Today we pause to remember those who fought and died in America’s wars.
The best way to honor our war dead is to press for peace always.
As the hymn in one of my favorite Japanese movies goes, “May we live without destruction. May we look to tomorrow with hope. May peace and light return to us.”
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See the World! Podcast, Episode 6 — sponsored by See the World!, now available for pre-order.
(From the archives, Feb. 7, 2017)
It was the evening of Feb. 7, 1959. Dad took me and my two brothers for a ride in the car. I don’t remember the pretext or where we went. I just remember when we got home, Mom was sitting in the living room and a dog was sitting in front of her.
Lady was a good dog – a medium-sized, brown and white mutt with maybe a beagle’s face but a stub of a tail. She ran like the wind playing keep-away with a dishpan of all things. For most of the next 10 years she was an integral part of the family, joined eventually by a succession of cats.
There was only the one dog while we were growing up, but the three boys became men and keepers of other dogs.
When I write and share photos of our lovely companions, Willow The Best Dog There Is™ and Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars, I sometimes remember Lady, the patient and loving canine who introduced my family to the joy of dogs.
Three dogs through the years have especially seized my heart – Poppins, the little collie mix who appeared, abandoned, at the door of the radio station one summer day; Tucker, the undersized German shepherd who arrived in my arms (hands, really) as a tiny puppy; and Willow, who melts my heart daily (Yes, Dejah, you’re a special dog, too, but Willow got there first).
It all began with Lady, though, whose coming was so momentous that it’s the first event in my lifetime to which I ever affixed the exact date.
(From the archives, Aug. 24, 2020)
We timestamp our moments (or the computer does it for us), with each detail of the stamp representing the same journey at different paces. Our spot in time is part of a specific year, a specific month, a specific day of the week, a specific day, and even hours, minutes, seconds. There’s the signpost up ahead: You’re about to enter Monday, August 24, 2020. (Note to future readers: Edit in your mind to insert your actual day.)
It is a specific day filled with specific moments, all of which will never happen again (unless we record them, but even then, no recording captures the exact entire experience). We measure these moments as accurately as a timestamp can manage.
Time passes, or perhaps more precisely, we pass through time, one second at a time, recording imperfectly as we go. The photos or recordings help us describe or reconstruct moments, but life itself is a continuous journal in which we mark the highlights.
We play some part in determining whether it is a comedy or tragedy. In the strictest definition of the words, all lives are tragedies because they end in death, but we can have our share of comedies along the way in which love triumphs — perhaps not a wedding but a metaphor for weddings every day.
The choice is laid out — light and dark — in every instant, or at least every moment. Once making a defining choice, we measure our actions by how much we adhere to that choice. And there is where we find the shades of gray — how light or dark our shades of gray measures us like time.
