Boone's Big Adventure

•   My name is Boone Callaway. I'm 9. My family and I live in Sarasota, FL. I have a mom, dad, and brother named Rowan. But, Hurricane Irma is going to get a direct hit on most of Florida.We evacuated to Montgomery, Alabama, with our friends, the Harringtons. The oldest kid is James, the middle child is Charlotte, and the baby is Andrew.

  Today, I got a new fidget spinner since my old one rusted. We met another family with three boys and walked around the giant lake outside. The middle child noticed that there was a Pittbull with two different colored eyes. He was really mad at us, and was barking loudly. He almost jumped over the low fence! We walked around a few times then James noticed the owner hiding in a bush. He must have thought that we were stalking, because we went around one more time, and we noticed the Pitbull was gone! We went to tell the parents but the Pitbull was with them! We quickly walked to the parents and Mom said, "Let's go back to the hotel, that Pitbull scares me.''

  A few seconds later, the oldest boy of the family we met ran over to us and said, "Do you want to go to the pool with us later?'' "Sure!'' said Mom "See you later!'' We walked to the hotel and sat on the couch for about an hour.

   Mom took me up to Moma Keen's room. Moma Keen is my grandma, but we call her Moma Keen because she likes it. She got the name from our cousins when they were babies. They couldn't pronounce Karen, (Moma Keen's real name.) so they said "Keen''. When I was born, I said "Moma'' for some reason. So, now she's Moma Keen.

  We went to dinner last night with our friends. When we woke up, we were ready to go to North Carolina where our cousins, Greer, Lane, and Beau live. The car wouldn't turn on so we had to call someone. When Dad was talking to a really nice guy who eventually solved the problem, Mom was dealing with a mean guy who said he didn't want to help. Mom ended up scolding him. His boss fired him. When Mom went to the car to tell Dad the whole "Mean guy who got scolded thing," Dad had already called someone who solved the problem.


  The car worked, but the guy said we couldn't turn it off or it would break again. So, the whole twelve hours we were in the car, we didn't  turn the car off. We had to take shifts into restaurants and Target. When we got to Uncle John, Aunt Kristin, Greer, Lane, and Beau's house, we had to turn it off , so, we obviously did. Dad then figured out that the car still turned on! So we technically took shifts and added two extra hours for nothing!

  This morning, Greer said, "YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO TO SHCOOL! NO FAIR!'' Well, believe me, I want to be at school! Why would she say something like that? I told her about hurricane Irma. Lane on the other hand is the exact opposite of Greer. Greer mostly says "LANE!'' and "Sttttooopppp!'' Lane always says "GREER!'' and "I GET THE LIGHTSABER!'' Yeah. Lane loves Star Wars. He also likes dinosaurs, LEGOs, Ninjago, and Power Rangers.

  We had to leave Greer, Lane, and Beau's house for school. On the way back, Rowan and I watched movies almost the whole time. We also played on our tablets a lot. I played with my new fidget spinner a little, but the little time I did, I lost it underneath my seat. I didn't get it back until about a month later.

  It has been a while since I’ve blogged. But I SURVIDED HURRICANE IRMA! When we got back, we had to go back to school. But, I got in soccer with my friend from 2nd grade who moved to Pineview Elementary School. My last soccer game is on Saturday though. See! THAT'S HOW LONG I HAVEN'T BLOGGED. I will have to wrap up this blog though. But make sure to check out my other blogs that I will make soon. BYE!

Gold Stars, War Memorials, and Memories

                                       


My father's plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan on a cold December day in 1951.  Later, Mom received a letter of condolence from President Truman. Daddy was dead; Mom was a Gold Star Wife. I don't remember much after that except that my heroic mother gave us a Christmas that was a happy one.


But years later, the Vietnam War that divided the country also divided our family, Mom usually stayed out of out our arguments.....until she didn't. "Tom was killed for line on a map," she said with a quiet ferocity that slammed a silence over us all. And she then slung her apron at a chair and left the kitchen.


