAN means. Enjoy this trailer:
Thursday, October 22, 2009
GHOST OF HALLOWEEN PAST
HALLOWEEN & Pre-Election 2008. Has anything changed?
2008 Blog & Today: (Read then watch video)
I gave up on Halloween costumes and "trick or treating" when my 1965 12 year-old brain told me it was "childish" to hit up homeowners on Christine Ave, Simi Valley, CA. for treats in exchange for playing no "tricks." Yet that is exactly what many supposed leaders of our country and financial institutions have done to stake-holders in the Amercian dream of home ownership for decades... dressed up and played the Halloween games with our future.
How appropriate: Given the momentous "Bailout" (they like the term "Rescue") actions of the present politicos I thought I would share the Wikipedia definition of the Halloween mantra used by children. Here it is:
The "trick" part of "trick or treat" is a threat to play a trick on the "homeowner or his property" if no treat is given. Trick-or-treating is one of the main traditions of Halloween.
It isn't difficult to understand how we got into an economic mess...
"Trick on the homeowner:" Congressional Democrats and Republicans have encouraged the mortgage industry to create "entitlement" mentality to "home ownership" for nearly a generation. Documentation, and traditional qualifying requirements have been virtually suspended compared to past generations of borrowers. Mortgages; the "easy money," became "candy" or treats for "votes."
THE CANDY MAN: Both political parties are to blame; creating a sweet tooth public mentality that all people were "entitled" to home ownership regardless of classic and real ability to pay. Now we are on the verge of economic collapse. Banks sit on non-liquid assets. Banks require liquidity to run, lend, keep the engine of commerce alive. Congress created the problem, and now pat themselves on the back for fixing it? (See Sept. 27th Blog - Saving the Economy.)
New Candy Men with October Surprises? In thirty days we can choose between a war-hero seasoned Senator who claims to be a "maverick" or a freshman "community organizer" Senator who hopes we buy into an emotion filled platitude as a substitute to substance; "change we can believe in." Is this your average election year "October Surprise?" or just a coincidental convergence of justice finally catching up to theft, incompetence, and greed 30 days away from America's national election?
Not sure there are many "treats" out there, but I'm sure there are plenty of "tricks." Be careful. Be thoughtful. Judge character. Shed emotion and toss out reliance on empty "platitudes" of change. Look under the political rug for what has been swept and hidden there. These people running are experienced politicos and we may be choosing for a lesser of two evils during war and economic crisis. People who helped "create" the crisis are not going to bring "change."
Do the math. Do the homework. Your vote is required in 30 days. Obama or McCain, and other candidates will ask, "Trick or treat?"
JMP 2008
TODAY: Halloween 2009 – THE DOG SAYS IT ALL. Watch this:
2008 Blog & Today: (Read then watch video)
I gave up on Halloween costumes and "trick or treating" when my 1965 12 year-old brain told me it was "childish" to hit up homeowners on Christine Ave, Simi Valley, CA. for treats in exchange for playing no "tricks." Yet that is exactly what many supposed leaders of our country and financial institutions have done to stake-holders in the Amercian dream of home ownership for decades... dressed up and played the Halloween games with our future.
How appropriate: Given the momentous "Bailout" (they like the term "Rescue") actions of the present politicos I thought I would share the Wikipedia definition of the Halloween mantra used by children. Here it is:
The "trick" part of "trick or treat" is a threat to play a trick on the "homeowner or his property" if no treat is given. Trick-or-treating is one of the main traditions of Halloween.
It isn't difficult to understand how we got into an economic mess...
"Trick on the homeowner:" Congressional Democrats and Republicans have encouraged the mortgage industry to create "entitlement" mentality to "home ownership" for nearly a generation. Documentation, and traditional qualifying requirements have been virtually suspended compared to past generations of borrowers. Mortgages; the "easy money," became "candy" or treats for "votes."
THE CANDY MAN: Both political parties are to blame; creating a sweet tooth public mentality that all people were "entitled" to home ownership regardless of classic and real ability to pay. Now we are on the verge of economic collapse. Banks sit on non-liquid assets. Banks require liquidity to run, lend, keep the engine of commerce alive. Congress created the problem, and now pat themselves on the back for fixing it? (See Sept. 27th Blog - Saving the Economy.)
New Candy Men with October Surprises? In thirty days we can choose between a war-hero seasoned Senator who claims to be a "maverick" or a freshman "community organizer" Senator who hopes we buy into an emotion filled platitude as a substitute to substance; "change we can believe in." Is this your average election year "October Surprise?" or just a coincidental convergence of justice finally catching up to theft, incompetence, and greed 30 days away from America's national election?
Not sure there are many "treats" out there, but I'm sure there are plenty of "tricks." Be careful. Be thoughtful. Judge character. Shed emotion and toss out reliance on empty "platitudes" of change. Look under the political rug for what has been swept and hidden there. These people running are experienced politicos and we may be choosing for a lesser of two evils during war and economic crisis. People who helped "create" the crisis are not going to bring "change."
Do the math. Do the homework. Your vote is required in 30 days. Obama or McCain, and other candidates will ask, "Trick or treat?"
JMP 2008
TODAY: Halloween 2009 – THE DOG SAYS IT ALL. Watch this:
Sunday, September 20, 2009
MARCHING WITH THE MOB on 9-12
OR...IT'S ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION, STUPID!
Four Mobster Guys from New Jersey
Marching with the Mob and a Visit to Hollowed Ground... I chose to go to Washington DC on Sept 12th to be a small part of something I sensed was going to be big. This is a quick report, which I feel obligated to write so that the truth of what I saw and felt is available on the Internet as a permanent record.
EN ROUTE: Flying out for Dulles International in Virginia, I was surprised to be surrounded by people in rows, both front and behind me, chatting it up; up until then, perfect strangers. Each guessed their seat-mates intentions by the books they had pulled out to read; two had Common Sense by Glenn Beck, and three had Cleon Skousen's "The Five Thousand Leap." I had just pulled my study copy out of the same book as the 3 behind and across from me, and decided to not get in the conversation, nor share that I was the publisher of Skousen's opus, but observe.
Each shared their motivations for going to Washington DC, and each not sure what they would find. None were representing any group, just going as individuals, as one man across the isle from me said: "I felt inspired to go. I don't know why, but my wife and I just decided to take the trip from our Christmas savings and make this our present to each other." They spoke of fiscal responsibility, family values, and expectations for the Congress and President to represent the voice of the people; and all determined to express displeasure with the apparent rush toward socialism. This was a "the Constitution matters to us" crowd.
