Not all people have the physical courage of Saint Francis, but some do. I’m an Army brat proud of my father’s service to our country and proud of my son Evan who began yesterday pre-Ranger School training at Fort Bragg. I received just now a copy of this email my brother Sean sent to our father. It deserves a wider audience. Hat tip to Sean Royal Ellsworth, West Chester, PA.

Dad,

I want to share this personal, related story. Last month while boarding a plane in Dallas to fly back to Philadelphia I observed a young E-1 Air Force Airman take a seat in coach about three rows in front of me. Many fellow citizens were thanking him for his service and just being generally accommodating to the men in uniform on the flight (you gotta love Texans!). As the flight attendants were preparing for take off I saw two of them approach this young serviceman and could tell they were asking him for something in particular. It was taking some coaxing on their part so my interest grew then I saw an older gentleman stand up in first class as the young airman walked toward the front of the plane in his combat dress unform. These two men exchanged a heartfelt handshake and I then knew that the older man was giving up his first class seat for him. This struck many people in the plane as they observed this and the older gentleman received some high fives as he made his way back toward the back of the plane. Afterward as we walked toward baggage claim in Philly I shook the older man’s hand and thanked him for his excellent act of citizenship and leadership that made such a lasting impression on so many on the flight. He told me he was a young E-1 Airman once and served 22 years in the Air Force and will never forget these young servicemen and women.

Share these stories. Look for these divine appointments in your day as they can make a lasting impression on those around you. Veterans Day is in 35 days. Maybe you are being “called” to do something special this fall for somebody in your neighborhood or community that is serving our country or has a son or daughter serving.  Maybe next time you are in an airport and you see young servicemen in line for some food or something to drink you tell the cashier to put it on your tab.

From the family diary of 1997 —

Aaron loves big work trucks of all sorts, just as Evan did. His favorite is a backhoe. This fall he asked Victoria, “Where is God?” She answered, “In the sacrament, in our hearts, in good fun, in church, in heaven.” He countered, “He is on a backhoe, a cement truck, a bulldozer!”

At St. Bartholomew’s [in midtown Manhattan, my first cure], worried at the communion rail that the priest with the paten was passing him by, Aaron asserted in an uppercase voice, “I WANT THE CHRIST! I WANT THE CHRIST!”

At Christmastide he confided, “I want to go to church to see Joseph, Frankenstein, and Mary!” glossing thus the holy family, the gifts of the magi, and Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus.

In today’s Yale Daily News

In his popular course Cold War, history professor John Gaddis opened his lecture Monday by saying that it was the saddest day to hold class since the day after September 11, 2001. Gaddis told his students that he considered holding a moment of silence before starting class.

“But what I really want is not silence,” he said. “I want you to call home and tell the folks at home that you’re okay and that you love them.”

The word soul in Hebrew is nephesh. In Hebrew literature, nephesh means throat. Whatever else we make of words figuratively, and there is plenty to make of them that way as I’m about to show, we take literature literally for the same reason we take music musically. We start there so that it can take us somewhere.

The Hebrew language is earthy and imagistic, thick with metaphor, and nephesh is characteristic Hebrew. Think about your neck. It connects what thinks with what feels, to say nothing of everything else. Your neck or throat is where the wind goes up and down between your nostrils your mouth and your lungs. It’s a place where everything comes together. Everything has to go between the head and the body. Cut your neck and it’s all over. There’s nothing. No nephesh no soul, no ‘you’. Notice that the word itself doesn’t have anything to do with the invisible. It’s visible. It’s the neck, the throat.

On 22 May, 1986, my first child was born at 3:42 in the morning. After a long day prior of contractions and a longer night of labor, when our nurse and our obstetrician recognized that the baby was in severe distress, they rushed blessed Victoria and me too into the operating room where I watched my son Evan delivered by emergency caesarean section. When the coast was clear, I went out to a waiting room and closed the louvered doors of an old-fashioned phone booth to call my parents. The phone rang once, and again, then my father picked up and said hello. At the sound of his voice, all that I’d wanted to say I couldn’t say. I couldn’t speak. Something was stuck in my throat, and it was this recognition: All my life I thought I knew my parents loved me, and now I know I had no idea.

In the English language there are idioms that have nothing to do with Hebrew. Stuck in the throat isn’t one of them.

Home for the holidays in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on a quiet Christmastide morning, a young man rises early to make sticky buns. He makes a triple batch with extra pecans. He likes sticky buns that way. This is before the man had children and learned that children do not like nuts on stuff, even on sticky buns.

But this story takes place years ago. These sticky buns were made before the kids were made. These buns were the kind that make your mouth water. The man’s mother and father and his brother and sisters, his wife, they would all enjoy them with breakfast.

The man’s father gets up to take another sticky bun. He wants to melt the dab of butter he’s put on top of it. And there, at the Amana Radar Range, he makes the kind of mistake a man makes when he has forgotten himself. Enjoying his family, the father forgets himself, forgets his wife’s instructions on how he is to use the microwave. And he is detected.

The mother says, “Oh Bud, that’s not how you do that!”
The father’s countenance falls. “Oh Ann” he pleads, “this is too how I do it. And what difference does it make?”

