Remembering the future . . .

Today is Memorial Day . . .

. . .the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we remember those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is to say, for the rest of us. . .We are haunted by the holes those deaths ripped forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born. . .For many of us, we know only what we've been told, and often there has been little of that.

As for me, I remember my uncle Eugene Wilson “Gene” Young – a B24 “belly” gunner who flew from England over Germany. He survived World War II and lived until his 70's with a partial lung. He knew many who died in the skies but to my memory never talked about them, preferring to joke about the living.

Those who survived are now in or near their 100's and they, along with those who died those untimely and unimaginably horrific deaths, gave up not only their lives also their futures to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.

As fascism rears its ugliness again, now spreading across the world and our own homeland, we would do well to remember not only those who served and died for us, but why. And, it wouldn't hurt to remember this every day of the lives we now have left.

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my

chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow. . .

I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much

with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life. – Robert Desnos