ON PENNSYLVANIA AVE: I didn't have a group I belonged to but did have friends from Tea Party Patriot Live radio show from Orlando, FL. They became my marching buddies. We started at Freedom Plaza near the White House. People converged from all directions. If you examine photos from the event you will see a high percentage of marchers over forty. The placards were home-made, against mandated government run health care, fiscal irresponsibility, socialism, and liberal dominated policy making in rapid breath-taking speed that didn't allow time for digestion and study by our elected representatives or citizens.
OF NOTE: I recall the liberal and leftist lead protests of the 60's and 70's; they always descended from the ideals of their leaders to actual violent, loud, and property destructive behavior leaving an aftermath of trash, garbage, and injury.
MISSING:Television cameras from all the major networks. Not one. Just FOX and CNN.
In contrast this "mob," which liberal Congressional House leaders called conservative town hall protesters of the summer of 2009, were courteous, constructive, yes loud, but they actually peacefully dissented and cleaned up their own trash. (I took photo evidence of trash cans filled with used placards, and clean streets.)
I estimate the crowd was no less than 100,000 as I wandered back from the Capitol building and saw protesters filling Pennsylvania Ave for two solid hours after I arrived, walking shoulder to shoulder, until the spill over filled the Mall the distance between the Capitol Building to the north and Washington monument to the south.
An atmosphere of calm and celebration was apparent throughout the day. A victorious sense of accomplishment along with a reverence for what Washington represented; accompanied everyone I met; and I found people from every state of the Union had come in spontaneity, just as I had overheard on my flight in to Dulles.
What I saw and felt was FREEDOM.
THE BATTLEFIELD FOR THE UNION IN PENNSYLVANIA
SACRED FREEDOM and UNION: I celebrated the sense of sacred liberty the next day by a solo trip to Gettysburg battlefield, where once, long ago the fate of the Union was challenged over three bloody days of American fighting American. I climbed Big Round Top were I met four Alabamians who came, drawn as I was, to blood soaked hallowed ground where ancestors in arms fought countrymen who's motivations were, on both sides, FREEDOM.
We greeted, but spoke quietly, in awe of what took place there a violent day in July 1863. Yankee to Southerners who now only wanted one thing; to preserve the Union they love, parted knowing we would ever be united in love for country.
The country is torn again, but not by geographies. Don't be fooled by the disinformation from the media and government liberals in opposition to Freedom movements nationwide. They will call us a "mob," Nazi's, thugs, right-wingers, and racists. Heaven only knows what else...
We are NOT anti anything but "stupidity."
This is a First Amendment inspired revolution by educated people, non-violent in nature, by-in-large faith-filled for God and country with one thought; to return sanity to government, fiscally, morally, and in harmony with traditional American values. The ballot box and free speech will be the people's only weapons. Americans north, south, east, and west simply want to be AMERICAN.
And, if we could shout it in unison so that the Legislative and Executive branch of the government could hear it, it would be this:
"It's about the Constitution, stupid!"
James Pratt
Four Mobster Guys from New Jersey
Marching with the Mob and a Visit to Hollowed Ground... I chose to go to Washington DC on Sept 12th to be a small part of something I sensed was going to be big. This is a quick report, which I feel obligated to write so that the truth of what I saw and felt is available on the Internet as a permanent record.
EN ROUTE: Flying out for Dulles International in Virginia, I was surprised to be surrounded by people in rows, both front and behind me, chatting it up; up until then, perfect strangers. Each guessed their seat-mates intentions by the books they had pulled out to read; two had Common Sense by Glenn Beck, and three had Cleon Skousen's "The Five Thousand Leap." I had just pulled my study copy out of the same book as the 3 behind and across from me, and decided to not get in the conversation, nor share that I was the publisher of Skousen's opus, but observe.
Each shared their motivations for going to Washington DC, and each not sure what they would find. None were representing any group, just going as individuals, as one man across the isle from me said: "I felt inspired to go. I don't know why, but my wife and I just decided to take the trip from our Christmas savings and make this our present to each other." They spoke of fiscal responsibility, family values, and expectations for the Congress and President to represent the voice of the people; and all determined to express displeasure with the apparent rush toward socialism. This was a "the Constitution matters to us" crowd.
ON PENNSYLVANIA AVE: I didn't have a group I belonged to but did have friends from Tea Party Patriot Live radio show from Orlando, FL. They became my marching buddies. We started at Freedom Plaza near the White House. People converged from all directions. If you examine photos from the event you will see a high percentage of marchers over forty. The placards were home-made, against mandated government run health care, fiscal irresponsibility, socialism, and liberal dominated policy making in rapid breath-taking speed that didn't allow time for digestion and study by our elected representatives or citizens.
OF NOTE: I recall the liberal and leftist lead protests of the 60's and 70's; they always descended from the ideals of their leaders to actual violent, loud, and property destructive behavior leaving an aftermath of trash, garbage, and injury.
MISSING:Television cameras from all the major networks. Not one. Just FOX and CNN.
In contrast this "mob," which liberal Congressional House leaders called conservative town hall protesters of the summer of 2009, were courteous, constructive, yes loud, but they actually peacefully dissented and cleaned up their own trash. (I took photo evidence of trash cans filled with used placards, and clean streets.)
I estimate the crowd was no less than 100,000 as I wandered back from the Capitol building and saw protesters filling Pennsylvania Ave for two solid hours after I arrived, walking shoulder to shoulder, until the spill over filled the Mall the distance between the Capitol Building to the north and Washington monument to the south.
An atmosphere of calm and celebration was apparent throughout the day. A victorious sense of accomplishment along with a reverence for what Washington represented; accompanied everyone I met; and I found people from every state of the Union had come in spontaneity, just as I had overheard on my flight in to Dulles.
What I saw and felt was FREEDOM.
THE BATTLEFIELD FOR THE UNION IN PENNSYLVANIA
SACRED FREEDOM and UNION: I celebrated the sense of sacred liberty the next day by a solo trip to Gettysburg battlefield, where once, long ago the fate of the Union was challenged over three bloody days of American fighting American. I climbed Big Round Top were I met four Alabamians who came, drawn as I was, to blood soaked hallowed ground where ancestors in arms fought countrymen who's motivations were, on both sides, FREEDOM.
We greeted, but spoke quietly, in awe of what took place there a violent day in July 1863. Yankee to Southerners who now only wanted one thing; to preserve the Union they love, parted knowing we would ever be united in love for country.
