Gratitude Doesn't Begin to Cover It

"This country will remain the land of the free so long as it is the home of the brave." ~ Elmer Davis

It didn't seem right to enjoy the day off without doing something to honor the reason holiday, so this afternoon I drove out to Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery and found my grandfather's grave marker. As with funerals, cemeteries are for the living, and as far as cemeteries go, this one is top of the line, a truly beautiful spot.

I stopped at Trader Joe's after the gym and bought a beautiful bunch of irises to leave at the grave, but not surprisingly, I forgot them on the kitchen counter. I felt bad about not having anything to leave on the stone; it seemed important to leave something, to show that someone had been there. As I was wandering around looking for the site, I found a pinecone that I thought might suffice.

The pinecone seemed insufficient though, so ... I really hope that this doesn't make me a bad person - I thought about it for a while, and I'm pretty sure that it doesn't...I borrowed a rose from an arrangement that had been left at a nearby stone by a less scatterbrained visitor. 

Walking around Fort Rosecrans, you can't help but be struck by the sheer number of veterans and their families who have been laid to rest there. I was also struck by the number of headstones on which the birth year was the same as my grandfather's but the year of death was 2006 or 2008. How great it would have been if my grandfathers had lived long enough for my siblings and I to really get to know them.

Most of the headstones were twenty to sixty years old and marked the grave of an older veteran who presumably died of natural causes. Some of the stones, however, were newer and seemed to suggest that the soldier had died in action. There was one stone in particular that gave me pause... He was two years younger than me, an apparent casualty of the war in Iraq. He would have been twenty-eight last week, and his loved ones had obviously been to his grave to commemorate his birthday.

 

As I have said before, the importance of service, the responsibility that we all have to country and to our fellow man, is something that is ingrained in my DNA. Both of my parents grew up in military families and themselves joined the Navy after college, both of my grandfathers fought in Korea and in World War II, and two of my uncles served in Vietnam, and so I have always had a deep respect for the men and women of the armed forces. Nothing has brought that respect into sharper relief than the past nine months that my brother has been laying it all on the line in Afghanistan. 

I have always been able to intellectually understand the magnitude of the sacrifice that the men and women of the military make, but it wasn't until it was my brother making the sacrifice that I really got it. One month from today I will be in Vermont welcoming him home for good, and until then, I hold my breath. Today there are hundreds of thousands of people holding their breath as they await the return of their brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, and children. So today I thank the many thousands of men and women  who are willing to lay down their lives to protect us, and I am equally indebted to the people who love those men and women, the people who are willing to hold their breath until their soldiers come home.

War should belong to the tragic past, to history:  it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future.  ~Pope John Paul II

Walking the Watershed

 
In an attempt to take advantage of Disney's Give a Day, Get a Day program and work toward accomplishing #9 on the list (volunteer for a charity I care about), Tom and I headed to Monroe Middle School in City Heights on Saturday for a community event put on by San Diego Coastkeepers and Outside the Lens. 

Coastkeepers is a group dedicated to protecting the beaches, bays, rivers, and watersheds around the county; they provided trash bags and set up education stations along the half mile length of Swan Canyon. Outside the Lens is "a youth media literacy program dedicated to celebrating the vision and voices of children around the world and across cultures." Outside the Lens also happens to be working on a three-year project called Water in Focus, "a global photography project that calls youth to action as they document the use, waste, conservation, and pollution of our most precious resource through words and images."  

Outside the Lens seemed like a really cool organization, plus.. Kids? Cameras? Around the world and across cultures? Conservation and pollution? Words and images? Sign me up! So sign me (and Tom) up I did. We showed up Saturday morning, trudged down into the canyon, and helped to set up OTL's education station where we, along with four other volunteers, were to encourage people to sign a petition in support of the Water for the World Act and try to get people psyched up for the photographic scavenger hunt that OTL had created.

