#211 – Dick Bernard: Creating History, "Fact" vs "Story"

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“History: 1) an account of what has happened; narrative; story; tale.”
Websters New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 1979 edition
July 8, about 6 p.m., I arrived at Bismarck ND, where I was to attend a French in America conference. My father was 100% French-Canadian, and I’d just completed a 500 page book on his family’s history, so the conference was a great reason for a trip (and an excellent experience, by the way.)
I was tired, but before I checked into my hotel I wanted to find the site where General Henry Hastings Sibley and troops had reached the Missouri River in the summer of 1863. A long-ago relative, Private Samuel Collette, had been one of the 2800 troops under Sibley’s command. I found the site (General Sibley Campground 3 or 4 miles south of downtown Bismarck at the south end of Washington Street). The next day I was at the ND Capitol grounds, and saw a large pie-shaped monument on the grounds. It turned out to be a map of the last part of the Sibley campaign. The Sibley venture had been, apparently, a very important event in the history of North Dakota, which was to become a state 26 years later. His unit had been in what is now Bismarck July 29-August 1, 1863.

Map of the last portion of the Gen. Henry Hastings Sibley Campaign in 1863


There were some likely facts leading to my interest: I had Samuel Collette’s military records from 1862-63; I now had seen the end-point of the campaign he’d been part of, and knew the many stops in between Minnesota and the Missouri River.
Beyond this, everything was story: the varied interpretations of why Sibley went west, and their meaning etc. etc. Such it is with history: as the above definition suggests, history is simply a collection of stories, perhaps illuminating, perhaps confusing or deliberately distorting.
The family history I had written, which was many years in the making, is many things. But a primary celebration of the history was the recording of stories, particularly of my common folk ancestors: a collective story which included their own recollections, or second or third hand recollections, or documents or written records. I was lucky in that I had a cadre of past and present family members who seemed to have an interest in recording people and events, including through photographs. But my reality is similar to most common families: people lacked literacy, or the time, or the interest, to record things that later generations might find interesting or significant. And every family has pieces of their tale that they’d rather not tell – the hidden and untold story is part of every narrative, without exception. So, for me, the task became assembling a puzzle from assorted scraps of evidence. A very significant portion of those 500 pages were stories recorded by various people over many years. I didn’t call these “facts”; rather they were “stories”. I acknowledged the missing pieces in the book….
On the final afternoon of the conference, I “skipped school” for a couple of hours, just to drive around Bismarck, a city I had last visited 25 years earlier.
Driving down the Main Street of the town, towards the Missouri River bridge, I saw a most unusual sign:

My curiosity was peaked, and I set out to find this Memorial. There was a monument (below) and on two plaques at this Memorial were two very carefully written narratives defining the composers view of the “Global War on Terrorism”. The words on the plaques are reprinted below, and speak for themselves. The Memorial was dedicated September 11, 2009.

Global War on Terrorism Memorial


Were these indelible words representations of “facts”, or were they, simply, some unnamed person’s “story” – a carefully written attempt to fashion a heroic one-sided narrative of a troubling and divisive time in United States history? This “War on a Word” (Terrorism) almost ruined us economically, and severely tarnished our reputation as an ethical society through things like sanctioned use of torture. We lost standing as a part of the world community; and reputation lost is difficult to regain.
Did the permanent recording of heroic victorious words in bronze, in a public space, with a sign showing the way to them, elevate them from “story” into “fact”, more significant than other stories? Or were they, rather, simply an attempt to diminish or eliminate other stories, perhaps even more factual, from the community consciousness?
Earlier, in driving around Bismarck, on individual lawns I saw Peace signs on a couple of lawns. I wonder what their opinion of that Terrorism Memorial might be.