The country is torn again, but not by geographies. Don't be fooled by the disinformation from the media and government liberals in opposition to Freedom movements nationwide. They will call us a "mob," Nazi's, thugs, right-wingers, and racists. Heaven only knows what else...
We are NOT anti anything but "stupidity."
This is a First Amendment inspired revolution by educated people, non-violent in nature, by-in-large faith-filled for God and country with one thought; to return sanity to government, fiscally, morally, and in harmony with traditional American values. The ballot box and free speech will be the people's only weapons. Americans north, south, east, and west simply want to be AMERICAN.
And, if we could shout it in unison so that the Legislative and Executive branch of the government could hear it, it would be this:
"It's about the Constitution, stupid!"
James Pratt
Sunday, August 30, 2009
WINNING IS EVERYTHING...
Winning is Living Fully...until the whistle blows!
It’s Football Season again, and winning is everything…especially for final games.
This week’s movie, watched three times for the inspiration... WE ARE MARSHALL. I believe it is destined to become a football classic, and I couldn’t stop the emotions easily overtaking me as I revisited my final season and game that same year, 1970.
The look and feel of the film, perfectly cast, superbly costumed, music exactly as I recall, and team spirit die-hard football players understand.
We Are Marshall is a spirit of loss and winning. It is a story of tragedy and coping with it. It is about life, and playing what is dealt us, but ever seeking to win...until the whistle blows.
Tears in my eyes each time I watched, I recall the feelings I had when I heard the tragedy on the news that night, November 14, 1970. I had played my final football game as a senior at Simi Valley High School; injured, I was carried off the field, to never wear pads again.
The feelings never leave; those of your final game, and what might have been, and what became of the youthful passion, and friends, and expectations.
That night: I saw “pure end zone,” when the hit I didn’t see coming happened. I recall the little voice, (instinct) was to “cut right” toward sidelines, but the goal was so close. I didn’t see the man clipping me from my left as right knee extended and I crumpled in a heap yards from the score. “Should’ve cut to my right,” I remember moaning as I tried to stand. The defensive player from Newbury Park High said, “Hey man. Come on. Get up!” I thought that was generous and pure class act.
Meyers and another team member saw my dilemma and came to bring me off the field. The player from the other side, I hoped might be there was busy… as teams reformed while I limped off. He probably didn’t even know it was me who was injured. Mike Carlisle was a church buddy, but Newbury Park High was his school and all we talked about for weeks was this match of prowess and wits. I wanted back in, begging for my leg to heal. It was gone, and that was it…my final game. And winning?
Little could I know that three years later Mike’s final game would also come so quickly; played out while serving his fellow man in San Salvador. A lot of final games for a lot of friends since, I still play the game of life and wonder… is “winning everything?”
The Marshall coach tells his team just before they board the plane for the flight that would kill them, “Years from now men, people won’t remember ‘how you played the game.’ It’s winning they will remember.”
Winning takes many forms, as the movie points out. Nothing beats actually “high score wins” in a game like football, but I think there were a lot of winners that night for Marshall, and for Simi Valley and Newbury Park High. And it has never left me.
Should’ve cut to the right! Here’s a trailer from the movie. I know you’ll enjoy.
It’s Football Season again, and winning is everything…especially for final games.
This week’s movie, watched three times for the inspiration... WE ARE MARSHALL. I believe it is destined to become a football classic, and I couldn’t stop the emotions easily overtaking me as I revisited my final season and game that same year, 1970.
The look and feel of the film, perfectly cast, superbly costumed, music exactly as I recall, and team spirit die-hard football players understand.
We Are Marshall is a spirit of loss and winning. It is a story of tragedy and coping with it. It is about life, and playing what is dealt us, but ever seeking to win...until the whistle blows.
Tears in my eyes each time I watched, I recall the feelings I had when I heard the tragedy on the news that night, November 14, 1970. I had played my final football game as a senior at Simi Valley High School; injured, I was carried off the field, to never wear pads again.
The feelings never leave; those of your final game, and what might have been, and what became of the youthful passion, and friends, and expectations.
That night: I saw “pure end zone,” when the hit I didn’t see coming happened. I recall the little voice, (instinct) was to “cut right” toward sidelines, but the goal was so close. I didn’t see the man clipping me from my left as right knee extended and I crumpled in a heap yards from the score. “Should’ve cut to my right,” I remember moaning as I tried to stand. The defensive player from Newbury Park High said, “Hey man. Come on. Get up!” I thought that was generous and pure class act.
Meyers and another team member saw my dilemma and came to bring me off the field. The player from the other side, I hoped might be there was busy… as teams reformed while I limped off. He probably didn’t even know it was me who was injured. Mike Carlisle was a church buddy, but Newbury Park High was his school and all we talked about for weeks was this match of prowess and wits. I wanted back in, begging for my leg to heal. It was gone, and that was it…my final game. And winning?
Little could I know that three years later Mike’s final game would also come so quickly; played out while serving his fellow man in San Salvador. A lot of final games for a lot of friends since, I still play the game of life and wonder… is “winning everything?”
The Marshall coach tells his team just before they board the plane for the flight that would kill them, “Years from now men, people won’t remember ‘how you played the game.’ It’s winning they will remember.”
Winning takes many forms, as the movie points out. Nothing beats actually “high score wins” in a game like football, but I think there were a lot of winners that night for Marshall, and for Simi Valley and Newbury Park High. And it has never left me.
Should’ve cut to the right! Here’s a trailer from the movie. I know you’ll enjoy.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
ANGEL of ILFRACOMBE
A little over one year ago I went on a journey to discover the world of James Allen, the 1902 philosopher who wrote the multi-million selling classic, AS A MAN THINKETH. His fifty page book started me on a journey I enjoy today, when my mother gave it to me at age 19 with hopes I would internalize Allen's message. Thank God for good mothers.
Traveling alone, I discovered a world of wonder, and dreams, and innocence, I had only imagined in writing the novel, still in manuscript form that April 2008 day. I climbed Capstone, the hill overlooking Ilfracombe bay in Devon on the Southwest coast of England, at sunrise, and before me was a statue dedicated to the life and death of an innocent child. It was a spiritual moment as I realized the love two parents had for this child, taken so swiftly in a fall upon that hill; thoughts went to her flying away from the troubles of life and I realized how powerful mental imagery and thoughts are.
No lengthy message this week, just on "thought." James Allen climbed this hill before sunrise every day to meditate. Before the work day began he had already decided upon his actions, what he would think, how he would act, love, be. And his thoughts about becoming whatever we desire to be are still read by millions today. We become what we think about, and we can change thoughts at any time. We are really, as Allen put it, "...the sum of our thoughts."