[The mother takes the cup of coffee out of the microwave, places a napkin over the cup, sets a saucer beneath the cup, and puts it back in the oven.]
“The difference,” she says, pointing her finger, “is that I’m a perfectionist and you’re not!”
“You’re right, Ann. You’re a perfectionist and I’m not. And that’s why I married you and you married me!”

This is as quick-witted as any repartee between Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or in Holiday. His father’s retort sounded like something Mr. Grant might have said to Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth.

“That’s why I married you and you married me!” the father said, hopping an inch up in the air as he said it. He put the exclamation point on the sentence not the way you do when you are angry. He put the exclamation point on his sentence the way you do when you tell the punch line of a joke.

The father tries to wrap his arms around his wife. He tries to kiss her. She is vexed, not ready to quit a fight she knows she cannot win. She gives up in his arms and gives in to his kisses. And the young man who did not yet have children laughs so hard he spills his coffee.

The Road goes ever on and on 
Down from the door where it began. 
Now far ahead the Road has gone, 
And I must follow, if I can, 
Pursuing it with eager feet, 
Until it joins some larger way 
Where many paths and errands meet. 
And whither then? I cannot say.

— Bilbo in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings

It’s on DVD now, the 8mm home movie clip of my sister Vicki and me on Christmas Day in Okinawa in 1963. We are on the porch in front of our house, the door wrapped like a gift in silver foil, a big red ribbon on it cruciform and tied up in a bow. I am wearing my new holster and my six-shooters, my leather vest and cowboy hat, and she’s decked out in her new white dress and her new Mary Janes. Her hands adorned by her new white gloves she’s slapping me about the face and I’ve got my guns in my hands applying the butt-ends of those pistols to the top of her head which is coiffed appropriately for the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Then the silver door opens. And there is our mother in her cat eye glasses, lipstick and Christmas dress. She bends over and, pointing to the camera, says something to us — this was 8 millimeter film so there’s no audio. It’s evident she’s saying that Daddy is capturing all this on film, for we look both of us in the direction of the camera and quick as Jesse James I put my pistols in their holsters the way the gunslingers do, Vicki adjusts her dress while our mother fixes her hair, and the two of us put our arms about each other just so and walk arms around each other down the sidewalk to the car, the picture of two loving, happy, camera-fearing children.

What were we fighting about? We had come to blows over my sister’s anger at my having lost the key to her brand new roller skates. So we were not fighting over nothing.

Ten years later, a door opened to the Chapel of the post where we lived, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. It was held open by the invitation of a friend, and under the auspices of the chaplain at the time, an Episcopal priest. The girl who went through it is not the same girl who came out. Vicki started to recognize that her life was lived under a beneficent eye, and not just the eye of her father looking through a camera. She began to live Coram Deo, as the monks use to say, before the face of God.

In response to a school assignment to write about his favorite place, Evan wrote:

Evan 11/28/94

My favorite place is with my Grandma and Grandpa, and Mom and Dad. I like it because Grandpa goes hunting and brings back deer meat.

The sound of my Grandpa’s house is logs crackling in the fire. The smell in my Grandpa’s house smells like Japanese cooking. It smells like Japanese cooking because my Grandma is 100 percent Japanese. Her cooking tastes fabulous!!! When I am with my Grandma and Grandpa, and Mom and Dad my heart is happy.

Gabriel ‘skyped’ us this morning from the Kazuaki and Tomoyo Meiri home where he’s living this summer in Yokohama. [Follow his blog.] Behind that video chat there’s a story to tell.

My Japanese grandfather lived in New York City in the twenties. When I was at Saint Bartholomew’s in New York, I used to look out the window of my study onto Park Avenue and through a gimlet eye imagine my ojiisan standing there on the corner of Park and Fiftieth. Chances are good that he came into Saint Bart’s. It would have been one of the most physically imposing buildings on the Avenue back then. And he was a religious man. Later in life, he taught Bible studies in Yokohama.

He was a bespectacled and bookish linguist and something of an eccentric. Every morning he would pick up his violin at precisely seven o’clock, play it for fifteen minutes, not a minute more nor a minute less, and put it down whereupon my grandmother would hand him the lunch she’d made for him and send him out the door. He kept an English dictionary in the breast pocket of his coat, and every day on the train to work he would take the dictionary out of his pocket and read it. He was already fluent in English; he liked words is all. When my mother Akiko speaks to my children about her father, she always tells them, “Your father is just like him.”

His name was Yoshiharu Tamaoki. Born in Tokyo, he came to America to study first at Berkeley and then in the City of New York, a city he would always love. That doesn’t surprise me. New York, to those who love it, is like malaria. If it gets in your blood it stays there the rest of your life.

He lived in New York for more than five years. He never would have left it, my mother says, except for a telegram that came one day from Japan.  MOTHER DYING. STOP. MUST COME HOME. STOP. Where he lived in the city, the life he left, what ship he boarded: we don’t know any of these things. His papers about these years were lost in the war. But that message — words — changed his life. He dropped what he was doing, gathered a few things, not least himself, and exchanged virtually everything he had for passage home.