Peace sign in Bismarck ND July 9, 2010


Let the conversation continue.
*****
The Story as told by the plaques at the Global War on Terrorism Memorial:
#1
THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERRORISM
Operation Enduring Freedom
Operation Enduring Freedom began October 7, 2001, in Afghanistan following al-Qaeda’s attack on the United State on September 11, 2001, and has also included operations in the Philippines, Horn of Africa, Trans Sahara, and Kyrgyzstan. In October, 2006, NATO forces, led by the United States and United Kingdom, assumed command of Coalition forces. Afghani Presidential elections were held in October, 2004, and parliamentary elections followed in October, 2005. The enemy continues to resist the elected government of Afghanistan and Coalition efforts to secure freedom and democracy for Afghan citizens.
Operation Iraqi Freedom
Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20, 2003, with the liberation of Iraq. Coalition forces from 40 nations participated in military action in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. By mid-April, 2003, Coalition forces began restoring civil services, despite violence aimed at the new Iraqi government and Coalition forces. In 2006 the first democratic elections were held. On June 29, 2009, United States forces withdrew from Baghdad and other cities across Iraq.
“We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom” Dwight Eisenhower
#2
Memorial to the Fallen
in the Global War on Terrorism
This Memorial is dedicated to the members of the United States military and Department of Defense civilians who lost their lives in the Global War on Terrorism. It is a place where families, friends and fellow citizens can reflect on the lives of the Fallen and remember their service to our country. It was funded through the generosity of businesses, organizations and individuals throughout North Dakota and across the United States. The memorial is a joint venture between the City of Bismarck and the North Dakota National Guard.
The Battlefield Cross
The Battlefield Cross has been used as a visible reminder of a deceased comrade since the Civil War. The helmet and identification tags signify the Fallen. The inverted weapon with bayonet signals a time for prayer, a break in the action to pay tribute to the Fallen. The combat boots represent the final march of the last battle.
“We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we we will always be free.” President Ronald Reagan

#210 – Dick Bernard: A Farm Freezer, Haiti, the Oil Spill and US

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Monday, July 12, was the six month anniversary of the catastrophic earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and area in Haiti.
That same day, I spent a few hours helping my Uncle and Aunt, out at their now-empty North Dakota farm. (They’ve lived in a nearby town for several years – an option they don’t like, but the only reasonable option they have. They are at an age, and their medical conditions are such, that they could no longer survive independently on this place where they lived as brother and sister for over 80 years. My uncle is 85, his sister, my aunt, turns 90 a week from today. Their house remains much as they left it, but they don’t live there, only frequent visits.)
One of Monday’s tasks was to empty their freezer which included frozen produce from their garden, some of it ten years old. They knew it had to be done: my uncle, in fact, brought up the idea. That produce in that freezer would never be used by anyone, including themselves. But the notion of wasting this food was reprehensible to him. He was nine years old during the worst year of the Great Depression in ND, 1934, and he knows what it is like to have nothing.
We unloaded the freezer, and put its contents on the back of his old pickup truck, and drove down to the family garden – a one acre plot, used by the family for many years. The garden is still used by the couple, but only a tiny portion of it is planted. They don’t have the energy to garden more, and even if they did, the produce would go to waste: for them, it is unusable.
During the Depression and other bygone years, there were eight people or more who depended on that garden, but the prospects of even a small crop to harvest and process for the winter were not always good. Once experienced, one tends not to forget such experiences.
Those bygone years, the normal process was to pressure cook and can the food, in sealed glass jars. There was no electricity and thus no freezer; there were no plastic bags – a product of the petroleum industry. Kids now-a-days would be hard-pressed to even imagine the planting/growing/harvesting/preserving process which people of my generation grew up with. Forced to live that way again, most of us would not survive, literally.
Down at the garden we emptied the plastic bags which had held the frozen produce of the farm: spinach, corn, beans, peas, broccoli, onions, apples, and on and on and on. Considering it was ten years worth, it really wasn’t a lot of, as my uncle would say, “wasted food”.
While he was sitting on the tail gate of the truck, opening and emptying the bags, he was lamenting the waste, here, while so many people were starving elsewhere. No, he didn’t think that frozen bag of kernel corn should be sent to Haiti; more so, the notion of waste was on his mind. He wants to help, but how? People his age get endless appeals for funds from all manner of agencies. My advice to him: throw them away unless you know the group is good. So many are simply scams.
I doubt that he – or I, for that matter – thought about the amount of electricity that had to be consumed to keep that food frozen….
Haiti, and that waste at the farm unexpectedly came together for me a little later in the day. Back at my temporary home in the local motel, I flipped on the television, and happened across a CSPAN program recorded earlier that day: a panel discussing Haiti six months after the earthquake. The program is well worth watching. It had not occurred to me till that moment that July 12 was indeed the six months anniversary of that humanitarian disaster.
Back home in the Twin Cities the next day, there were several e-mails with varying perspectives six months after the quake in Haiti. Mostly, though, Haiti is out of sight, out of mind, even for people like myself who have a great interest in Haiti.
More on our minds, currently, is the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico: hundreds of millions of gallons of crude oil befouling the Gulf: oil which was to be used for the fuel that got me out to that North Dakota farm, and back; and which was used for to manufacture those plastic bags we had just emptied.
Mostly, for most of us, life goes on. “Don’t worry, be happy”. We’ll always have it all.
Don’t count on it.