THE BOOK: As a Man Thinketh...In His Heart coming in September for free at our new website: www.powerthink.com.
James Michael Pratt
www.jmpratt.com
Monday, August 3, 2009
RE-MAKING AMERICA
OPENING LINES
"If I were not living this daily 're-making of America' as our new President proudly calls it, I would think all I see and hear was a conspiracy theory; not real. Like waking from a coma to a bad dream, we seem to be living our Founder's worst nightmares in the light of day.
"And I fear a conspiracy is not hidden from us at all, but plied upon a weakened Republic in plain sight; a Republic unable to take many more blows to its foundation dealt by the enemies to the Constitution from within."
These are the "opening lines" to a new novel series -- "THE FOUNDER's CLUB -- soon to be delivered online at my new website www.powerthink.com, now under "re-make" and re-design for "OPEN HOUSE" on Sept. 1st.
Hope you'll look for my emails regarding the newest venture; to deliver novels "online" -- one chapter at a time -- for FREE.
Keeping the faith...
James
Sunday, July 5, 2009
SMALL SHIPS, 102 PEOPLE and AMERICA
How a Big Dream & 102 People Changed Everything
The pilgrim story seems always reserved for Thanksgiving Day, however my visit to a replica of the famed Mayflower which brought 102 religious freedom seekers to New England, stunned me because of its size… In fact, the diminutive vessel came to life for me and became the focus of my July 4th blog as I posed against it (see photo) in Provo, Utah at one of the nation’s largest Independence Day Celebrations and parade events; over 500,000 in attendance.
The 1620 voyage of the Mayflower, more than 3,000 miles across the uncharted, unpredictable Atlantic, to an untamed and forbidding land yet to be named America was accomplished in a 100 foot long twenty-five foot wide wood-plank ship – not built for passengers, but for cargo.
Crammed in a vessel so small that there was little room to stand or move about, these 102 freedom-seekers ate, drank, slept, and took care of mother nature’s call (without bathing) in the same “hold” that would have contained precious cargo; meaning they “were” the cargo, and must have also rationed dried foods, salted pork, and grains sparingly.
No life boats, life jackets, creature comforts, in terms of today’s liability insurance and safety rules, today one would be hard-pressed to sail further than from Long beach, CA. harbor to Catalina Island (26 miles) without complete federal restrictions shutting the cruise down.
My point? Freedom is a precious thing. Our first immigrants were willing to die in the depths of the Atlantic for it. I was busy, with you, celebrating Independence Day on the 4th. The 1620 pilgrims, one of whom is my ancestor, did not do less than our Founding Fathers, our Revolutionary War heroes, or any other heroes to bequeath this land and liberty to us today.
In a nutshell… a small vessel, and small group of people – no more people than are on my Facebook site, The US Constitution Coach fan page – started a big dream; The United States of America. We are in a position today of seeing precious freedoms stripped from us by a central government bent on monitoring and measuring every one of the freedoms so many Americans of generations past and present have taken for granted.
IT IS NOT TIME TO RETURN TO EUROPEAN style governance. It is time for another Declaration of Independence in private ways; ways that encourage peaceful reemergence of the American dream our founding families established in their escape from central governments of Europe run my kings, rulers, and political bodies bent on suppressing the natural desires for self-fulfillment found in faith, prosperity, free economy, property rights, and freedom of expression (speech), protection, and self-government.
Learn about the Republic our Founders created. Become informed of the 233 year-old dream and drama that the history of America really is. Get The “US Constitution Coach Kit” at www.amazon.com with more than 60,000 searchable documents of US History and American Heritage. Understand the documents pre-dating America’s; the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and then enjoy what the Founding fathers wrote; giving context and texture to the fabric of the new Republic.
I am not a radical, but these words would seem radical to the modern educated college or high school student because they have not been taught from original documents or sources.
If a small vessel and 102 people could begin an American Republic, we can save one.
James M. Pratt
www.jmpratt.com
Saturday, June 13, 2009
DAD, a DREAM, a LOVE STORY
POST SCRIPT to DAD, The Man Who Lied to Save the Planet
Families begin with a dream and a love story.
My father’s dream is spelled out in simple eloquence through one hundred loving letters from the World War Two battlefields of North Africa, Italy and military posts thousands of miles from Mom.
Being a “Dad” was going to be a big deal…the written details passed back and forth between Mom and Dad though separated for three of the War years. And, so it was, with the birth of each of nine children. Just as a parent watches his dream develop and the “letting go” of his sons to Vietnam, colleges, his daughters to other men, and his youth to old age, sons and daughters “let go” with great reluctance. This column shares some of that with you… But first the changes and the “passing of the baton” from one generation to another.
Dad died on April 2, 1994. It still seems like yesterday. He had earnestly looked into my eyes and tried to tell me something important. I can only say how grateful I am that the words were finally given him for me to hear and relay to family.
The world has changed much in 15 years. Of course the human turmoil, wars, plagues, diverse earthquakes, storms and floods that have so often beset mankind for millennia have carried on with tragic and historic consequences. Both momentous and insidious changes of foreboding and potential blessing for world societies have occurred since Dad left me with the words we all long to hear spoken to us.
The speed of light communications literally available to all, mesmerize us and enhance life; but also have attached the burden and legacy of new vices and addictions. Unheard of instantaneous gratifications are elicited from messages at the touch of “click” on the key board. People that wish us well and harm literally reach inside our homes to offer messages of love but also to tempt and try; the good we can do with these tools is equal to the power in our hearts to do so, but we must beware.
In a mere 15 years since Dad’s passing, 24/7 connectivity offers us a two-edged sword.
Parents today need more wisdom, care, and vigilance than ever before to protect and nurture the innocent minds of the news ones just arrived to our modern world. And, to have innocence is a treasure beyond most minds to comprehend. We need to get it back. We need to try to rescue those who have lost it. We need the simple ways of a generation gone by to mingle with the madness of life-at-light speed so that we might remember, and cope with all that comes at us each day.
The gentle and kind admonitions of a generation almost gone now; that generation whose parents, my grandparents, literally traveled at the speed of one horse power buggy – this generation still calls to us. I think that Dad’s words and those of men and women from his generation will call to us forever. I can only thank God I have the age to look back upon many decades to understand the qualities of life that existed in the slower ways, the wise ways of thoughtfulness before action.
Then… When a boy or girl could ride a bike or one of those new skate board things to visit a friend without any thought of harm. Hanging out in a tree house to read a book, or play a board game, or fight off the imaginary bad guys with sling shots. A man or woman took things not much faster than the top speed of 1956 Chevy, of 1965 Mustang. It was fast enough to get what really mattered done, and slow enough to say, “Let’s give that a second thought.”