I am reminded of these things as we again face the cost of undeclared wars. October 2017. Four Marine Green Berets are killed in Niger.

Since WW II, Congress has not made a declaration of war. The now-called Korean War started as a police action, became a conflict, and only after we stopped combat by declaring a stalemate was it labeled WAR.

My adult children and I visited the Mall in D. C. one Thanksgiving Day in the mid 1990s as I'd especially wanted to see the new memorial dedicated to those who died in my father's war. The Korean War Memorial is heart-achingly beautiful. Tall stainless steel helmeted solders, metal rain capes seemingly moving in a wind, steel boots slogging through juniper bushes. Even though I knew that the Korean War was primarily a ground war—if for no other reason than I'd seen every episode of M*A*S*H—my first impression was unsettling.  Knowledge is one thing. A child's impression is another. This did not represent my dad's war. I still saw it through my 1951 eyes, a scene with enemy soldiers firing machine guns at my daddy's plane. "How silly of me," I thought and moved on. I then went to show my family their grandfather's name on the computer listing KIAs.

But there was no mention of Lt. Commander  Benjamin Thomas Pugh. When I did find his name, I saw that he is listed as a "non battle related injury." I was stunned.  Injury? What!

"His plane was shot down in a bombing raid!" I said. Even now, that label affixed to my dad's name makes me angry.  So what if no North Korean soldier shot his body? They shot his plane, and it crashed down a frigid sea. He froze to death before he could be rescued. So......just as killed as anyone else. Just not KIA. Officially.

Wars hurt the families of those who die during these undeclared wars, KIA or due to "non battle related injury."   They suffer, and a small part of that family dies as well. Their absence leaves a ragged tear in the fabric of life that is not easily  mended.

Historians discuss the cost of wars (or conflicts, storms, operations, whatever) in terms of "blood and treasure." My dad and many others today die in not-wars. I loved that Navy pilot I'd known until I was almost eight. I love him still. He may have been a Lt. Commander in the U. S. Navy officially, but he was a dad with an all-over-the-face smile who read the Sunday funnies with me, who savored The Katzenjammer Kids strip and laughed aloud,  who ate ice cream in a vegetable bowl and let me share, who helped me plant snapdragons in the back yard.....of the Amameda house.


That Alameda house where officers in dress uniforms walked up to the front door and knocked.


That memory comes in slow motion. Mom walks toward the door. We three kids--Tomi (5), Ben (2), and I are in the living room. The Christmas tree is in one corner. Mom opens the door, then grabs the door frame as if she's falling, and she sobs. The officers proceed into our living room. Mom collapses into a chair and pulls her apron over her face. We kids don't know what is happening,  only that it's something terrible. One of the officers stoops down by Mom. He is talking, but I cannot hear him. My mother is crying.  The other officer guides us three kids into one of our bedrooms. It is he who tells us that Daddy has been killed. "Did it hurt him?" I ask.  He tells me that he froze to death. "It didn't hurt," he says, kindly. "He froze to death. It's like falling asleep." But even a child knows that freezing cold hurts.


My brother now has all of my father's ribbons and medals in a frame. The gold star is there, too. It's such a tiny thing to represent an entire life, to represent the blood and treasure of a man: a son, a brother, a husband, a father. He's buried on Cemetery Hill, now called Woodland Cemetery. His simple headstone overlooks the Ohio River and the small Kentucky town where he grew up, where I grew up. The river moves on, and I, as the child of a man who died of a non battle related injury, in an undeclared war with North Korea--a war not really over-- thinks of the wives and children of these recent victims of not-wars.

When You Wake

There comes a time in everyone's life when a previously unseen truth smacks you in the face.  For me, it was after I'd been to Ole Miss for a college visit and saw shortly thereafter news coverage about James Merideth's experiences there. Ours were not the same experience. Until I saw what was happening to James Merridith on the nightly news, I'd walked through life in utter oblivion. I'd led a privileged white life, and like far too many of us, I'd skipped along, completely unconcerned about what had been happening just beyond the tip of my nose.

