Out-boxed

"Look, John," she told me, there in her office, on that muggy and rainy afternoon in Florida. "You live inside your head."

Then, I wasn't sure what she meant.

From the window, the palm fronds were waving in the summer storm. The tropical rain falling in a typical Florida torrent. Dark, low skies lurking just over the Live Oaks; the rain blurring everything like a dense fog.

The summer storms always transformed Florida, they changed it, sometimes into a place that was more like Jurassic Park. Like Neverland. Like a Universal Studio set. For me, it was this transformation that felt like escapism. It compelled imagination.

Through the rain and the sound, through the furious otherness, one could imagine sailing on The Ghost, as Humphrey van Weyden in Sea Wolf, toward Pitcairn Island. Or on Bligh's Bounty, at the helm, fighting the furies of the ocean, looking for the whale.

For this I knew - I liked the rain better than the sun.

"John," she advised, "you can't stay in there forever. I want you to meet people, maybe take some chances." She had told me this before, in other ways, that I couldn't be content to push feelings and memories into the background; where they could become lost and harmless and impotent.



The other night, I visited friends in the city, in their eclectic urban condominium. I hadn't seen them in over a year.  Their home was astonishingly filled with the collectibles of a museum. Everywhere, there were tributes; to literature, film, architecture, and history. I could have looked through their shelves and walls for hours.

In the kitchen, on their deep charcoal wall, was a watercolor painting of a Polar Bear. My friend swept her arm out across the wall and cheerfully said, "And doesn't this look so wonderful here?"

At first, I didn't recognize or remember it. But I had painted it and gifted it to them some years before. It was puzzling. It had somehow fallen into the outbox of my mind.

Just like so many other things.

She was right - I was living in my mind. And it was masterful at protecting me, hiding things from me. Sorting and filing and filtering.

I eventually came to understand that the other side of perception and sensitivity - of tuning into music and feelings, of knowledge and words and the metaphysical self - was a vulnerability.  And to me, it's still dangerous.

But I'm trying. When I looked at the Polar Bear, my friend's beaming smile told me that it was OK to remember.

And that's one of the reasons I write these posts. I need to start keeping some of the sweetness and the music from getting pushed into the outbox with everything else.

I can't so easily forget the Polar Bear, lost to Pitcairn Island.

Maybe I need to quit wishing for rain every day.

The hurts that heal

Wish you were here, I wish you could see this place
Wish you were near
wish I could see your face
The weather's nice, it's paradise
it's summertime all year
and some folks we know, they say hello
I miss you so
Wish you were here



I still have a faint mark on my finger - where my older sister nicked me with a butterknife.

I was no older than seven or eight, and we were in the bunkbed at our lake house. From the top bunk, I'd reach down, trying to pull her blankets off or pull her hair or grab her book.

But one time, she was ready for it. She told me later - OK years later - that she was sorry. The crying and ensuing punishments are just faint memories, unimportant in the cosmic time-stream. But I do remember the band-aid. It was way too big for my seven-year-old pinkie and didn't really help.

That butterknife cut left a small, almost indiscernible scar. And I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

Years later, my sister would ask me to show her. Or to show it to one of her boys. Or a niece or nephew.

Sometimes I'd get a hug. Me, as a man in her kitchen, her children and dog watching, bewildered by sympathies from long ago. But her arms around my neck were not for apology or sympathy; they were for the love of our shared childhood; of secrets and memories only we could know.

And that faint scar was a reminder.

A reminder of the days of autumn, when we shared a bunkbed. When we listened to the crickets through the open windows and the muted voices of our parents and grandparents through the bedroom door. A reminder of 1976 and 1977, of summer mornings, riding our bikes to swim lessons at Memorial Park; towels around our necks, bike locks in our baskets. A crumpled dollar bill in someone's pocket.

We were as free as we would ever be - even though we didn't know then. And wouldn't, until many decades would pass. Until then, we would come to know - and share - the joy and sorrow that life would bring us, once we passed beyond those blissful summer days.

