Remembering, Memorial Day 2017

Memorial Day is a Federal holiday, observed the last Monday in May, to honor the U.S. soldiers who died while in military service.  The son of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan put it this way:

His life was not taken: It was given, to his country.

I served in DaNang, Vietnam, from February 1969 to February 1970 and then I came home. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the mall in Washington DC has etched on its black surface the 58,307 names of Americans who died during the war there. They came home draped in an American flag.  It includes these two names:  

Barry Lynn Brown, Killed in Action, Vietnam, 1968.

James Clifford McKittrick, Missing in Action, Vietnam, 1967.

Why are these two men so significant to me? Go here and I'll tell you.

Enjoy your long holiday weekend with family and friends.  And the next time you step into a voting booth think carefully about your choice.

Rock On. And Zapped!

Long Live Rock!  That's me at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.  It was a major stop on our big road trip, along with the Cleveland Museum of Art.  On the right in the picture you can see the slanted roof of the museum, these words are in the front plaza.  It's fun to wander through this museum, looking at all the videos and displays.  

Our favorite thing to do is to find the screens where you can listen to the top 100 songs from any one year and see the videos or film clips that go with them.  There are also special booths where you can listen to songs by groups/individuals that were what we call "a one-trick pony".  In other words, there was one hit song and never anything else significant produced by that group/individual.  Our favorite example is this song, which did wind up being appropriated by several other artists and used in a movie. You can't listen to it without feeling like you are in the 50's. If you were a boy you had sideburns, if you were a girl you were wearing a poodle skirt.

Zapped!  All I was doing was riding my bike and I'd stopped to look at the graffiti (above) by the side of the road and I was attacked!  He flew right onto my chin and inflicted major damage.  In this picture he looks a little small but honestly, he was about 2 feet long with a huge wingspan and an enormous stinger.  Susan inspected my wound when I got home, listened to my sad saga, and just then just picked up her newspaper and kept right on reading. A cold, cold woman. See if I decorate her hard-boiled eggs again!

Did You Miss Me?

Did you miss me? I'm hoping my Blog Wrangler will post some more pictures but for the last hour she's been wrangling with the new computer and the old one and she said she's forgotten everything she learned before we left and Photoshop is refusing to cooperate and she doesn't want to talk about it any more. And I don't want to talk about the fact that my cellphone, for which I do not give out the number, has rung 4 times today with robocalls from Connecticut, Georgia and other places I don't know anyone.  I'm really tired of them leaving voice mail and even though I now know how to block call numbers they still get through, like cockroaches.

We've been on the road for 24 days, 3852 miles on the car and only 4, maybe 5, OK, 6 times did we scream at each other.  Briefly.  Justified.

That's me on the first day, at our favorite rest stop, Buc-ees. Buc-ees are only in Texas and I wish they were everywhere.  Susan loves Buc-ees because: 1) every Buc-ees women's bathroom has 30 stalls, 2) each stall has a door that shuts and you flip a lever and on the outside it changes from saying "vacant" to saying "occupied" so you don't have to peek under to check for feet, 3) each stall has a dispenser with 4 separate rolls of toilet paper so they never run out and 4) each stall has a Purell dispenser in it. And they are always clean!

One stop was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland where this quote by Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys caught my eye.