After an old friend wrote the following on his blog, I decided to add another heart to the mix in my foyer:
My friend wrote:
[Someone from our mutual hometown posted] “that he was a veteran and thought he deserved better treatment than he had received. This person is so typical of what I think is wrong with our way of life that he ought to be bronzed and put in the town square of Pecos. First, I would like to thank him for being a veteran. My dad and 10’s of millions of other men were veterans of WW II. I do not remember my father ever mentioning that he thought the government owed him anything for his service other than a ride back home from Burma. I don’t remember any of the fathers of any of my friends making such claims. They were thankful to have the opportunity to start a life and family and do it with freedoms that other countries don’t enjoy. I don’t remember my father ever mentioning that any businessman owed him any help in keeping up our property. When the fence needed painting he bought the paint, gave me a paint brush and that was a summer job.”
I replied to him with the following:
“You and I are probably just a little to the left and right of center respectively on most issues, but I so much agree with what you said about how our dads came home from the war and went to work and raised families and did not let having been in horrendous battlefields become the focal point of their lives. Pretty much all I know about Daddy’s service is that I am now the proud keeper of his purple heart.
Here is a story in support of your opinion. I live in a very nice neighborhood of wonderful old houses, so the family that moved into the house across the street live in a wonderful old house too. They have a Cadillac SUV that the mother uses to drive their two children to the neighborhood grade school every day (Most kids take the bus.) and the father has a small scary-looking black car that has a noisy engine. He sits out front in it a lot with the motor running. Weird. Loud.
He appears to have no physical limitations; however, apparently, he is permanently disabled with what we used to call shell shock. The family seems to live very well on whatever compensation he gets. He told my nextdoor neighbor that he is “retired.” Sometimes I see him in that car in the parking lot of our neighborhood Fred Meyer’s. He isn’t very friendly and favors wearing camouflage all the time. Unlike most of us, he is not eager to “visit” with the rest of us when we happen to be out front at the same time.
But here is the really odd thing. Once a week, they have all their groceries delivered from Safeway. Huge truck. Lots and lots of groceries.
It seems that Safeway delivers free to disabled vets. I could have the same service and pay $12 per delivery, but I really enjoy picking out my own groceries. Since this man doesn’t seem to have anything to do, you would think he might enjoy buying the groceries when he’s in front of the store where I run into him. Perhaps he finds going into busy stores nerve wracking. It can be.”
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This brings me, admittedly belatedly, to the point I want to make:
I don’t like to be judgmental, but we all are. We can’t help it, even though we can’t really know what others suffer.
Almost all the people I know have had some really regrettable things in their lives. You too? Maybe you were born to a single mother or had bad parents. Maybe you were a late-bloomer and didn’t work hard enough in school. Maybe you chose the wrong line of work or married the wrong person or didn’t have children or had too many. Maybe you had to go to war. Maybe someone you loved went to war and didn’t come back or came back disabled. Maybe you have a mental or physical illness that you have to deal with every day. Maybe you are estranged from someone you love. Maybe you made bad decisions or had them forced on you. Horrible, horrible things. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have hard times or regrets or grievances. But I do know lots of people who choose not to let this be the focal point of their lives. They do not allow the worst thing that ever happened to them define them.
What do we want to be the focal point in our lives? What do we want to define us?
Daddy never wore his purple heart.
