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About Us
This Memorial Day I've written a memorial piece for my
father, a soldier who did his part in keeping all of us free to have
computers and blogs and Starbucks coffee and organic food. If you like
living in America and all of our freedoms,
thank a member of that great generation who answered their country's
call. I didn't - answer my country's call, but I have always thanked
military and police officers and fire-persons and reservists - you know
whom I'm talking about, the men and women who make our impossibly
luxurious lives possible. Without them, the bad, thieving, sick,
immoral, vicious, violent, murderous, hateful people - for whatever
motivation - would rob and hurt and kill everyone that they could. Don't
ever forget that and live in a dream world, like my father used to tell
me that I lived in one. And he was right, in a way. But I surely live
in a dream world today, one where I speak to his spirit more often than I
spoke to him when he was alive.
When Viet Nam came I did not believe that we had any business
fighting and dying there and I said so. The draft had come down to a
lottery by 1968 and my birthday, January 22, came up number 336, I
believe. It would have taken the Red Chinese landing on the beaches of
Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, before they'd be drafting me!
My father thought I was a coward and a fool and said so, loud
and often. He was in charge of a squad of club swinging cops during many
of the anti-war protest riots and we fought almost as bitterly about
the issue at home. He didn't want to see his only son die in Viet Nam
but he believed that young men should do their duty.
Years later, when the truth of that horrible war became known,
my father apologized to me for his being wrong about my stance on the
Viet Nam war. It was the only thing he ever apologized to me about - not
throwing me out of the house for good when I was a teenager for no good
reason other than so he could be alone with his girlfriends, not for
looking at me like an accident waiting to happen and giving me no
affection because he was afraid that I would grow up mentally ill like
my mother had become, not for ridiculing my choice of wanting to be a
songwriter musician poet and never ever coming to here me play, nope.
Just Viet Nam and I'm glad he did.
That was him and I am me and I don't blame him for anything. He
did the best he could with what he had, just like I'm trying to do. And
he never drank around me - I never knew that alcoholism was the great
murderous problem it is because my father stopped the cycle and for that
I am proud of him. Plus, he provided for the children he had as best he
was able and lots of men do not even try to do that. They leave. My
father didn't leave my mother, she left him
I am so very fortunate to have lived and loved with Amy all
of these years and I've not only endured, I've triumphed, as best a
human can in the face of age and sickness and loss and death. No hubris
here, just realism of the Kali and Shiva side of life as well as the
Enchanted World side. Plus, Amy and I had Amy's mother, Jessie Spicer
Zerner as both a surrogate mother and a best friend. Losing her was
almost too much to bear.
She's whom I am in contact with when I do psychic readings. Jessie had been an Air Raid Warden during
WWII, making sure that all the lights in her neighborhood were blacked
out during air raid drills so that the German bombers couldn't have
accurate targets to hit if they came.
So on this Memorial Day I acknowledge my debt to my father and
Jessie and Amy's dad Ray, who was in the Army, and my uncle who also was
in the Army and was the only one of the group to serve overseas, and to
a lessor extent my mother and aunt. This generation lived with the
reality that we all forget - that Hitler almost won! The Japanese almost
won! Now we worry about our computers crashing. They worried about
dying in battle or invasion.
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