From the garden, back to the garden


The farm garden, before an acre, presently only a small plot.

#206 – Dick Bernard: Reflecting on the American Flag

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Monday of this week I delivered a 500 page family history to the printer. The history is of my Dad’s French-Canadian family, in North America since the early 1600s. That’s a lot of history. The 500 pages can only be a summary.
The last photo I selected and inserted was the one below, the dedication of a flagpole at the Apartment Community of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville IL. The dedication was Memorial Day, 1998, six months after my Dad died. The flagpole was donated by we siblings to honor the memory of our Dad, Henry L. Bernard, and his brother Frank Bernard, who went down with the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. The first flag hoisted up the flagpole – the flag pictured – had 48 stars. It had draped the casket of Dad’s Dad, another Henry, in 1957. Grandpa had served in the Spanish-American War in the Philippines 1898-99.

At Our Lady of the Snows, Belleville IL, Memorial Day, 1998


I have often seen the flag used as we used it in 1998: to remember somebody’s service to country. Whether the cause served was just or unjust (a very legitimate matter of debate), the question of service is less debatable.
In more recent years, particularly post 9-11-01, there has been (in my opinion) a reprehensible turn in the business of “Flag” as a litmus test of “Patriotism”. The Flag has become a weapon to be brandished against those with a different point of view. In the recent series, the “Story of US” as portrayed on the History Channel, I saw General Tommy Franks talking about the three F’s as basic American values: Family, Faith and Flag. The portrayal, and choice of portrayer – Franks – turned me off. It was definitely an “us vs them” portrayal; the primacy of military might, viewed through the flag.
Like it or not, military is part of every one of our family’s lives. I’ve been military myself. I didn’t go in to set about killing someone from somewhere else, or being killed, but that could have been my fate. I went in because I knew I’d have to go sometime (the Draft), and best to get it over with. Luckily, my decision to join when I did made me a Vietnam era veteran, when service in Vietnam was a coveted assignment…. Not all were so fortunate.
In the previously mentioned history, I noted that all of my male ancestors who came to Nouvelle France (Quebec) were in one way or another military people. They had other skills, yes, but what got them on the boat from France to to-be Canada was mostly related to military – to secure the new territory for France, and then protect it from intruders.
One of my first ancestors in what is now the Twin Cities joined the military unit whose job was to chase the Indians back across the Missouri River in 1863. He was the first ancestor to visit what is now North Dakota. His service record is about the only history I have of him. Luckily his unit was not involved in any massacre of the Indians, but nonetheless, he was part of the force that took the Indians land…and gave my ancestors theirs.
I’m sure the flag was involved there, too.
This little writing won’t dispose of the flag issue, or of the issues relating to War and Peace. At the same time, I think all sides need to think this issue through.
I close with a memory of a photo I took in a farmyard in Finland in June, 2003. We were on a cruise of the Baltic countries, a few days later we were in St. Petersburg, Russia, a month after George W. Bush had been there. This was not long after the war on Iraq commenced. One of the people on the cruise seemed a particularly belligerent America Firster. We were touring a Finnish farm, and the guy was there, wearing his American Flag jacket. The facial expression of the Finnish girl in the background, in context with what I saw before that photo, is priceless.