KEEPING FAITH: Those days are gone, but not the all the people. It is up to us now; 70 million of us in America called the “baby boomers” to recall and glean from those still living and the memories of the dead, the attributes of what really makes life “great.”
NOW FOR THE REST OF THE STORY… With all this in mind, it is still hard letting go of Dad… and Mom who recently joined him.
A DREAM and A LOVE STORY
As a “Post Script” to DAD, The Man Who Lied to Save the Planet, (coming out in a version to be released in 2010) I’d like to share a story worth noting, and perhaps an “insight” to how we are still connected to loved ones who have gone on before us, was offered to me by my Mom. Readers of MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs may recall Mom was deaf from a surgery gone awry in 1967.
She had told me she didn’t dream often, but when she did it was vivid and seems to be a message of some kind.
About one week before Dad passed away she dreamt she got a phone call. Mom couldn’t talk on the phone to us because of the near complete deafness, but in this dream she said she saw who was calling, and so she answered the phone. It went like this:
“Hello, Virginia?” the pleasant man said.
“Why Linford. Is that you? Aren’t you dead?” she asked a dear church friend she and Dad dearly loved.
“Yes,” he answered, then added: “Virginia, I have called to ask you if we can come and get Grant?” Beside him, Mom saw Linford’s wife, who had just passed on not long before, and a daughter she had never met. (She did not know of a deceased daughter at that time.)
“Well, I guess that will be alright,” she recalled answering.
“Will it be alright if we come for him on April 2nd?” he asked.
“I suppose so,” she remembered saying, and the dream was over.
LETTING GO
See, it was Mom’s child-like innocence that she carried in her heart that allowed such a dream; such spiritual awareness to take place. To others it might have meant nothing. But to Mom, God had answered a prayer to help calm her and prepare the “letting go of Dad”
I was there. It was just after 2:00 pm on the afternoon of April 2nd 1994 when Mom stroked his tired brow and kissing it said, “You can go now Grant darling.” And it was then after a half hour of struggle to try to tell me something important that he left for me, the rest of the family, and you my reader-friend, a final lesson found in those three cherished words, “I love you.”
I suppose Linford came. I suppose other friends, but also his brothers, and father and mother came to that tiny room in the farm house of Heyburn, Idaho to take him safely to another glorious home.
There were final lessons for me and I share them with you. The lesson of love, and of friends, and of family, and of connections that seem gone, but are just out of reach; yet still really there. These all occurred in a humble setting with a deaf woman, a dying man, and a son on April 2nd 1994.
MOM’S PASSING: Another Dream:
It was February 5, 2008 in the political world it is known as “Super Tuesday.” A little after 6:00 pm Janean, my older sister, called and said, “Jim, Mom just died.”
Just the day before, Mom had emailed me about another dream she had. It was a dream about her departure, meeting Dad, and a question she had been trying to make sense of. It went like this:
“I dreamed I was trying to catch a bus Dad had just left on, and was so disappointed that I missed it. I asked the bus driver when the next bus would be leaving so I could be with Dad. The bus driver the said, ‘5-12.’ Jim what do you think 5-12 means?”
I answered in an email that it probably meant the month and year the Mayan calendar ended and that she’d see Dad pulling up in that bus to get her in May 2012.
“Janean," I asked, as I tried to absorb the information about Mom’s passing I was receiving. “Do you know what time Mom died?” I questioned.
“Oh yes! I recall looking down at my watch. It was 5:12 pm.”
I invite you to read, DAD, The Made Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs and MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs to learn more about love and timeless values we all must keep faith with during these troubling times…
Go to www.jmpratt.com, order either one for $4.95 and I’ll simply send the other free.
Families begin with a dream and a love story.
My father’s dream is spelled out in simple eloquence through one hundred loving letters from the World War Two battlefields of North Africa, Italy and military posts thousands of miles from Mom.
Being a “Dad” was going to be a big deal…the written details passed back and forth between Mom and Dad though separated for three of the War years. And, so it was, with the birth of each of nine children. Just as a parent watches his dream develop and the “letting go” of his sons to Vietnam, colleges, his daughters to other men, and his youth to old age, sons and daughters “let go” with great reluctance. This column shares some of that with you… But first the changes and the “passing of the baton” from one generation to another.
Dad died on April 2, 1994. It still seems like yesterday. He had earnestly looked into my eyes and tried to tell me something important. I can only say how grateful I am that the words were finally given him for me to hear and relay to family.
The world has changed much in 15 years. Of course the human turmoil, wars, plagues, diverse earthquakes, storms and floods that have so often beset mankind for millennia have carried on with tragic and historic consequences. Both momentous and insidious changes of foreboding and potential blessing for world societies have occurred since Dad left me with the words we all long to hear spoken to us.
The speed of light communications literally available to all, mesmerize us and enhance life; but also have attached the burden and legacy of new vices and addictions. Unheard of instantaneous gratifications are elicited from messages at the touch of “click” on the key board. People that wish us well and harm literally reach inside our homes to offer messages of love but also to tempt and try; the good we can do with these tools is equal to the power in our hearts to do so, but we must beware.
In a mere 15 years since Dad’s passing, 24/7 connectivity offers us a two-edged sword.
Parents today need more wisdom, care, and vigilance than ever before to protect and nurture the innocent minds of the news ones just arrived to our modern world. And, to have innocence is a treasure beyond most minds to comprehend. We need to get it back. We need to try to rescue those who have lost it. We need the simple ways of a generation gone by to mingle with the madness of life-at-light speed so that we might remember, and cope with all that comes at us each day.
The gentle and kind admonitions of a generation almost gone now; that generation whose parents, my grandparents, literally traveled at the speed of one horse power buggy – this generation still calls to us. I think that Dad’s words and those of men and women from his generation will call to us forever. I can only thank God I have the age to look back upon many decades to understand the qualities of life that existed in the slower ways, the wise ways of thoughtfulness before action.
Then… When a boy or girl could ride a bike or one of those new skate board things to visit a friend without any thought of harm. Hanging out in a tree house to read a book, or play a board game, or fight off the imaginary bad guys with sling shots. A man or woman took things not much faster than the top speed of 1956 Chevy, of 1965 Mustang. It was fast enough to get what really mattered done, and slow enough to say, “Let’s give that a second thought.”
KEEPING FAITH: Those days are gone, but not the all the people. It is up to us now; 70 million of us in America called the “baby boomers” to recall and glean from those still living and the memories of the dead, the attributes of what really makes life “great.”