Kentucky was just as segregated as the rest of the South, but there was no signage in my hometown saying who could and could not go where. And so, at age seven, when the family car trip saw us at a Georgia service lesson for a rest stop, there was a scene. Caused by me. As Mom herded my sister and me to the restroom, I saw two signs: Colored. Whites Only. Spoiled, ignorant little white girl that I was, I pitched a hissy fit to go to the one marked Colored. I thought it would be prettier. Mom jerked me into the Whites Only, and gave me a quick swat on the bottom. After we returned to the car with me still complaining, Mom said something like, "Karen, the other one is an outhouse." The reason given. "Those are the rules." I never ever heard my mother say a racist thing, nor did I ever see her treat anyone badly. But, the rules were the rules. We didn't question them.

After that trip, I returned to life in a small Kentucky town that had one black couple of which I was aware. I didn't know that they had children as I'd never seen them. (They did, I learned as an adult, have children who went to the neighboring county's black schools.) Everyone just went along and got along in our very white world. I was reminded of this while reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

Harry is surprised that none of the Muggles notice as he and Hagrid slide through barriers or enter shops that only the Magic see. Hagrid explains that Muggles don't even know magic when they see it.  For too long, I didn't notice institutional racism when I saw it. The TV and movie world verified my world.

Time passed. My freshman year in college, I was thrilled to be asked to the Ole South Ball where males wore Confederate uniforms and we women wore gowns and carried parasols. I sat proudly on the back of a convertible with other faux belles, waving our white-gloved hands to crowds as we paraded down Lexington's Main Street. The police watched the crowd and kept the street open. I was so blind. Shortly thereafter, James Merridith tried to enter University of Mississippi and it took the National Guard. I've tried to atone ever since. But I cannot change what I did and didn't do then. Nor can any other man nor woman. But we can change what we do after we become less ignorant. We have to do everything we can to address a great problem that the Founding Fathers had to give up on. What the Reformation couldn't do after the Hayes-Tilden compromise. What the Civil and Voting Rights Act attempted and has been losing ground on lately. This country will never ever be what it is meant to be until we look at the evils of slavery and racism straight in the eye.

What has been winked and blinked at or even ignored must be faced. Slavery was a legal institution. Slaves helped build this great nation. We cannot pretty that up or gloss over it. We cannot pretend that it did not happen. There comes a great reckoning for us all, as people and a as nation. If it did not happen with a Civil War, after people of color fought for this country in every single war, after the Civil Rights movement, and after events and words in and after Charlottesville, you have to take a stand now. There are not two sides on some issues. You are either for or against white supremacy in this country. You are either for neo-Nazism and fascism or you're not. Being anti-KKK or anti- neo-Nazi is easy. But our President saw two sides, after which the heads of every single branch of the military responded that there were not two sides. You cannot be ho-him on this. Pick a side. The children of the future will be watching. And judging.

Butterflies Are Killing My Zen

I took up butterfly farming--as my 6-year-old grandson calls it--over four years ago. Initially, I did this for Boone and Rowan so that they would see the butterfly cycle, but, in all honesty, it was I who became entranced with our experiment.

Four years ago, I ordered a kit for the boys that included a net pavilion, a jar of butterfly eggs, and a bottle with a dropper of a liquid nutrition. I next made a huge production of reading "The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar" before I had the big ta-da moment of showing them the set up. I was excited, imagining their happy faces. No smiles. Disappointed questions. "What are those? Where are the butterflies? Is that dirt in the jar?" Like so often, I'd imagined this scene much differently. Finally, once the caterpillars hatched, the boys did become more interested. Butterfly release day was exciting for us all. However, the burden of the first hatch was completely on Samantha, and so I put the the science demo on sebatical.

Last year, Samantha's friend Hannah gave us a milk weed plant, and I kept the tented plant on my lanai. The boys came by every few days to watch for caterpillar appearances and logged each one that crawled to the top, when a chrysalis formed, then waited for a Monarch to emerge. We'd release each beautiful Monarch as it burst forth, and it was breathtaking. I was hooked.