Finnish Farmyard, June, 2003


Have a good fourth of July

#201 – Dick Bernard: Sock Monkey takes a trip

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Back in April, my son Tom alerted me to watch for a package containing a Sock Monkey. It was in Michigan, he said, and our home was its next stop. When I received it I was to let people who knew his daughter (thus my granddaughter) Lindsay see the monkey, and write a note or such wishing well her and her-husband-to be Jeffrey.
We talked by phone, and Tom mentioned that the monkey was his idea. He could remember seeing such a monkey at some relatives house years earlier, and he thought it would be a neat idea to have a Sock Monkey carry a message of good wishes to the newlyweds.
It was certainly a neat idea.
Sock Monkey came, and I got into the task far more so than I had expected.
Sock Monkey went out to North Dakota to the ancestral farm, and took a photo with Tom’s grandmother’s brother and sister.
Back in the Twin Cities, the Monkey got around, visiting all of the places that Tom had lived and gone to school before he migrated to Colorado many years ago. Sock Monkey posed with Tom’s sisters and their families, and with friends.
I worried about misplacing, or forgetting, the Monkey in its makeshift home – a small packing box.
Memorial Day we began our trip west via the Black Hills with an overnight in the famous Wall S.D. Sock Monkey got free ice water at the Wall Drug (well, figuratively speaking); made a call out west from the phone booth in front of the drug store; posed with the dinosaur, and was pretty generally was a pretty typical tourist. Walking through the Wall Drug with the Monkey I found a whole rack full of Sock Monkey’s! The friendly monkey had a family reunion, right there on the Main Street of Wall!
We drove on, through eastern Wyoming, where Sock Monkey (below) took a moment to perch on the dashboard and take a look at Wyoming’s scenery.

Sock Monkey visits Wyoming


Safely in Denver, I delivered Sock Monkey to the father of the bride, who, at the reception presented the Sock Monkey to the new couple. I gathered this was a surprise gift, but one of the highlights of their wedding weekend.
At the gift opening the day after the wedding, one of the highlight gifts was a Sock Monkey stained glass window made by one of the relatives in Michigan. It was a hit.
That Sock Monkey was a very simple idea.
But what a wonderful one!
Related posts: here and here.

Sock Monkey gets undivided attention at the Wedding Reception


A wedding gift: Sock Monkey in stained glass!

#200 – Dick Bernard: Fathers Day

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Happy Father’s Day all you Dads, and those whose role is or has been or will be that of “Dad”.
Wikipedia notes, without any fanfare, that this is the 100th anniversary of the observance of Father’s Day, it’s first observance on June 19, 1910.
I’ve been around long enough to have been a Dad not far short of half of those 100 years. Most Dad’s days have been pretty normal days; once in a great while comes one that’s not so hot; and if you’re really lucky, every now and then comes one that is a peak experience, not always on the day itself.
This year was one of those “peak experience” years, two weeks ago Friday, when I watched my oldest son give away his daughter, my granddaughter, to her new husband, Jeffrey. It was one of those “chest-swelling, button-splitting proud” moments for me. Leaving the Chapel, people in the pews applauded we grandparents of bride and groom, and I self-consciously waved. It’s a difficult experience to describe.
This Father’s Day also marks the end of a year spent trying to summarize nearly 400 years of my French-Canadian father’s family history. I’ve been going through boxes of documentation, recollections, letters, pictures: mother’s, father’s, sons and daughters, extended family…. For me the dates of birth, marriage, death are not nearly as interesting as the stories of these assorted names who are the roots of my particular family tree. The Bernard family story includes all of the elements of the story of most every family – memorable things, things you’d rather not have known. It’s just how it is.
Father’s Day came to be as an appropriate recognition somewhat akin to the earlier and still better known Mother’s Day. Father’s Day was, apparently, a woman’s idea at the beginning.
There can be endless discussion of why Mother’s Day came earlier than Father’s Day, or why it seems to still have a higher place in the pecking order of observances even today, but those can take place off to the side, and individually.
Being “Father” or “Mother” has traditionally and likely always will mean different roles and responsibilities which evolve over time in each family. (I’ve been both father and mother on more than one occasion – that is another story.)
Recently, a wonderful relative, now 90, wrote me about a long, long ago happening in her home when she was five years old. Her Grandpa – her Dad’s Dad, and my Great-Grandfather – had come to live with them on the farm after his wife had died. One day he fell down the steps and had to be hospitalized. After some time in the hospital, a decision needed to be made about him coming back to the farm for his last days, or remaining in the hospital. He died in the hospital a few months later. To this day there remain some residual feelings about whether or not Great-Grandpa’s last days were handled appropriately, and there are still conversations many years later. (In my opinion, there is no question: his last days were handled very appropriately.)
Agnes, with the directness a person her age is entitled to, wrote about the decision making process at that time: “Mom could not take care of him. [She c]ould not depend on Dad or brothers to help. Farm men don’t spend their time in the house.” And so it went. Another dilemma in the country, repeated endless times, people doing the best that they could under not always the best circumstances.
As we deal with the complexities of our own lives, a Happy Day to All, especially Dad’s.

