Travel

Memorial Day 2025

/ howardshapiro / 8 Comments

I’m feeling very nostalgic this Memorial Day. The part of Memorial Day where we are called to remember our war dead. It used to be called Decoration Day and originated a few years after the Civil War ended. One in fifty Americans died in that war and Decoration Day began as a way to respect the sacrifice of those soldiers both North and South with the decoration of their grave sites in 1868. The term Memorial Day grew popular after WW I and became the official name of the holiday in 1967 with the intent of remembering the fallen of all American wars.

There is a part of me that likes the original name of Decoration Day. My mind goes to how do we decorate their memories. What are the terms of respect we can give them? I know they didn’t die for mattress sales. They died because they believed in our country. The values we hopefully all share of freedom for all, dignity and respect for each other, the promise of justice and due process, the pursuit of the right to be our truest selves without  government’s dictates.

I happened to have served in one of America’s Wars. The one we call the Vietnam War; the one the Vietnamese call the American War. When Eileen and I visited Vietnam as tourists ten years ago, one of the very impactful places we visited was the American War Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). Impactful, instructive and immensely sad – how this war that still makes no sense cost the lives of almost 60,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese and for what. How the government consistently lied to us – yes, the American government and it didn’t matter which political party. These men and women whose graves we decorate this weekend died for the idea of a country we are still struggling to live up to.

Yesterday I went to a street festival in our little town of Brevard, NC. There was blue grass music, food trucks with a lot of smoked meats, cotton candy, funnel cakes and open-air booths with t-shirts, ceramics, jewelry and lots of things we didn’t need. People were walking around with all kinds of outfits and hats – people of all different sizes, shapes, shades. One woman wore a Trump 2028. I sighed (deeply) and reminded myself – they died for her right to wear it – no matter how abhorrent to me.

So how do we remember and how do we decorate? With respect for their sacrifice; with a commitment to the core values of this country no matter what the administration; with a pledge to preserve the promise of our founding words – we are all created equally; we are all deserving to pursue our vision of happiness in whatever form or modality we choose. And it is all about “ we the people…”

So let me remember one – he died when a helicopter was taken down by the Vietcong in the Central Highlands. He was from the Upper Midwest, a JAG officer who befriended me and reminded me of  my rights as a Chaplain but that’s another story. He also gave me a gun and told me no matter what the regs said, I should keep it near even if I couldn’t officially carry it. His name lives inside of me as well as his kindness, caring and compassion. His memory is a blessing.

So eat hot dogs; find good sales; but remember, our freedom comes with sacrifice.

Father’s Day

/ howardshapiro / 4 Comments

I decided to get my walk in early this Father’s Day morning and let Spotify create a playlist for me. The computer decided “Forever Young” would be a good first song and did it know how ironic the choice was? This is the saying amongst my peer group: “Growing old isn’t for cissies.”  Ain’t that the truth, though I am blessed to be relatively healthy at this moment of my growing older. (Not that you would know it from the number of pills I count out each night and morning.) When I ended my hike, the algorithm had me at “Papa Was A Rollin Stone.” If you don’t know the song, it is about an absentee father, “wherever he laid his hat was his home and when he died, all he left us was alone,”

It got me to thinking about my father. His name was Charlie and when my mother and he were having a loving moment, she used to call him Sir Charles and he called her, Lady Marilyn (her middle name). In my memory, those moments weren’t as many as we would have liked them to be. My father worked hard all his life. He was a pharmacist who had his own drug store before I was born and then worked as a pharmaceutical rep and subbed several nights and weekend days in a drug store in Waltham, Mass. I remember him compounding meds and measuring potions with great care. I also remember him letting me play at being a soda jerk at the fountain where I made a great Lime Rickey. He catered to my mother during her illnesses. But after his car accident on the Maine Turnpike which put him in the hospital in a coma in Lewiston, Maine where we spent an upside-down Passover waiting to see if he would regain consciousness, there was an angry side of him that surfaced.

They say you are supposed to be slow to anger and quick to forgive. He struggled with that, and if I am honest, so do I (the quick to forgive part.) But I’m not going to talk about me – I’m going to remember the moment before my father’s funeral when we were alone in the chapel and Eileen took out three cigars from her pocketbook and placed them inside his coffin. You see my father never went anywhere without a cigar. The smell of cigar smoke, no matter what quality, brings me right back to him. And to the affable, personable salesman with a trunk full of samples that he felt were meant to be shared.

I took the picture above early in my walk this morning. The Lake is calm; the bullrushes (is that what you call them?) are straight and strong. The waters and the sky reflect each other in peace. So may it be with us.

Guardians of the Future

/ howardshapiro / 2 Comments

DSCN1981“If you keep digging, we’ll hit China.” That’s what they used to say when we piled sand upon sand, digging holes, building castles and no one worried about how tan we got. Well, we’ve just returned from China and in the sites and cities we visited, China isn’t at the bottom of a hole. China is very much in this world and China looks like the future. And it isn’t all panda bears and pagodas, forbidden cities and clay warriors.

It is smog and pollution; it is unbelievable traffic; it is concrete apartment buildings to house millions of people in cities the size of counties; it is sensory overload with neon signs in red Chinese characters and sky scrapers illuminated in colors and designs, flashing against the dark, proclaiming we are here: notice us; pay attention.

It is a proud people with good reason to be proud. It is a heritage of great beauty and symmetry with a wall that was built to keep the invaders out and the “cultured” in. It is rice and noodles and soy sauce; it is tea and Chinese beer that is one of the few things that taste good without ice. It is the “chutzpah” of the Three Gorges Dam, creating the largest hydro power station in the world, dislocating in the process 1.2 million people and submerging well over 100 towns and villages.

Don’t get me wrong. It is beautiful; it is exciting; it was a privilege to feel its enormous energy and see the delicate harmony ancient Chinese artisans created in the way they designed their palaces and gardens, their tombs and their temples. I loved it and if it weren’t for the flight would go back in a minute (ok, not a minute) because I know there is so much more to see, experience and learn.

Like: If we do not figure out how we create energy and keep polluting the air, then I invite you to taste the smog in the back of your throat and walk around with itchy eyes and wonder what is happening to your lungs. We were lucky. We had just a few days of pollution. But it was enough to make me yearn for the clear blue skies of a beautiful sunny day.

Like: If we do not figure out how to move people around efficiently and keep building rings and rings of roads and elevated highways decked two and three times above the streets, then I invite you to sit in traffic jams that rob you of your day and precious hours with family and friends. It was enough to make me fear for the future because this isn’t about China; it is about all of our 21st century cities.

Like: The Terra Cotta Soldiers have guarded the Chinese Emperor’s tomb for centuries. They have stood in a dark still silence, buried from sight and blind to the present. They are only clay, and yet, you look at them and feel their steadfast power. It makes me wonder: Who will guard our future? Who will vision a cleaner, clearer, brighter tomorrow for us and for our children? Or do all our politicians care only about the emperor and the trappings of power? Some of them talk about building a wall. To protect who from whom?