[Rhodes22-list] Memorial Day

L. Sailor watermusic38 at yahoo.com
Wed May 31 12:31:30 EDT 2006


That was beautiful, Brad. Thanks for sending it to the
list.

Elle

--- brad haslett <flybrad at yahoo.com> wrote:

> OK folks, last post I promise.  I'm trying to wind
> down for bed after a wonderful Memorial Day weekend
> in
> New England.  Fan and Cora flew into Boston and
> joined
> me in Manchester. We drove along the New Hampshire
> and
> Maine coast and let Cora dip her toes in the
> Atlantic
> for the first time.  Here's something I stumbled
> across in my bedtime reading.  Ben Stein, in
> addition
> to being funny, is a pretty good financial advisor
> as
> well.  Brad
> 
> -------------------------------
> 
>   Memorial Day Diary 
> By Ben Stein  
> Published 5/30/2006 12:10:33 AM 
> 
>  
>  MEMORIAL DAY -- My brain is just exploding this
> morning with emotions about Memorial Day, and I have
> to get some of them down or I will lose what's left
> of
> my mind.
> 
> Saturday night I was in Arlington, Virginia, at the
> annual meeting of the Tragedy Assistance Program for
> Survivors. This is a fine group founded by Bonnie
> Carroll to get widows, widowers, mothers, fathers,
> and
> children of men and women who have died in the war
> on
> terrorism together. Last year I spoke and there were
> about 500 people in the audience. Saturday there
> were
> 700.
> 
> Bonnie Carroll, a stone genius, spoke gloriously.
> Magnificently. An angel of oratory. A staggeringly
> beautiful woman named Joanne Wrobleski, who had just
> been married to her husband for two years, spoke
> with
> power and rage and healing as a projector showed
> photos of her wedding to her astonishingly handsome
> husband. It was enough to melt a marble pillar.
> 
> A woman next to me named Mrs. Beard told about
> losing
> her son, Bradley. I asked her if she worked at a
> job.
> She said she used to be a bank teller, "but that
> after
> I lost my son, counting people's money didn't seem
> that important anymore." Her husband, a homebuilder,
> looked distraught. Their beautiful daughter played
> the
> piano and sang songs she had composed of peace and
> loss.
> 
> At every table, we passed around boxes of Kleenex
> continuously.
> 
> I spoke briefly and talked about how the loved ones
> missing from this dinner were the only people doing
> meaningful work in the world today as far as I could
> tell. The media try to tell us their work has no
> meaning, and when the media do this, it's almost
> like
> grave robbing.
> 
> Anyway, I spoke and then I hugged widows and bereft
> mothers for about an hour and a half. A man named
> Nolan Rappaport who has been a close friend since
> 1956
> accompanied me and took photos. He was very patient
> and when I thanked him for his patience, he said,
> poetically, "I don't feel as if the time was lost."
> 
> When I got back to Los Angeles, I started to read a
> book I can't finish, called A Writer at War by
> Vassily
> Grossman, a correspondent with the Red Army
> newspaper
> during World War II.
> 
> The part I can't get past is the atrocities of the
> Germans towards the Jews when they took the Ukraine
> in
> the early part of World War II. One incident just
> haunts me every day.
> 
> The Germans came upon a kosher butcher. They asked
> him
> if he were really a good butcher. He said he hoped
> he
> was. They brought his two small sons to him and
> said,
> "Show us. On your sons."
> 
> I keep putting the book down at this point and
> wondering, "Why did God bother making creatures as
> wicked as man?"
> 
> Then I picked up a book of interviews with Bob
> Dylan.
> They were interesting. He's a clever con man and
> huckster and poet of the obscure and sometimes the
> meaningless. It's called The Essential Bob Dylan
> Interviews, edited by a man named Jonathan Cott. I
> recommend it. I also have with me a book called
> Heart
> of a Hawk about coping with losing a son in Iraq.
> It's
> by a woman I met at the event on Saturday, a lovely
> soul named Deb Tainsh. I have already read it and
> it's
> major stuff about loss and faith and pain.
> 
> And I thought, well, here's Bob Dylan, making jokes
> and making fun of his interviewers and he's a Jew.
> And
> here I am sitting at my computer with my dogs
> snoring
> nearby and my palm trees and my bottled water. And
> I'm
> a Jew. And why do we -- Jews and Gentiles here in
> America -- get to do what we do instead of being
> killed by the Nazis or the Islamic terrorists?
> 
> Because of Bonnie Carroll's husband and Bonnie
> Carroll. Because of Joanne Wrobleski and her hero
> husband. Because of all of the men and women at
> Arlington National Cemetery and on ocean floors and
> blown to bits in forests and muddy trenches. Because
> God made Eichmann, but he also made Bradley Beard
> and
> Dale Denman, Jr.
> 
> More are dying as we speak every day in Iraq and
> Afghanistan.
> 
> How do we ever make it up to them? How can we ever
> pay
> them back? Above all, by taking the loved ones they
> left behind into our arms, into our hearts, and
> loving
> them forever. And by making sure that when they die,
> their deaths are known to have meaning.
> 
> We would be nothing without them. Nothing. And
> somehow
> I feel as if my brain were still on fire.
> 
> 
> Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer
> living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. 
>  
>  
> 
> 
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