#199 – Dick Bernard: A New Cuyahoga Moment?

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Previous posts on this topic: here and here.
For years, when I’m “out and about” in our world I’ve made it a practice of picking up the local newspaper, however humble or exalted.
So, when we were about to leave Denver on June 6, I picked up the Sunday Denver Post, and when I wasn’t in the drivers seat, took time to read the news. Colorado and mountain west personalities and U.S. Energy Policy are very close kin, and the Post had two most interesting articles which can be accessed here and here and speak for themselves. Tidbit: The first words in the Post lead article say “[from] its creation in 1982, the Minerals Management Service…has been a conflicted agency.” In 1982, Department of Interior was headed by James Watt in the administration of Ronald Reagan, but it is impossible to find this most basic fact in either the articles or at the MMS website.
But as the deepwater catastrophe continues in the Gulf of Mexico, my memories go back to a memorable trip I took in early August of 1968.
I was a junior high school geography teacher back then, and the opportunity arose to get in my Volkswagen and take a solitary tour through parts of the northeast U.S. and southern Canada. I set a goal (which I met) of spending no more than $10 a day TOTAL for food and lodging, and off I went, with my starting and ending point of Columbus, Ohio. I wanted to see some of the geography about which I was teaching. I remember the trip vividly. Here is the thumbnail synopsis: (I was young, then, and I could accomplish a lot in what were some very long days of trying to see everything possible).
First night, Charleston W Va, including seeing a giant chemical plant on the Kanawha River
Second night, Fredericksburg VA on the Rappahannock, after seeing giant coal trains just into Virginia, driving by the military complex at Norfolk-Newport News; Colonial Williamsburg
Third night, some unremembered town in the exhausted Anthracite mining district of Pennsylvania, after driving through Washington DC, which was not recovered from the 1968 riots after MLK’s assassination; Gettysburg; a tour of the Hershey Chocolate Factory (we watched Hershey Kisses being made!)
Fourth night, Elmira NY, once a home of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
Fifth night, some forgotten tiny town near Lake Ontario in northern NY after a day of mostly just driving, after a morning visit to Corning Glass Works in Corning NY. (My vivid memory here was checking in to the hotel, and asking for a room key, and getting a blank stare. They didn’t have keys…. This was just one of many examples of my high quality accomodations.)
Sixth night, Pembroke, on the Ottawa River in Ontario, seeing rural Ontario to and from, and log rafts on the Ottawa River.
Seventh and probably last night, Lockport NY, on the old Erie Canal, and not far from Niagara Falls.
The last day I drove along Lake Erie very early in the morning, and reached my destination of Oil Creek State Park near Titusville PA when no one was around. This was ground zero of American oil in 1859. Much to my surprise, a pump was running and a trickle of oil was coming out of a spigot. I rummaged in a garbage can and found an empty Iron City beer bottle, and filled it with Pennsylvania crude, turned on the screw cap and went on to see United States Steel in Pittsburgh before finishing the last leg to Columbus and home.
It was a warm day, and I forgot a basic physical fact: heated oil expands. I came back to my car and the oil had exploded the beer bottle, and I had a mess on the floor of my back seat. It was my first oil spill….
But that doesn’t explain the title of this post.
A year later, in Cleveland OH, the Cuyahoga River caught fire. In the same time frame, Lake Erie became almost a dead lake, and concern was raised about those wonderful phosphate rich detergents that not only were remarkable cleaners, but devastated the environment. We were killing ourselves. The American People Noticed.
In 1972 Congress passed the Clean Water Act.
It occurs to me that my little jaunt as a young geography teacher in 1968 was a look at the beginning of the end of the good old days of our business as usual U.S. industrial history. But changing habits is a terribly hard exercise.
Maybe the deepwater catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico will be the U.S. “Cuyahoga moment” of 2010. We are the ones who can make it so.

