Happy . . .

During WW II, we received a telephone call that devastated Mommas. She threw herself across the bed in the downstairs bedroom and cried like an injured child.

Dad explained that Watson had been killed when the wing came off his flying boxcar. Watson was her sister's son and Mommas had a colored portrait-style picture of him, wearing his uniform, on her dresser. He was a better looking version of a young John Wayne.

I didn't know that a flying boxcar was a cargo plane. I didn't know why he had been flying in a boxcar. I only knew what I could see: that a telephone call like that one could distort one's reality into awful, new directions.

People are living with that knowledge, today. And today, we honor those who have given all they posessed so that we may be free to keep this holiday however we wish.

God Bless them and those who love and honor them.