Memories that only we could understand. Why we'd hug tightly, there in her kitchen, amidst all those other satellites that circled and filled her life. She would become the center of everyone's universe - just like she had been for me, for as long as I could remember.

She was summertime all year. She brought a kind of beauty into the world like a sunset brings to a beach. Like the crickets bring to a summer evening. Like pumpkins and apples in the fall.

Her kindness was so radiant, her soul so beautiful, that only she could raise a butter knife at me as a father of four and threaten me upon the slightest infraction. She'd be making a sandwich and hear me say something. "Don't think I won't," she'd laugh.

And this afternoon, I wished she was here. I wished that she was still the center of my universe.

I cried and felt better. I looked at my finger and I thought about the hurts that heal.

And I thought about others that seem like they never will.

Citations:
Wish you were here 
Released January 11, 1999
Format CD Single
Length 4:00
Label Mercury Nashville
Songwriter(s) Skip Ewing
Debbie Moore
Bill Anderson
Producer(s) Carson Chamberlain

Wish you were here - Mark Willis

Roy and the Sky Writers

"I haven't seen that before," I said, looking at the rainbow pattern. "You know, those are kinda cool."

I thought she looked wonderfully Bohemian; ready for an adventure in a vintage travel trailer. To Oregon - or down to Baja and beyond. She could fill the soul of a VW van; puttering down the A-1A, all musical and happy and free - and free some more.

They reminded me of things like tie-dyed peace signs, just like the yellow and blue neon hair of that lady selling her shirts at the farmer's market.

They made me think of America, singing "Ventura Highway."
Ventura Highway
Ventura Highway
In the sunshine
Where the days are longer
The nights are stronger
Than moonshine
You're gonna go I know 

So simple and so complex, the rainbow. God's perfect PowerPoint projection of the palette he used to create the living experience. The geeks tell us it's just the visible spectrum of light. The height of wavelengths that shine into our retinas, our rods and cones turing them into colors inside our minds.

But in my Bohemian, tie-dyed worldview of the rainbow? Well, you'd need to know about the sky writers. Roy, G, and Biv.

Roy is the cowboy. On his palette are the pigments of dusty, rusty trails winding through the layered rock in Sedona. Hues infused with the magic of the Apache and Hopi. Like the faded rust of Zuni handprints in high caves.

Roy is all about scarlet sunsets. The tanned leather of rawhide and rein. And he rides a Chestnut brown gelding that kicks up Bell Rock dust, which floats into the sky, bending the spectrum with a cosmic lens that reminds us of the warmth and safety of Roy's campfire.

G is an emerald child, born among the flowers in the spring, among the vibrant green hues that signal new beginnings and innocence. Painting in so many hues and verdant pigments that they each seem just beyond clarity. Tones that breathe, that soothe, that flow. Colors that always - and only - exist between morning and night.

The emerald girl's colors are of the living, never burning and never freezing.



And Biv. To me, he's really Bob Dylan.

Dylan, a soul gifted to the world every few generations, whose role it is to paint the sky in his own special palette. Of chords and ballads that provide color for the most delicate and mysterious of wavelengths.

Colors of the guitar and the harmonica; of words - sometimes in sad, deep indigo tones. Sometimes in peaceful, soulful blue hues. And sometimes in the colors of the world in between; those of mesmerizing and mysterious violets. They are depth and wonder.

His words, his music. Blue, Indigo, violet.

Bob and his "Tangled up in Blue." Nobel-worthy tints.

But all the while I was alone
The past was close behind
I seen a lot of women
But she never escaped my mind, and I just grew
Tangled up in blue

And that's how we remember the rainbow. In my words.

"You should keep those," I told her.

I was thinking about all of these things. But I couldn't express why. Too many hues, too many reasons.

I was thinking about the cowboy, the emerald girl, and Dylan.

And a vintage travel trailer.