#196 – Dick Bernard: Lindsay and Jeffrey's Wedding

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Okay, okay.
Here’s a slide show of a wedding with 84 slides, and I took them all. (Simply click on the first photo in the group, and then you can play this as a slide show, as you wish.)
Do cut me some slack. After all, it was granddaughter Lindsay’s wedding, June 4, 2010, at the beautiful Red Rocks in Morrison CO, with other events in Denver suburbs Lakewood and Littleton. We had a wonderful trip, and time.
Some of you know the “players” in the slide show; others may know no one. I’m the white-bearded, white-haired guy…there aren’t many of us to pick from! In the photos are my siblings and my kids and many of their spouses. At the wedding, a few deer were a delightful distraction (the man officiating reminded us that he knew the deer were there, right behind him, but we were in the chapel for a wedding!) But how can you not notice?
Simply Sloppy Joe’s is there in the slides: it is a small, well known popular walk-in eatery in Denver area, the enterprise of Lindsay’s Mom, with her Dad’s help. The business name says it all. A few standard varieties of Sloppy Joe with a weekly special. Even Sloppy Joe cookies. They’re a local institution, well known and loved in the Denver area, at the corner of Pierce and Mississippi in suburban Lakewood. Check them out if you’re in Denver. If you know someone in Denver area, let them know of Simply Sloppy Joe’s!
But this slide show is about a wedding. And it was, truly, one of the nicest, best weddings I’ve ever attended. Sure, I’m biased. But it was.
In the images are some clues about the high points of the wedding.
There’s a sock monkey who appears in a few places. “Sock Monkey” travelled all over creation, and appeared in lots of photographs on both sides of the new family. The images ended up in an album, an enduring message about the strength of family. One of Jeffrey’s relatives in Michigan made a stained glass sock monkey. Cute. I took my sock monkey duty seriously. Along the monkey went to North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado. Sock Monkey even stopped at Wall Drug for a glass of free ice water!
I liked the refrigerator door display in the new couple’s townhome. It’s in the photos. Lindsay loves the Beatles, for a very personal reason. I told her the Beatles were just hitting it big in the United States when her Dad was born in 1964.
Instead of the traditional unity candle, the couple used a natural theme, a young sapling, for that portion of the ceremony. The simple wedding cake followed the natural theme. A story teller told a marvelous story. At this wedding, good followed good followed good….
They recently closed on their townhome, and a criteria was that its cost be low enough so that it could be paid for if only one of the two were working. Good practical old-time kind of thinking.
Marriage is often viewed as a destination.
More accurately, I see it as the beginning of a trip along a road which is not always predictable.
I wish Lindsay and Jeffrey well.
From what I experienced last week, they’re off to a good start.
Congratulations and best wishes!
A pre-wedding post on the upcoming wedding is at the blog for May 31, 2010.

#195 – Dick Bernard: A Reflection as I prepare to travel to a wedding.

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Have a good Memorial Day.
I press “send” and we leave suburban Denver and my oldest granddaughters wedding on Friday June 4.
All such events are significant. This wedding is far more so than most for me.
Lindsay’s grandma, my first wife, Barbara, died at University Hospital, Minneapolis, when her Dad, my son, was 1 1/2, July 24, 1965. She was essentially terminally ill (kidney disease) during our entire marriage of just over two years. She was only 22. Her need for a kidney transplant then is why I live in the twin cities today. She didn’t live long enough to get a kidney. Had she received the transplant and lived, she would have had to stay here as the possibility of organ rejection was monitored. In those years, they were doing transplants, but the process was very new, and done in only a few hospitals in the U.S. University Hospital was one of those few.
Time flies. This last week I’ve been out taking photographs of the places I/we used to live in this area. I’ll deliver them to my son and granddaughter in a few days.
Tom and my first home after Barbara died was at 1615 S. Ferry St. in Anoka, just a block from the Mississippi Bridge. It has always been there, just a small very old house alongside a very busy road. Sometime between my last visit and yesterday it was torn down and replaced by two houses set back behind a fence which probably serves a function as road noise barrier.
Properly, the address, 1615 S. Ferry St., which we knew as just another old house, was long past its prime, even then badly needing rehabilitation.
Nonetheless, for some reason you understand, I don’t look at it in quite the same way.
I wrote a short letter to Lindsay which I’ll give her when I get to Colorado. I suggest that she call up John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” on YouTube. That’s the song with the lyric, “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”. Take your pick of versions.
We humans face a quandary every day: look to saving the future, obviously; but live as well as possible today, as well.
Life, indeed, is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
But one is cautioned to not neglect or dismiss the future either…the generations which follow deserve our very serious attention to that as well.
That is a job, I have observed, that we do not do well….