NOW FOR THE REST OF THE STORY… With all this in mind, it is still hard letting go of Dad… and Mom who recently joined him.
A DREAM and A LOVE STORY
As a “Post Script” to DAD, The Man Who Lied to Save the Planet, (coming out in a version to be released in 2010) I’d like to share a story worth noting, and perhaps an “insight” to how we are still connected to loved ones who have gone on before us, was offered to me by my Mom. Readers of MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs may recall Mom was deaf from a surgery gone awry in 1967.
She had told me she didn’t dream often, but when she did it was vivid and seems to be a message of some kind.
About one week before Dad passed away she dreamt she got a phone call. Mom couldn’t talk on the phone to us because of the near complete deafness, but in this dream she said she saw who was calling, and so she answered the phone. It went like this:
“Hello, Virginia?” the pleasant man said.
“Why Linford. Is that you? Aren’t you dead?” she asked a dear church friend she and Dad dearly loved.
“Yes,” he answered, then added: “Virginia, I have called to ask you if we can come and get Grant?” Beside him, Mom saw Linford’s wife, who had just passed on not long before, and a daughter she had never met. (She did not know of a deceased daughter at that time.)
“Well, I guess that will be alright,” she recalled answering.
“Will it be alright if we come for him on April 2nd?” he asked.
“I suppose so,” she remembered saying, and the dream was over.
LETTING GO
See, it was Mom’s child-like innocence that she carried in her heart that allowed such a dream; such spiritual awareness to take place. To others it might have meant nothing. But to Mom, God had answered a prayer to help calm her and prepare the “letting go of Dad”
I was there. It was just after 2:00 pm on the afternoon of April 2nd 1994 when Mom stroked his tired brow and kissing it said, “You can go now Grant darling.” And it was then after a half hour of struggle to try to tell me something important that he left for me, the rest of the family, and you my reader-friend, a final lesson found in those three cherished words, “I love you.”
I suppose Linford came. I suppose other friends, but also his brothers, and father and mother came to that tiny room in the farm house of Heyburn, Idaho to take him safely to another glorious home.
There were final lessons for me and I share them with you. The lesson of love, and of friends, and of family, and of connections that seem gone, but are just out of reach; yet still really there. These all occurred in a humble setting with a deaf woman, a dying man, and a son on April 2nd 1994.
MOM’S PASSING: Another Dream:
It was February 5, 2008 in the political world it is known as “Super Tuesday.” A little after 6:00 pm Janean, my older sister, called and said, “Jim, Mom just died.”
Just the day before, Mom had emailed me about another dream she had. It was a dream about her departure, meeting Dad, and a question she had been trying to make sense of. It went like this:
“I dreamed I was trying to catch a bus Dad had just left on, and was so disappointed that I missed it. I asked the bus driver when the next bus would be leaving so I could be with Dad. The bus driver the said, ‘5-12.’ Jim what do you think 5-12 means?”
I answered in an email that it probably meant the month and year the Mayan calendar ended and that she’d see Dad pulling up in that bus to get her in May 2012.
“Janean," I asked, as I tried to absorb the information about Mom’s passing I was receiving. “Do you know what time Mom died?” I questioned.
“Oh yes! I recall looking down at my watch. It was 5:12 pm.”
I invite you to read, DAD, The Made Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs and MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs to learn more about love and timeless values we all must keep faith with during these troubling times…
Go to www.jmpratt.com, order either one for $4.95 and I’ll simply send the other free.
Friday, June 5, 2009
D DAY -- REMEMBERING THEM
D DAY June 6, 1944 SPECIAL REPORT & PRAYER
I first sent this report out as a member of the "Official US Press Pool" at Normandy, France on the 60th Anniversary of D-Day. Still relevant, I'm happy to say Howie Beach, is still alive, well, and just finished his memories soon to be available on AMAZON.COM: Titled: "THE PRIVATE WAR OF HOWIE BEACH." A "must read" for anyone interested in the soldier's eyewitness account of D-Day through VE Day.
REMEMBERING SOLDIERS WHO SAVED THE PLANET
James Michael Pratt – Official US Press Pool
Normandy June 6, 2004
As a member of the official US Press Pool to the multi-national sixtieth anniversary ceremonies commemorating the Allied D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, I had the privilege of witnessing a never-to-be-repeated celebration of honor and courage at the battlefield locations in Normandy, France.
The war was nearly five years old for our British and other allies by 1944. The gathering of old warriors in their eighties and nineties said it all. They came because they knew this would be the last time in their lives such a large congregation of nations and people would pay them and their fallen comrades homage. We, the sons and daughters, came for the same reason.
My father’s age of old-young men, are leaving us at more than 1000 veterans a day. They take their history of war, love, and bravery with them to a place their comrades who died in arms have preceded them to. I miss Dad, a man who entered Rome, Italy with the victorious Allies on June 4, 1944, 2 days before the famous Normandy landings. I am growing in awareness at how much I will miss all of them. So I stumble a bit at conveying the depth of reverence and awe I felt among the 10,000 crosses so elegantly and poignantly witnessing to us of young men's sacrifice.
Equally in awe were hundreds of the aged veterans, like Howie Beach, 79 years old, from La Habra, Cailifornia. I was privileged to receive an oral history lesson of his experience of coming ashore and then 11 months of fighting hell that followed. In childlike candor he seemed the young soldier asking me, the gray haired wise old man, this question: “Do you think I can find them?”
He teared up, and I got a lump in my throat as he added, "I lost seven good friends in France and Belgium and I want to find them. Do you think I can find where they are buried?"
“Yes,” I answered. "Your friends can be found, Howie.”
“Oh,” was his simple reply as he searched the meaning of sixty years having passed.
“You are 19 years old again, aren't you?” I asked.
“What?” he asked with moist eyes.
“You aren’t 79 today. You are 19.” I knew that the recognition of this first trip back to France - one totally done in peace, and not carrying a rifle - was slowly dawning on Howie, and confusion of 60 years of time so compressed now mixed with memories so startlingly fresh.
“How do you know that…how I feel?” he responded with surprise.
“Everyone feels the same way. We are eternally young inside, like the young soldier friends of yours. They haven’t aged, and in some ways, neither have you,” I replied.
“That’s right! It is just like it was all yesterday. I don’t understand it. I shut it out for so many years and now it’s as if I am there again and it is all fresh; fresh in my mind, I mean.”