That hatch included nine butterflies, and the next two had seven and eight respectively. Rowan, Boone, and I were repopulating the endangered Monarchs all by ourselves. Summer came and vacations began, but we began again in late August. These caterpillars are not adorable little pre-butterflies. They are vicious!

Nine caterpillars emerged, but by the time the last one arrived, it was getting ugly in there. They'd eaten the milkweed bare and had begun stem gnawing. The fattest guy (or girl?) was causing the stem to shake enough to endanger the well-being of  the little scrawny caterpillar. I panicked. I was a slum landlord. Maybe a third world dictator, keeping my people caged in a food desert. I called Samantha. With very little preamble, I said, "The caterpillars are trying to kill each other! Can you find me another milkweed?" I'm pretty sure she thought I'd gone over the edge, but she did find four plants for me. I'm growing my own milkweed now and know to put in two plants the next time.

 The scrawny one crawled to the top--too soon, I fear--because the fatter food bullies wouldn't give him a stem. I put in a branch of one plant in for those remaining, and at this moment, the pavilion is not very pretty--just ten or so nubby, leafless stems in the pot and nine chrysalises on the plastic top.  It's waiting time now.

But--and this is not easy to say--my foray into the natural world freaked me out this time. I had seen nature as I know it to be but pretend not to see. It's a wild world. A dark world. Survival of the fittest, even with my pre-butterflies. Instead of being still moments to cleanse my mind and soul of the world of politics gone crazy, I've seen internecine war among caterpillars. I'm pretty sure the biggest was at least a bully if not a war lord. Butterfly farming has not been beautiful and calming this time. I'd seen its ugly underbelly. Yes, I will release these Monarchs as they emerge, but I do hope I've not accidentally bred a bunch of super preditors. All the zen motivators are gone now.

At this moment, I'm anxiously observing the two blue beta fish (females) swimming around their bowl, hoping they don't kill each other.

Butterfly Farming? Not Always a Zen Moment

I have had a few causes that are life-long. My latest is saving the butterflies, one Monarch at a time. It all began with the most noble of intentions as do so many things in my life. When Boone and Rowan were two and four, I planned a beautiful nature awareness moment. I bought a large copy of "The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar" and a kit for raising butterflies. It included a net pavilion, a small container of butterfly eggs and drops for feeding. But, as all it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-times, it was a it labor intensive. Not for me. For Samantha. She had to oversee the project, keep the pavilion in her closet (that the boys invaded to check on 'my' project. Oops.

Remembering

          Growing up in Vanceburg, Kentucky, Decoration Day--as I heard it called then--was as much a day of family gatherings as it was for honoring the dead. Children never regarded Woodland Cemetery-- or Cemetery Hill--with any dread. Our ancestors were buried there, ancestors we learned and relearned about with each trip up the hill.

           My family bought our plot after my father was killed in the Korean War.Too soon thereafter, my grandfather, Rival Pugh, died--only in his 50s. Heart attack or heart break, my grandmother, Hame always said. These were the last plots in this part of the cemetery, the part where my paternal relatives were buried since the 1800's. When I was young, I took comfort in thinking they were all up there together.


           Memorial Day, as it is more generally called today, was known as Decoration Day when I was young, and adults knew well the holiday's purpose.  I did know that members of the family had fought in every war from the Revolution through the CivilWar (for the North and the South), as well as in both World Wars. It was something we leaned in passing, but war was never glamorized. Most children my age knew about war in an abstract way as our fathers were World War II vets. As kids, we even played war. How could we begin to take in the seriousness of any of this then?

          To me, Decoration Day was a holiday when we all went to Aunt Doris and Uncle Sam Johnson's who lived on Third Street, in the original family home. It was to this home that all came bearing covered dishes, desserts, and armfuls of flowers in a bucket. People came from Huntington, Charleston, Cincinnati, Ashland and points east and west.  Shortly after the foods were put aside, the motorcade to the cemetery commenced.