#192 – Dick Bernard: Heather 'n me 'n The Smooch! Project 'n The Rave!

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The evening of May 4, my wife and I spent a delightful time out at Aronson Field in suburban Lakeville. Here a group of irrepressible adults engaged in the game of softball. These are all adults who are called “disabled”, one of them my Down Syndrome daughter, Heather.
This night was billed as a pre-season “scrimmage”, so each player had at least one time at bat. Heather’s turn came, and she got a single. She was not relaxing on the way to first. She was running!

Heather enroute to First Base May 4, 2010


At First Base, she was all business. Soon she was standing on Second. Another ball was hit, and she took off, rounding Third enroute to home plate. Unfortunately the ball got to the catcher before Heather did and she was out. But she was pumped up. What a gal!
Heather is 34 now, and I thought back to many dark days before 1980, during which she went through, to my recollection, several heart procedures at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis under the care of Dr’s Katkov and Singh. She’s lived with an implanted pacemaker since before 1980. There has been a remarkable advance in technology since those early days when the pacemaker had a single pace…running was no option for Heather. Today’s technology allows variable physical activity, and Heather takes good advantage of it.
Heather and I shared another piece of “fame” lately.
On April 6, the local St. Paul affiliate of ABC, KSTP-TV, aired a two minute segment about The Smooch! Project. March 24, Heather and I happened to be at The Smooch! Project ‘gittin our pitcher took’ at the time KSTP-TV photo journalist John Gross showed up to film a potential feature. He expertly distilled an hour on-site into this segment which lasts less than two minutes. At the KSTP website there is a link to The Smooch! Project. Do visit.
I knew this photo session would be special, and it was.
I wasn’t prepared for the personal emotional content of the hour in the studio. It brought back nearly 35 years of “Heather ‘n me”, her sisters, and brother, and Mom.
It’s time I write Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis, and Dr. Amarjit Singh of Children’s Heart Clinic across the parking lot from Childrens, to tell them of this link, and to revisit long past years.
Heather played softball last year, too. There are blog posts about my feelings here and here.
There were many times in the past 34 years where I could not have imagined ever being involved with the Smooch! Project with Heather; or watching Heather play softball. That’s likely where the emotion came in.
Thanks to Bonnie Fournier of Smooch! Project, the Heart team at Children’s, my family, and many, many others, I’ve had my opportunity.
Now, Heather, “Go RAVE!”
And to Bonnie, all best wishes for great success with The Smooch! Project!

Heather's Jersey, May 4, 2010

#185 – Dick Bernard: Easter (and other) Postcards from the olden days

/in , /by

Happy Easter.
Some years ago I convinced my Uncle to loan me his collection of old postcards, sent to the rural North Dakota farm where he and my mother and many others grew up. The cards were mostly from the early 1900s, and in the end I scanned over 150 of them, and wrote a commentary about them which is still accessible. (At the end of the commentary I suggest that the cards are still viewable, but they are no longer available from that source. Maybe another spring project…. See paragraph below.)
I comment on the Easter cards in the post. Succinctly, about 40% of the cards had a religious theme, while the other 60% had more seasonal or secular themes. This surprised me somewhat because this farm family and its root family was very religious. And these cards were mostly from the first decade of the 1900s.
Following are samples of the cards, secular, religious.
There are many others. (The on-line album listed at the article is no longer available. Here is a link to all of the postcards, including the Easter themes.)
Have a good Easter, or spring day, or whatever is your wish or belief on this April 4, 2010.