Hard to believe that war ended 100 years ago today.
As we've done for years, my mother and I are meeting at Applebee's for a Veteran's Day lunch. Applebee's provides free entrees from a reduced menu to current and former military members, and we like that. By the time you throw in dessert and drinks, and perhaps meals for non-veterans, I wonder if Applebee's loses any money on the deal. The wait staff, though, makes out like bandits! A Naval Academy grad friend is coming in tonight and staying for a couple days, if she gets here early enough perhaps she and I will go find dinner somewhere :)
The smoke from wildfires blanketed the area yesterday, to the point that you could look directly at the sun and not hurt your eyes. It doesn't look like today's going to be much better. The fires are a couple hours' drive from where I live, which tells you how much smoke there is.
The switch back to Pacific Standard Time was last weekend, but it was this morning that I made my own official recognition of cold weather. That's right, the cotton sheets on the bed went up into the closet and the fleece sheets made their first appearance of the season. Fleece sheets on a heated waterbed--no stacks of blankets, no feather ticks, just toasty goodness in a cold house at night. And the programmable thermostat heats the place up just before I have to get out of bed in the morning--who wants to wake up to a cold house?!
Those soldiers who lived in lice-infested muddy trenches 100 years ago would not believe such comforts could ever exist, much less that a mere schoolteacher could have them.
3 comments:
we take my wife's 96 year old father to Applebee's every year. He wears his WWII cap. With the meal he always orders a brandy Manhattan straight up with cherries. It takes a long time to finish the meal with all the vets coming over to shake his hand. It is quite moving.
Richard the Liberal
Happy Veteran's Day. I think about my father in law and my own Dad and how they served far too young. My Dad was just 19 when he was in charge of a PX in Nagasaki. He had a bunkmate with what we know now as PTSD. He would sometimes wake up at night and think my black haired Dad was a Japanese soldier. My father in law was younger still, enlisting at 16, then training on Maui before they shipped them off to places called Saipan, Tiannian and Iwo Jima. He got a Bronze Star for "being stupid." Then I think of my sweet brother in law who went to Vietnam, came back unscathed, then died in a car accident a year later in what may or may not have been an intentional act. When I was in Krogers the other day I struck up a conversation with an older man wearing a Vietnam Vet hat. He stepped away for a minute, spotting another Vietnam vet and went up and said "Welcome home." Evidently that is how Vietnam era vets greet one another. I never knew that.
I didn't, either.
Post a Comment