Now apparently the photographer who was supposed to cover the event didn't show up, so after my very supportive husband grossly oversold my photography skills, I found myself reassigned.Tom and I spent the next hour or so walking around the canyon taking pictures of all of the kids and families who had dedicated their Saturday to restoring the canyon. 

 learning about seed balls

 over 275 pounds of garbage removed from the canyon!

planting native species 

pledging to conserve

After a couple of hours of cleaning and learning about the canyon, participants marched out of the canyon to Hamilton Elementary for a closing celebration complete with performances by the teen dance troupe Transcendance, a skit about the dangers of plastic bags featuring the evil villain, Bag Monster, and a delicious array of tamales.

Bag Monster

handing out tamales

All in all, it was a great Saturday morning, made even better by a stray puppy found wandering the streets around the school.

If not for Tom's frequent reminders of our landlord's no pets policy, I would have scooped this guy up and taken him home. 

Service

More than three weeks have passed since the earthquake that has devastated Haiti, and as is to be expected, the media has started to move on. After all, there is the pressing issue of whether or not Michael Jackson's doctor will be charged with manslaughter, and let's not forget, that we still haven't bled the Tiger Woods well dry. I wish I were exaggerating, but both of those stories are on the CNN homepage at the moment.

Despite the fact that the media seems to have the attention span of a gnat, there are still many, many people who have not forgotten about the tremendous suffering that continues in Haiti. I am very proud to be related to two people who are currently working on the frontlines to alleviate some of that suffering. My father and my sister Maureen, as part of a team put together by the Scripps healthcare system, have been working at a hospital in Port au Prince for four days now. They have limited access to email and most communication has been via text message, but my dad has relayed that the devastation is worse than one can imagine. They are busy and it is challenging work made more so by the lack of supplies, the impossible conditions, and the overpowering smell of decaying bodies, but there is no where else that either would be.

The importance of service to others has always been at the forefront of my family's credo. The idea that "of those to whom much is given, much is expected" has long been an essential part of how I see my place in the world. I cannot credit my parents enough for instilling this idea in me and in my siblings.

Some of my earliest memories of living in Vermont are of driving around Burlington with my siblings and my mom in our station wagon, going from restaurant to restaurant to collect the muffins, pastries, and breads that would otherwise be tossed out after Sunday brunch. After making our rounds, we delivered the bounty to the local food shelf. Later on, my mother modeled patience and compassion beyond anything I have ever seen when she took under her wing a very lonely, very chatty developmentally disabled woman, taking her everywhere from the grocery store to bingo night at the high school. I am sure that we grumbled some when we learned Carol would be joining us for Easter dinner, but it was another invaluable lesson in service. In high school, I occasionally joined my dad at the free clinic where he somehow found time to volunteer each week, and after college, I was lucky enough to join him on a medical volunteer mission to Haiti. Today, my mom volunteers each week at the homeless shelter where I worked as a social worker for the first two years I was out of college.

The point, if there is one, is that I feel so strongly that we humans have a responsibility to each other, to our planet, and the other creatures who share it, and I will be eternally grateful for the amazing role models I have in my family. Not just my parents whose star service credentials I have already enumerated, but my siblings as well. Mo is right along side my dad, forgoing all the comforts of home (including the yoga she loves so much) and staring disaster and the civil unrest that comes with it in the face in order to offer some comfort and relief to the people of Haiti. My brother Michael has begun a year of full-time service to his country and to all of us, saying goodbye to his girlfriend, his routines, and his security to spend ten months in Afghanistan performing a service that he firmly believes is his duty. My sister Meghan is forever fundraising, volunteering, walk-a-thoning, benefit-organizing, and generally supporting CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) and various other causes, yet she somehow still has time to keep up with bio pre-med coursework and look darn cute while doing it all, I must say.

Seriously, my family amazes me. I am so, so very lucky. I truly have been given so much, and thus I am dedicating myself to getting into a regular volunteering habit. It is, after all number 9 on the list.