"What you can't not do"

"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways... I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Theodore Parker, theologian and abolitionist, wrote those words as part of an 1850 monograph.

His almost alchemical words were so perceptively poignant that their echoes could be heard in the underlying tenants of Abraham Lincoln’s epic address at Gettysburg.

Words so powerful, so profound, that more than a century later, Martin Luther King would famously cement them into history when proclaiming that the fight for civil rights would never be lost - could never be lost. As evidence, King avowed, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Indeed, this metaphysical arc, as it bends across the universe, is inescapable. The pull of its path, infinitely more powerful than you might think, redirects all things toward justice.

It is powered and governed, cosmically, by what can only be described as a kind of karma. In driven deeds, inherited debts and eternal imprints.

I believe, as Parker did, that souls move along the arc, ever heading, ever yielding, towards justice. That you can no more alter its course than ride a comet traveling 298 miles per second and steer it by windmilling your arms convincingly in the vacuum of space.

Our world has endured times of inexplicable and disturbing injustice. Like the dark, bleak days of World War II. Then, existential philosopher and Nobel Prize author Albert Camus, writing from the battlefield, urged us to believe that tragedy should never turn to despair. Himself traumatized by the carnage, he wrote that the world would eventually recover their humanity, heal, and bend back toward normalcy – and justice.

Camus urged that no matter the tragedy, the world will heal. That justice will prevail.

And it does. It has. It will.

Perhaps by the Hand of our God. Every holy religion – Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism and others – espouses the basic tenant of undeniable justice. The Buddhist teachings say, “Hurt not others with that which pains yourself or in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. One should seek for others the happiness one desires for one’s self.”  Many of these religions hold varying beliefs on the purpose of the reincarnated soul, almost always associated with justice.

Sometimes, we are offered that it is ours to create the boundaries of righteousness. We may be presented with choices: faithfulness or infidelity, honesty or duplicity, happiness or sacrifice, affirmation or hurt, truth or manipulation. Love or hate.

In these moments, we should choose carefully. We will be pulled toward the path, across the long arc. But the universe is patient. You will carry your choices. Own them to try again.

From Parker to Lincoln to King. From Ghandi to the Dalai Lama. The words are true. The arc is long and bending to no one. For everyone.

It has always been the time to choose "what you can't not do." To strike a path toward freedom, equality, hope, truth, fairness and protection. Selflessness.

Perhaps I can describe it like this. Lay your path as if it were an underground railroad. Of any kind, any length. Of any material. For any noble justice. Build it. Own it.

Ultimately, the karmic force of the universe is upon you, pushing you along the arc - towards justice.

So do what you can't not do.

Going for a Drive

This is what it means 
To be alone
Tear out my heart
Feed it to lions
Oh, For this one wish 
I beg you this tonight
Show me no mercy
But spare me my pride
I'm going for a drive

"You've done harder things than this," I told her, trying to gently talk her through the tears.



I should have said, "Take a deep breath, this is the pain. This is the part where you need courage."

You may need to go on a drive.

Because to let these moments of destiny and pain and truth fall upon you, without permanent hurt, you'll need to breathe, to think, to be alone.

Because this pain is going to expose you. Strip you. It's going to offer the world a view of your weakness and your humanness.

And it's going to dare you. Dare you to squint into to the icy, windy, empty unknown. The frightening place where the you in you is naked and alone, begging to be clothed and defined.

Where the you is really you. Brilliantly and shockingly disconnected. A place where tennis rackets and Mercedes and Amex cards are without meaning. The place where only true affirmations can be told.

My words simplify those of poets and philosophers. And I'm right.

Because this is the you you lost, you traded. The you you were.

And it's been covered, layer upon layer, in yoga pants and tennis skirts, martinis and marriages, children and homework and false affirmations. Quiescently, it's been waiting, all these years, to be rediscovered.

And it is a force that will not, cannot be, denied. It's entangled with the other quantum versions of you. The mathematical certainty that your soul exists across 10 dimensions, maybe even 26 dimensions.