          Making our way a few miles up Route 10, the procession turned left and slowly wound its way up the hill, the place where Lewis County's founders had placed their cemetery.  Our family's resting places were on the very top, overlooking my home town, Vanceburg, which lay below, nestled between a bend in the Ohio River and the foothills of the Appalachians.  So stunningly beautiful in
May.  Serviceberry trees--their white blooms long gone--Redbud with its dark bark and heart-shaped leaves, parasol-shaped Dogwood foliage, majestic Oak and Maple, smooth-barked Beech, Sweet Gum with its broad leaves, Catalpas dripping their pods--we were wrapped in a comforting velveteen green that made hot days seem cool. The initial goal? Decorating graves.




      There was little sad about this to us children.  It was simply something we did. Running to the shed, we'd push and shove, vying to be the first to grab the handle of the green metal pump. Up and down. Up and down. The spout shot icy spring water into our metal buckets, which when full, we grabbed up and hauled back to the grave sites.  As we raced one another--water sloshing everywhere, half onto the ground, on our clothes and into our shoes, we only stopped when some adult said, "Slow down!" The men stood about, leaning on car hoods, smoking and laughing, egging on children and teasing their wives. Women arranged iris, roses, hydrangea, and whatever was blooming into coffee and Crisco cans, submerging the makeshift containers into a bit of soil just beneath the headstones.



          As adults worked and talked, we kids ran irreverently around the cemetery, admiring the elaborate markers on the oldest graves, then detouring to the outer perimeter to see where a distant cousin had buried his dog. He'd tried to have the dog buried near his parents. (Evidently, it was quite a dust up in the family.) In time, we'd dare one another to lie down in the oval bed-shaped markers topped with a cushy ground cover until some adult turned around and shouted, "Get out of Mr. James and Miss Olevia's graves. Right this minute!" And giggling, we'd comply.


         As many of the women--aunts, great-aunts, mothers, grandmothers, cousins--cleared up the detritus, our great-uncle, June Moore, took me--and whoever else was interested--around to each family grave and told us who they were and in what way we were related to them, stories I later shared with my own children. Often, Hame added her own perfunctory remarks in a series of non-sequiturs. "If this hill shifts much, Bess will slide on top of me one day." Or, "Look how far apart Mr.So-and-so is from Mrs. So-and-so are," and then she'd grin, with a meaning that I did not then get.


          Later that afternoon, back at the Johnson's, everyone sat around on walls, swings, porches, or in chairs, drinking cool drinks and feasting on country ham, fried chicken, green beans, cucumbers and onions in vinegar, beaten biscuits and yeast rolls. Throughout the afternoon, people wandered into the dining room to choose a dessert from a table full of pies and cakes. At some point, when we kids started to wreak a little havoc by pushing one another into the fish pond or locking another in the play house,  Uncle Sam distracted us kids with stories about cowboys he'd known, cowboys who'd defeated assorted bad guys with elaborate schemes. I was sure all of these stories were true.  He'd take a stick, draw in the dirt, and say, "Now I was up here with Wild Bill and Quick Draw Dan..." at which point he drew hills in the dirt with a stick. "And then we saw the Parson Gang," and he'd draw exes below, marking their location. He was very convincing. It took me years to realize none of these were true.  Sam Johnson was a mesmerizing story teller.


          After my grandmother and her generation died, my mother and step-father made this trip with us as did I with my children until I left Kentucky.  It's been over a decade or more since I thought about this, but I recently heard from my cousins after they'd been to the cemetery on Memorial Day.  A friend then messaged that he'd seen the beautiful flowers on the graves, and all these memories came flooding back.  Hame's up there now, as are Uncle Sam and Aunt Doris, and so many others.  Time passes.


          But when you celebrate Memorial Day next year, don't forget to share your childhood memories with the next generations. It is these memories that give all a sense of self, a love of place, and belief and understanding of purpose. Remember.