What he discovered when he got there was that his mother was fine. The telegram was a ruse made up by the family. They figured it was the only way sure to bring him home. Unless loneliness for her son can be counted as illness, his mother hadn’t been sick at all.

Yoshiharu didn’t return to America. He settled down. He married Kura, my grandmother, a country girl from Nagano. They began a family. Nobumasa. Kimiko. Akiko. Yoshiko. Eichi.

Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States of America. My mother remembers how that news rushed to her house. When the story broke neighbors and colleagues of my grandfather descended on the Tamaoki home because everyone who knew him wanted to know what Yoshiharu-san thought. “He was reading the newspaper. He looked up from his newspaper and he said to them, ‘We will never win this war,’” my mother remembers. “There was a lot of excitement in the room, everybody was excited but not my father. He was so serious,” she says. Some thought he was being a pessimist. “No. I’ve lived in America. I’ve seen America. I know America. If you could know what I know, you would understand. We will never win this war.”

As he pointed out to me the other day, Billy Shand and my mother have something in common. Each of them has had an ancestral home destroyed by the United States government. Billy’s great great grandfather, The Rev. Peter Johnson Shand, was the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Columbia, South Carolina from 1833 to 1886. When Sherman burned Columbia in 1865, Trinity Church was spared but the rectory was burned to the ground. Eighty years later, Yokohama was made a moonscape by a high-altitude B-29 bombing on May 29, 1945. The Tamaoki family had already evacuated to the country. Yoshiharu had stayed behind. When he woke up on the 29th he felt sick. He didn’t have to go to work that day. But he went anyway. A man of discipline and routine, I imagine what happened. He picked up his violin at 7 o’clock, played it for fifteen minutes, set it down and thought, “I might as well go to work.” That’s where he was when the daylight bombs started falling on Yokohama.

When the bombing was over, he patted his chest to make sure he was all there. He still had his life and his dictionary. It took him days to find his house, not an easy thing to find when all the landmarks are gone. And finally when he did find it he found that all that was left of it was a pile of rubble in the middle of which was a bomb. It hadn’t exploded but it brought the house down.

So as I said, Gabriel ‘skyped’ us this morning from the Meiri home in Yokohama. He’s living with the Kazuaki and Tomoyo Meiri family while he continues Japanese language studies at the IUC. Tomoyo’s mother is my Aunt Kimiko.

Thanks to a friend, Victoria and I have heard a number of writers read from their works. Several years ago we heard Christopher Buckley read AC in DC, a comic short story he’d written about the advent of air-conditioning in Washington. With Laurel and Hadi Bahar at this year’s literacy event, I noticed that Buckley had written a memoir and I asked Laurel what she knew of the book. Her brow furrowed. “He airs dirty linen,” she said, disapprobationary.

I google Losing Mum and Pup this morning and find Growing Up Buckley wherein Chris begins by describing his mother’s death in the hospital. Coming to the end of that description, he writes:

Soon after, a doctor came in to remove the respirator. It was quiet and peaceful in the room, just pings and blips from the monitor. I stroked her hair and said, the words coming out of nowhere, surprising me, “I forgive you.”

Not often do the words “I forgive you” cause a priest of the church to utter fecal indictments. My parents are both living. Their home is on Lake Gogebic in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but they are with us now, here at the ready for the high school commencements of Gillian (Friday morning at the National Cathedral) and my nephew Sean Jr. (Friday night, in West Chester, PA). Dear reader: If ever I write a word about my mother’s deficiencies or my father’s, please. Come over to my house. There is a baseball bat in the carport shed. Get it. Find me. And knock my brains out.

Being a Christian, I stand under the authority of the divine law that enjoins us to honor our fathers and mothers. That is now an oddity, sheer mindlessness in this era of overweening self-analysis which eagerly and remorselessly begins by rooting one’s own problems in one’s parents’ shortcomings, thereby dismantling any honor supposed to attach to them. But for any serious Jew or Christian, a most solemn interdict lies across this path. “Honor,” the commandment says, and our Lord Jesus affirms, “honor thy father and mother.” And Jesus, quoting from Exodus 21:17, adds something not taught in Sunday Schools. “He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die,” (Matthew 15).

What does this mean? It means this: Whoever it may be who bears the responsibility for pointing out to others a mother’s faults it is not her son.

Writing about my Great Aunt Mena recently, I used a biblical figure of speech, “singing the Lord’s song in a foreign land”. That phrase is used in Psalm 137, a prayer in a collection of prayers that, like the Bible, wasn’t written for children:

By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, ”Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!

C. S. Lewis says this about Psalm 137. “I know things in the inner world which are like babies; the infantile beginnings of small indulgences, small resentments, which may one day become dipsomania or settled hatred but which woo us and wheedle us with special pleadings and seem so tiny, so helpless that in resisting them we feel we are being cruel to animals. They begin whimpering to us ‘I don’t ask much, but’, or ‘I had at least hoped’, or ‘you owe yourself some consideration’. Against all such pretty infants (the dears have such winning ways) the advice of the Psalm is the best. Knock the little bastards’ brains out. And ‘blessed’ is he who can, for it’s easier said than done.”