But I can promise you this. It has a destiny. And sometimes it is pain that redirects you toward the path of your destiny.

And like the man who knows he cannot escape destiny, sometimes you just need to go for a drive. Allow the world to flow past you. Allow it's realities and possibilities and intricacies to flow into your mind, to widen your vision. Look into the sky and see the stars.

And as you drive, you'll perhaps find peace. Perhaps you will begin to understand why you may need to give up your heart. Give into the pain. The hurt. But know that while the universe will show you no mercy, it has a plan for you.

And while you may miss the Mercedes, it's far better to find your bliss riding among the stars.

So, on your drive, have courage. Trust in the universe.

Know that your destiny is beautiful. In one way or another, it is as glorious as the heavens. As the infinity of the stars.

The ones you'll see above you. Out there on your drive.  

1972 and our Better Angels - Terry and Peter's Dialogue

I hope to study further, a few more years or so 

I also hope to keep a steady high - ooh yeah yeah yeah...

Mid-century American history was, for a time, thought to be a confusing maelstrom of politics and violence, of war and peace. A time when radical ideas emerged. When the past clashed with the future.

But now, the history of that generation is viewed through a different lens.

Here, in the future, the veil has been lifted. We see the complex contexts of communism and colonialism. We can better understand how the brutality of the war reflected strategies adopted by generals from World War II; holdouts from a time when it was considered acceptable to firebomb civilian cities.

We've always known that our soldiers were heros - fighting and dying in a place that many considered the wasteland of a generation. Now we know it unconditionally.

But there were others who we might also remember differently - now that we can look at the past through a future lens. That there are other heroes - ones who fought in their own way: for our soldiers to live, to come home. They painted signs that said "make love, not war." They protested, held hands and put daisies in the gun barrels of the National Guards.

They didn't know what we know today. They did it anyway.

From the sign-painters and protesters, the nation's conscience began to appear; radiating from our nation's younger, better angels. It flashed on college campuses; in protests, chaotic disruptions, gatherings and, sometimes, with a certain violence. 

This new collective conscience was coalesced, memorably and beautifully, by art and music.

It had a soundtrack by Jim Morrison and The Doors, the Who and the Rolling Stones. Joan Baez.
Poetic voices. Hippie symphonies. Beautifully blended chords and bass tracks and keyboards.

Like the Who's classic tantrum about teenage wastelands.

It had a screenplay written by Martin, Robert, Timothy and others; an historic collection of philosophers, fearless dreamers and existential thinkers.

And with that, they created dialogue.

Nixon famously despised it - and later, to his regret, he simply disregarded it. Dissonance was attacked with rhetoric, racism, belittlement and shame. Mistakenly - and purposely - righteousness was cast in the context of drugs, pot and ignorance.

But the coffins kept coming home, draped in flags; and the cameras rolled. The images indelibly imprinted and energized the young, beaded and bell-bottomed. The result was a movement that would define their generation.

From the past, the words and music can remind us - in an instant - of just how special those days - those moments - really were. They were us at our best.

And even though perhaps we didn't know it then, we do now.

For me, there is this... "Dialogue parts I & II," written by Robert Lamm in 1972. It featured Terry Kath and Peter Cetera of the group Chicago. Terry, on his lead guitar, sent Lamm's words and chords across the studio to Pete, who responded with bass guitar and a kind of glorious inspirational naïvete.

It's goose-bumpingly stirring. To sing along and replay this anthem, over and over, is to glimpse moments in 1972 when heroes came in more than one form.

"Dialogue" Click here to listen to Dialogue Parts I and II

Are you optimistic 'bout the way things are going?

No, I never, ever think of it at all

Don't you ever worry, when you see what's going down?

No, I try to mind my business, that is, no business at all

When it's time to function as a feeling human being, will your Bachelor of Arts help you get by?