This was Howie’s moment to teach and my opportunity to learn. Howie opened up and I took notes on the spontaneous oral history lesson. I didn't need a movie screen; his eyes shared the scenes of comradeship and horror of battle as if it played out just days ago.
Howie Beach was one of many men, American, British, French, and Canadian who I met on travels for one week in June to honor on film and in the written word American Dads who stormed on to these beaches in an effort to save the planet from self-created demons and evil. These men had a call, and all recounted how they felt quite ordinary then, but part of something bigger.
“It was a mission,” Howie reminded us. “We were part of millions in uniform. Most of us figured it was a matter of time before we were dead men anyway, so we fought like mad.”
Norman Akers, a British soldier traveling to Normandy to be at a reunion of fellow British D-Day survivors was with his daughter, when I met him. He showed us an original photo of his brother’s shrapnel torn helmet lying upon a fresh mound of earth where he lay buried. The custom of the British was to immediately bury their soldiers where they fell. Later he was crossing into Belgium and then Holland during Operation Market Garden and came upon a bridge named “Akers Bridge.” He inquired and found out from a British officer, “Oh yes. That would be named for your brother. He was quite the hero, you know.”
Norman Akers looked proud, wistful, and sad all at the same time as his 83 year-old eyes strained at the graying photo of the bridge he was sharing with us; the sign posted as “Akers Bridge,” and what it meant to him to “carry on” as the surviving Akers brother of a war that consumed so many hundreds of thousands of British sons. “It seems like yesterday now,” he whispered. “I can’t understand why, but it is all so clear again.”
I thanked him for his service for us. Our British allies lost nearly one million sons beside our American forces in bringing victory to the cause. These two men both testified that they were not uncommon of other men of their time. They think of their dead brothers and comrades as the true heroes. But they survived to remind us of the cost; that FREEDOM WASN'T FREE. And now those “common men” of yesterday remind us of just how much one good man can do to make a difference in the world.
Our French hosts were generous in their regard for their American friends who gave their lives to liberate their country. American flags hung from the windows of Normandy countryside homes along with French, British, and Canadian flags.
A proud people, sometimes with disputes regarding American foreign policy, they lacked no gratitude for their hero “soldats Americain” who waded from chest deep water into withering enemy fire on D- Day beaches. More than 50,000 French civilians would also end up surrendering their lives to bombs made by Germans, and the Allies as they lived in the midst of warfare during those first terrible summer months of 1944.
The city I stayed in, Caen, France, is as charitable today in her regard for American, British, and Canadian sacrifice as it was 60 years before when nearly 95% of the buildings were destroyed and thousands of inhabitants were killed or wounded during the several weeks of fighting there between Allied and German forces.
Somehow everyone gathering during the week ending June 6th 2004 to honor our dead and living veterans of the great conflict understood that with the sacrifice, with something given up and lost, the pendulum of justice swung fully to the opposite direction offering a precious but sacred blood-stained gain in return.
In Howie Beach’s life the loss was friends and the innocence he had known as a teenager when he was called upon to become a killer of men. What he gained was a profound depth of appreciation for freedom, a love beyond measure for comrades, and a decency he would live the remainder of his life in spite of carnage and terror he experienced.
In Norman Aker’s life it was the same, plus the sacrifice of his beloved older brother. For French men and woman it was often their homes being destroyed along with family members being sacrificed for their final freedom.
One week earlier I had the honor of speaking to thirty wounded Marine’s at the invitation of personal friend at Camp Lejeune, NC. Now home from Iraq and Afghanistan’s battle fields, these men had gathered to listen to the Chaplain’s instructions on how to transform from warrior to peace-time dad and husband.
The Marines wondered aloud if we, the American citizen, appreciated them; if we cared. Many are husbands and dads, doing simply what they know their fathers and grandfathers did in World War Two, Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts.
“Will the American people be grateful?” one asked. “Will they let us finish our job?” another questioned. “I used to take my family for granted,” added a young staff sergeant. “I used to act like a drill sergeant to my young son. But when I got back from Iraq, and some of my friends didn’t, I just looked into his eyes and when he said ‘Daddy…and I…’” His throat closed tight on his own words. He wiped at the tears. “I’m not the same man,” he began once more. “I’ll never be the same man. I will never take my family or this country for granted again.”
Gratitude, love, honor. I witnessed these with our current crop of heroes, some Marines who want nothing from us but understanding and respect. And then on June 6th 2004, in an overflowing abundance of appreciation on French soil, hallowed and made sacred by men who died and also lived to tell their tales, I understood what soldiers of every time and conflict may have wondered when they asked themselves, “Will they remember me back home?”
I imagined in my mind’s eye a beneficent Creator offering an approval for a collective gathering of the spirits of the fallen whose bodies lay buried in the Normandy sod. Dads, sons, brothers, heroes all – I imagined another cerebration taking place near us; the dead among the ten thousand crosses, witnessing an earnest heartfelt homage being paid to them.
“Do they remember me back home?” I thought I heard whispered.
I knew the answer and whispered back: “Yes soldier, we do remember. We haven’t forgotten you. And we never will.”
THE D-DAY PRAYER by FDR:
James Michael Pratt - June 6, 2004
www.jmpratt.com
I first sent this report out as a member of the "Official US Press Pool" at Normandy, France on the 60th Anniversary of D-Day. Still relevant, I'm happy to say Howie Beach, is still alive, well, and just finished his memories soon to be available on AMAZON.COM: Titled: "THE PRIVATE WAR OF HOWIE BEACH." A "must read" for anyone interested in the soldier's eyewitness account of D-Day through VE Day.
REMEMBERING SOLDIERS WHO SAVED THE PLANET
James Michael Pratt – Official US Press Pool
Normandy June 6, 2004
As a member of the official US Press Pool to the multi-national sixtieth anniversary ceremonies commemorating the Allied D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, I had the privilege of witnessing a never-to-be-repeated celebration of honor and courage at the battlefield locations in Normandy, France.
The war was nearly five years old for our British and other allies by 1944. The gathering of old warriors in their eighties and nineties said it all. They came because they knew this would be the last time in their lives such a large congregation of nations and people would pay them and their fallen comrades homage. We, the sons and daughters, came for the same reason.
My father’s age of old-young men, are leaving us at more than 1000 veterans a day. They take their history of war, love, and bravery with them to a place their comrades who died in arms have preceded them to. I miss Dad, a man who entered Rome, Italy with the victorious Allies on June 4, 1944, 2 days before the famous Normandy landings. I am growing in awareness at how much I will miss all of them. So I stumble a bit at conveying the depth of reverence and awe I felt among the 10,000 crosses so elegantly and poignantly witnessing to us of young men's sacrifice.
