It is past midnight, so today is the 20th of May in the year of our Lord, 1998. Reading some of my writings of fifty years and more ago, a sadness came to me at this midnight hour.
I feel that I now will face the end of my days with the start of another great holocaustic war. Maybe the one Ezekiel of the scriptures spoke of. Perhaps it will be the one where the bones lie deep. The bones of the old, the young, the good and bad, the righteous and the ones who care not but to become the conquerors of our world, pushing their own and only their ways into the lands of this earth.
I remember more than fifty years ago watching my Coast Guard commander come into our office there on the waterfront in Detroit. This man, who had lived through terrible and bloody battles, now faced us with the tears streaming down his face. "We have just turned hell loose upon this earth. Never again will we be free from its presence". He laid the paper with the big banner of a headline on my desk: "ATOM BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN". Below it, in smaller but still large type, "The bomber, the Enola Gay today dropped one bomb, (only one bomb) on the large city of Hiroshima and it was no more".
As we turned on the radio, we heard the shaking voice of the announcer telling us that literally hundreds of thousands died that day. One more bomb was used during the summer of 1945 on one more city. The horror of it was so great that no other has been used as a weapon of war since, though many wars have continued to rage across this beautiful earth.
A new story, and there has been more than one such story, told of children finding supposedly "hidden" guns and killing each other. The parallel has been the headlines of the last few days. The children in this case, Pakistan and India, third world nations, have found the "hidden" guns and let loose the atom again. Now many are smelling once more the sulfuric smell of HELL.
I spent a good part of my youth years in Washington D. C. I often wrote of the beauty of that great city. Even in the sad days of WWII it was an incredibly beautiful place to be. Today I hear of its ugliness, a place where sin and corruption abound, a place where many live in an atmosphere of both physical and moral ugliness. The ugliness is not to be found only on Rhode Island Avenue and the back streets. It seems to pervade even the great halls of Congress and the White House, where corruption abounds and money is the God of this world. The moral decay even seems to penetrate here to our western valleys and mountains.
I have had a good life, because God has granted me so much. Today as I walked upon the green grass of my small yard and touched the delicate colors of the flowers about me, as I sat upon my bed with my small grandson, I found my own peace. What a life I really have had. I have never had "grand tours" as some others in my family have had, but I have seen much of the world. I have crossed two great oceans. I have lived and walked in other lands. I have also found time to look at this great nation. I have seen its rivers and mountains, its great cities and its great diversity. Five children have blessed my life. They are none rich or famous. They struggle daily to find their way, but as Evan often points out, they truly love one another and seek to let each other know this. Twelve grandchildren have found their way into our family circle. One, our Amber Beth, has left us to live with the Angels. I feel she'll be there in the not too distant future to help me find my way back to where I came from almost eighty years ago. There are many others there who have given my life depth and meaning.
I talk not of death, but of living. I lay this night beside dearly loved Owen. Though we do not have worldly wealth, we have much love and caring. Years to still look back on and still have hope for more time yet to share dogs and grandchildren and to yet see more of this beautiful land in which we live.
Whatever time God gives me yet to live, I hope to be happy and, in spite of a world in which evil does abound, to find His goodness in the skies and the brown earth I have spoken of before. I want to laugh, to scold and sing in my cracked up voice with my "Butch", to plant flowers and feel the sun of summer and find beautiful the snow that will fall in another winter of my life.
1997 Butch and Zelda Singing
I must take again the vow I took many years ago in my writing and still seek to find the goodness that is here for me to find. If I leave this world sooner than I intend to, I want my family to know how much I truly, truly care for them. I want them to know that life can be a never ending adventure and all we have to do to make it so is to seek always to see the face of God.
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