I hope to study further, a few more years or so. I also hope to keep a steady high - ooh yeah yeah yeah

Will you try to change things, use the power that you have, the power of a million new ideas?

What is this power you speak of and this need for things to change? I always thought that everything was fine - everything is fine

Don't you feel repression just closing in around?

No, the campus here is very, very free

Does it make you angry the way war is dragging on?

Well, I hope the President knows what he's into, ooh I just don't know

Don't you ever see the starvation in the city where you live, all the needless hunger all the needless pain?

I haven't been there lately, the country is so fine, but my neighbors don't seem hungry 'cause they haven't got the time

Thank you for the talk, you know you really eased my mind. I was troubled by the shapes of things to come.

Well, if you had my outlook your feelings would be numb, you'd always think that everything was fine. 

Everything is fine.

The other side of the world

"I'm watching a really scary movie tonight," I texted, around the globe, to earth's brighter side.

"It's the Sixth Sense," I typed, watching Bruce Willis on the screen.

Willis' character, a child psychologist, believed he was treating a boy who sees dead people. But he himself was unknowingly dead.

The movie is simple and haunting, a screenplay by Manoj Nelliyattu "M. Night" Shyamalan, who grew up in Pennsylvania - but is, interestingly, also from the other side of the world.

"Yuk, scary movies," she texted back. Her final text that night.

I almost responded with, "Yuk, spicy food," as a retort; that our cinematic and culinary tastes were equally mismatched. But I didn't.

She knows.

On her side of the world, the sun was shining and she was amidst relatives and guests crowded into the kitchen, sharing curries and languages; crowding each other in a din of voices and cultural comfort.

Here, the skies are filled with a bright crescent moon and a million stars. The tiny lights of fireflies flicker among the endless rows of corn. The train occasionally flashes past, blasting a horn that makes the coyotes and raccoons howl out near the river.

It's just me and my scary movie.

Across the room, pencils, watercolors and markers are scattered across the counter, waiting for the next inspiration. My Macbook is there too, waiting for the next entry, like this one.

I keep pausing the video, exchanging texts with my children. I'm alone, but not really. I've been able to feel alive and well on my side of world, even if it's just me.

But I remember feeling so different. Just packing for a business trip could make me feel lonely. I remember, SO many times, being homesick and heartbroken, leaving for the airport as the kids rode their bicycles down the driveway, waving goodbye.

The pain of leaving was as powerful as the bliss in coming home.

They were days of parenting, of pressure, of sleepless nights. Of baby pools and beaches and water wings. School lunches and homework help. They were days of happiness, of being a part of something greater than the me that I was before.

When the tsunami arrived, every day felt like I was just about to leave for the airport.

And so, I learned to do this thing.

A thing that protects me from being broken-hearted. I somehow learned to live inside of my head. A place where I could paint the landscape, instead of living in someone else's scary reality.

And there are times when I feel like Bruce Willis, the psychologist living in a world he believes is real. Where other people are scarred and scared and different.

But one where he is the ghost.

And so, here I am, on the other side of the world, listening to crickets and watching a scary movie.

And I try to imagine a place that is filled with too many people, chattering in different languages, talking over each other, eating and laughing and being way too close.

Even though it seems so foreign, so alien, it's where I was before. And I liked it - I really did.

But that was before I became this ghost.

A happy ghost, here, among the rows of corn and all these summer fireflies.

Here, on the other side of the world.

A hundred blues, a thousand skies

Not all creative souls are crazy.  And not all crazy people are artists.

"Genius comes from pain."

In recent decades, there have been a number of attempts to find a firm empirical basis for that idea.

Some correlative points have emerged: There is research suggesting that people with bipolar disorder, as well as the healthy siblings of people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, are more likely to have creative occupations.

People with certain genetic risk factors for schizophrenia have been found to be more creative. In 1989, Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., who herself has bipolar disorder, found a high prevalence of mood disorders among a group of British writers and artists. And in 1987, Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., found a higher rate of mental illness among 30 creative writers than among 30 equally educated non-writers.