Equally in awe were hundreds of the aged veterans, like Howie Beach, 79 years old, from La Habra, Cailifornia. I was privileged to receive an oral history lesson of his experience of coming ashore and then 11 months of fighting hell that followed. In childlike candor he seemed the young soldier asking me, the gray haired wise old man, this question: “Do you think I can find them?”
He teared up, and I got a lump in my throat as he added, "I lost seven good friends in France and Belgium and I want to find them. Do you think I can find where they are buried?"
“Yes,” I answered. "Your friends can be found, Howie.”
“Oh,” was his simple reply as he searched the meaning of sixty years having passed.
“You are 19 years old again, aren't you?” I asked.
“What?” he asked with moist eyes.
“You aren’t 79 today. You are 19.” I knew that the recognition of this first trip back to France - one totally done in peace, and not carrying a rifle - was slowly dawning on Howie, and confusion of 60 years of time so compressed now mixed with memories so startlingly fresh.
“How do you know that…how I feel?” he responded with surprise.
“Everyone feels the same way. We are eternally young inside, like the young soldier friends of yours. They haven’t aged, and in some ways, neither have you,” I replied.
“That’s right! It is just like it was all yesterday. I don’t understand it. I shut it out for so many years and now it’s as if I am there again and it is all fresh; fresh in my mind, I mean.”
This was Howie’s moment to teach and my opportunity to learn. Howie opened up and I took notes on the spontaneous oral history lesson. I didn't need a movie screen; his eyes shared the scenes of comradeship and horror of battle as if it played out just days ago.
Howie Beach was one of many men, American, British, French, and Canadian who I met on travels for one week in June to honor on film and in the written word American Dads who stormed on to these beaches in an effort to save the planet from self-created demons and evil. These men had a call, and all recounted how they felt quite ordinary then, but part of something bigger.
“It was a mission,” Howie reminded us. “We were part of millions in uniform. Most of us figured it was a matter of time before we were dead men anyway, so we fought like mad.”
Norman Akers, a British soldier traveling to Normandy to be at a reunion of fellow British D-Day survivors was with his daughter, when I met him. He showed us an original photo of his brother’s shrapnel torn helmet lying upon a fresh mound of earth where he lay buried. The custom of the British was to immediately bury their soldiers where they fell. Later he was crossing into Belgium and then Holland during Operation Market Garden and came upon a bridge named “Akers Bridge.” He inquired and found out from a British officer, “Oh yes. That would be named for your brother. He was quite the hero, you know.”
Norman Akers looked proud, wistful, and sad all at the same time as his 83 year-old eyes strained at the graying photo of the bridge he was sharing with us; the sign posted as “Akers Bridge,” and what it meant to him to “carry on” as the surviving Akers brother of a war that consumed so many hundreds of thousands of British sons. “It seems like yesterday now,” he whispered. “I can’t understand why, but it is all so clear again.”
I thanked him for his service for us. Our British allies lost nearly one million sons beside our American forces in bringing victory to the cause. These two men both testified that they were not uncommon of other men of their time. They think of their dead brothers and comrades as the true heroes. But they survived to remind us of the cost; that FREEDOM WASN'T FREE. And now those “common men” of yesterday remind us of just how much one good man can do to make a difference in the world.
Our French hosts were generous in their regard for their American friends who gave their lives to liberate their country. American flags hung from the windows of Normandy countryside homes along with French, British, and Canadian flags.
A proud people, sometimes with disputes regarding American foreign policy, they lacked no gratitude for their hero “soldats Americain” who waded from chest deep water into withering enemy fire on D- Day beaches. More than 50,000 French civilians would also end up surrendering their lives to bombs made by Germans, and the Allies as they lived in the midst of warfare during those first terrible summer months of 1944.
The city I stayed in, Caen, France, is as charitable today in her regard for American, British, and Canadian sacrifice as it was 60 years before when nearly 95% of the buildings were destroyed and thousands of inhabitants were killed or wounded during the several weeks of fighting there between Allied and German forces.
Somehow everyone gathering during the week ending June 6th 2004 to honor our dead and living veterans of the great conflict understood that with the sacrifice, with something given up and lost, the pendulum of justice swung fully to the opposite direction offering a precious but sacred blood-stained gain in return.
In Howie Beach’s life the loss was friends and the innocence he had known as a teenager when he was called upon to become a killer of men. What he gained was a profound depth of appreciation for freedom, a love beyond measure for comrades, and a decency he would live the remainder of his life in spite of carnage and terror he experienced.
In Norman Aker’s life it was the same, plus the sacrifice of his beloved older brother. For French men and woman it was often their homes being destroyed along with family members being sacrificed for their final freedom.
One week earlier I had the honor of speaking to thirty wounded Marine’s at the invitation of personal friend at Camp Lejeune, NC. Now home from Iraq and Afghanistan’s battle fields, these men had gathered to listen to the Chaplain’s instructions on how to transform from warrior to peace-time dad and husband.
The Marines wondered aloud if we, the American citizen, appreciated them; if we cared. Many are husbands and dads, doing simply what they know their fathers and grandfathers did in World War Two, Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts.
“Will the American people be grateful?” one asked. “Will they let us finish our job?” another questioned. “I used to take my family for granted,” added a young staff sergeant. “I used to act like a drill sergeant to my young son. But when I got back from Iraq, and some of my friends didn’t, I just looked into his eyes and when he said ‘Daddy…and I…’” His throat closed tight on his own words. He wiped at the tears. “I’m not the same man,” he began once more. “I’ll never be the same man. I will never take my family or this country for granted again.”
Gratitude, love, honor. I witnessed these with our current crop of heroes, some Marines who want nothing from us but understanding and respect. And then on June 6th 2004, in an overflowing abundance of appreciation on French soil, hallowed and made sacred by men who died and also lived to tell their tales, I understood what soldiers of every time and conflict may have wondered when they asked themselves, “Will they remember me back home?”
I imagined in my mind’s eye a beneficent Creator offering an approval for a collective gathering of the spirits of the fallen whose bodies lay buried in the Normandy sod. Dads, sons, brothers, heroes all – I imagined another cerebration taking place near us; the dead among the ten thousand crosses, witnessing an earnest heartfelt homage being paid to them.
“Do they remember me back home?” I thought I heard whispered.
I knew the answer and whispered back: “Yes soldier, we do remember. We haven’t forgotten you. And we never will.”
THE D-DAY PRAYER by FDR:
James Michael Pratt - June 6, 2004
www.jmpratt.com
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