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.