Recent research from Austria builds upon this idea. A 2013 study found that people who scored high for creativity and people who scored high for schizotypy -- that is, behavior suggestive of schizophrenia but not diagnosable as such -- "share an inability to filter out extraneous or irrelevant material," Fast Company reported.

So that's why.

People say we're distracted. That we notice everything, absorb everything.

Dad was like that too.

We see clouds and fixate on their shapes and colors. See a hundred different kinds of blue, a thousand skies.

Our days are filled to a level of happiness in the way a teacup is filled from a firehouse - empty from the filling. For there is too much sun, too many voices, too many colors, too much sadness.

Too many people to perceive, their subtleties and existence that stream, 4G, into our heads.

We find our happiness in the admixture of change, of revolving experiences and visions. We live our days through senses, for our minutes and our days are colored by the swirling reality of the moment.

And, as I've said before, we see ghosts.

Caretaking our Memories

This article was published and copyrighted in the Beacher Magazine. www.thebeacher.com/pdf/2017/BeacherMay25

The Caretaking of Memories - Omaha Beach and Uncle Bill

First Wave, 116th Division, 29th Regiment

“Your Uncle Bill was killed on D-Day,” my father would tell us. Curiously, he’d always refer to Bill as our Uncle, not his.

My earliest memories of my father talking about our Uncle were from the 1960’s. The oldest of my siblings were probably seven or eight. We didn’t understand Vietnam then, much less Normandy.

Just because we didn’t understand World War II didn’t mean couldn’t see how dad was different when he spoke of Bill. He seemed more vulnerable. Sometimes, when he spoke of Bill, he’d pull off his glasses and wipe a hand across his eyes.

In the 60’s, we were too young to understand more than that we had an uncle that was killed on D-Day. For a time, dad would spare us from learning more. But the story was there, and it would eventually need to be remembered.

Someday, but not then.

Dad was only eight years old when Bill was killed on that June morning in 1944. At that age, I’m sure he knew nothing of the “liberation” of France; why Uncle Bill and the 116^th Division would be asked to open a path on Omaha Beach. That it would allow for 1.5 million soldiers to move toward Berlin and ensure the end of the European conflict.

He wouldn’t know, until he was much older, about the bodies, like Bill’s, which floated in the French surf. Of the dead and dying that covered every stretch of beach, lying in the sand like broken and crushed seashells and twisted seaweed.

His mother, Esther, or his father John, would certainly not tell dad about what his other uncle, Robert, faced in the Pacific. Robert, Bill’s twin, was the determined and eager one, and he enlisted in the Marines.

Esther and John probably learned later that, in the Pacific, Robert and his Marines would witness unspeakable things - in battles of unspeakable horror.

Only Oppenheimer and the other physicists, working beneath the grass fields at The University of Chicago, would end that conflict. Then, Robert would return home, scarred and “shell-shocked,” as my father described him. With his brother lost, his family changed forever, PTSD likely pushed Robert to his unpleasant end.

Of Oppenheimer’s instruments, Big Boy and Fat Man, my young father would probably think they were comic book characters, not the hydrogen bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not weapons that would end the war and later change the world. Weapons so destructive that when their scientist-creator witnessed their devastation, he felt the need to cite a quote from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita: “I have become death, destroyer of worlds.”

Dad was an only child. In 1944, his backyard comprised most of his world. In his small, leafy Blue Island backyard, he built his own sort of play-house, cobbled together with scraps from nearby alleys and garages. My grandfather probably helped.

I remember seeing a black and white photo of the play-house, a tiny Kodak picture that was like looking through a keyhole and into the past. A glimpse into his innocent pre-war world. It helped me understand where my father’s imagination was seeded; there, among the dappled shadows of the tall maples on the summer grass.

In that tiny fenced fortress, his Blue Island backyard, our Uncle Bill would visit him.

My father eventually became a sort of caretaker of Bill’s story.

He was a good caretaker, for he was quite the storyteller. One story we especially enjoyed was that of his pet rooster, Blackie. He would describe how he’d ride his bicycle, with Blackie on the handlebars, around the neighborhood; sometimes to the gravel pit, where he’d shoot his BB gun. In one adventure, Blackie’s misbehavior made him crash, and he allegedly broke his nose.

“See, that’s from Blackie,” he’d claim, pointing to the bridge of his nose as proof. But my sister would be born with the same nose, the same bump. Perhaps a Blackie inheritance, perhaps not.

My siblings and I would tease him about Blackie – that the story, while entertaining, was on the edge of disbelief. We considered it more of dad’s creative lore – a kid and a bicycle and his crazy pet rooster. Until the day we discovered a faded photograph in some attic box; that of a child on his bicycle with a large black bird perched on the handlebars.

Like the Blackie story, it was hard to imagine dad’s favorite uncle in the first wave on the deadliest beach on D-Day.

It was just anecdotal. Until a box appeared, and dad began removing items we hadn’t seen before. A purple heart. A telegraph from the War Department, dated June 6, 1944 – August William Diedesch, missing in action. Another telegraph, killed in action.

He told us of the heartache of his grandmother Diedesch, of her worry with both sons in the war, and her unending grief at the loss of Billy.

The rest of Bill’s story we’d have to learn on our own.  

We learned that Bill was the more peaceable of the twins. Robert enthusiastically enlisted in the Marines. Bill didn’t. He would instead go to the Blue Island library and enlist in the Army Reserves. Robert was sent to boot camp and then to the Pacific.

Bill stayed in Blue Island, a twenty-year-old Reservist. But that lasted mere weeks. After basic training, his Reserve Unit was immediately “called up” to active duty. In a profound turn of fate, his unit was placed into the 116th Division, 29th regiment, a unit destined to be the spearhead of the invasion force on D-Day.

Their unit would ride the Higgins boats into the surf - and into history.

Their story was memorialized, in part, in the movie Saving Private Ryan. Its opening scene portrayed the carnage on that infamous beach; in shocking and upsetting ways that most Americans had never imagined.

Before that movie, the reality of Omaha Beach would largely be captured in print. In its November 1960 issue, The Atlantic Magazine published a story by S.L.A. Marshall about the 116^th and 29^th.

It sought to describe the real fate of those caught in the first wave of the assault. Marshall noted that historians had taken great efforts to document what happened to each unit as they came ashore, in detailed accounts from the survivors.

“At exactly 6:36 A.M. ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man's head.  Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine-gun fires from both ends of the beach.

The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the water-logging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads.”

And that was the fate of Uncle Bill, who was lost departing his Higgins boat, there in the surf.

As I’ve discovered this more complete history of Bill, I’ve tried to keep the memory alive; to share the story more completely than my father would, or could.

When my father passed, he left me a framed collection of Bill’s memorabilia, including the purple heart and the MIA and KIA telegrams from Western Union. And I cannot imagine a more cherished, valued item among anything I own.

Thus, I also have become a caretaker of memories. To remind our family about their famous Uncle Bill. Most years, I’ve posted stories on my blog about Bill on or around June 6^th.

And thus, I come to this. I believe that we are entrusted to keep memories alive - even if we don’t have an uncle who rode a Higgins boat into the French surf. Even if we don’t have a sibling or relative or friend who served in Southeast Asia or Afghanistan or Iraq. 

It’s up to each of us, on this Memorial Day, to remember all of our Uncle Bills, from every family, who found themselves to be in the path of destiny; who would be a part of history.

For we are entrusted to remember the soldiers and families that were willing to sacrifice upon “the altar of freedom.”

In Saving Private Ryan, a letter is recalled and quoted, by heart, from a general. He recalled words penned in 1864 to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, a widow believed to have lost five sons during the Civil War. While it authorship is debated, It reads:

Dear Madam,--

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln