The Redwood Forests to the Gulf Stream Waters

Fort Chapman celebrates.

From encounters with con men selling cars, to cancelled health insurance, to crooks in the business world, to well-meaning people who simply let one down, I've been reminded this week that life is not always a cabaret, old chum.

But in the midst of it all, I find moments of almost heartbreaking beauty. Last night, as I sat on my patio in the cool of the evening, pondering the vagaries of life in the modern world, a hummingbird cruised the nearby agapanthus and then hovered in mid-air, just beyond my reach, apparently trying to decide if my rose-and-green sundress had any potential for sweetness. You have to store up moments like that.

A Letter to My Father

Capt. William Ashley Chapman, in a photo taken of him in Brazil in 1943, when he was twenty-three years old.

Dear Dad:

Happy Fourth of July! I know how patriotic you are: so this day has made me think about you a lot. I sure do miss you, Dad.

I was remembering this morning the story you told us about the time you were coming home from Ascension Island during World War II, where you had been serving with the 38th Engineers. The ship had to stop in Brazil to pick up a load of German POWs, the survivors of German ships that had been sunk or badly damaged in the Atlantic.

It made the trip longer, but you didn't mind too much because you loved being on the ocean journey. You said you enjoyed watching the dolphins that swam alongside and all the other interesting things a young man like you, from Birmingham, Alabama, had never seen before. You were lucky, too, because, unlike many of your friends, you never got seasick. At least not usually.

Your commanding officer put you in charge of organizing the prisoners' work detail in the ship's galley--I guess the Colonel had figured out one of the most telling things about you: how much you like food! So, you had to keep the German POWs from making trouble as they did their KP duty: not exactly the most fun job in the Army.

One night, the sea was especially rough. At chow, many of your fellow officers were dashing for the gunwales with green faces, while you finished several helpings of chicken paprika with potatoes on the side. You were sitting by yourself when the dessert of custard pudding was served. It tasted a little odd, but, hungry as ever, you dug in. Suddenly, you too were ill and headed for topside where, for the first time on the ship, you lost your dinner.

Ever the engineer, you thought it was curious. So you went back to the wardroom to look at the pudding. After a short investigation, you figured out that some enterprising POW in the galley had added soap flakes to your dessert. Ouch. It was probably because you were one of the few American officers they had met and they didn't like the sound of your Alabama accent. Or something.

I ought to make sure that guy gets in big trouble, was your first thought. This is a serious offense. And then you thought again and it occurred to you: he's already in big trouble. He's a German POW who has spent time swimming in the cold Atlantic and is far from his country and family. Stuck on an America ship headed for enemy territory. The war is over for him.

What is the right thing to do, you wondered. You weren't badly injured. Another order of chicken paprika and you'd be feeling swell again. And so, you decided to say nothing about it. And that is what you did.

When we were children, we always loved that story. Anticipating the part where you ate the soap-filled dessert and dashed for the side of the ship. Eeeeeeuuuuuu.

But now that I'm older I think the story is interesting in another way. Because what you did that day by doing nothing says everything about your character. You thought long and hard before taking an action that might hurt a more vulnerable human being at a time when you had all the power and he had none. And you realized that if his goal had been to see you squirm, the best thing to do was not to squirm. And that this would be punishment enough.

I wish I could be more like you. I wanted you to know that.

A couple more things I wanted to tell you: I brought the flag up today. I've had the flag here at the house at half staff for you since we lost you on March 26. But it is the Fourth of July and I thought it was time to bring it back up again. I hope that's okay. You always loved seeing the flag flying out there beyond our kitchen window.

Another thing: when we were having our garage sale a few weeks ago, we opened a mystery box and found the most beautiful little toy airplanes in it, planes that you had obviously made by hand. They were tucked away in a brown paper box on the shelf in the garage where you kept your chemistry and physics books.

The little fleet of planes.

They are made of tiny pieces of balsa wood with tissue paper wings, and they have the most interesting black-and-white-striped wing flaps. They are so elegant and precise and remind me so much of you, I've been thinking of making a mobile out of them to suspend somewhere in the house. Each time I look at them I imagine you as (very likely) an 80-year-old kid, laboring over them on your workbench in the garage while Mom sat inside watching Julia Child on PBS.



This morning, I took them outside so I could get a picture of your miniature squadron in the shade of the garden. And, as I set them down and arranged them in formation, the morning breeze caught their props and each tiny plane looked as if it were just about ready to take off! Their black propellers turned with increasing speed and it seemed they would all head down the runway and lift skyward together into the sunlit sky. To join you, perhaps, on your journey.


With all my love,

Robin

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Be Proud on the Fourth of July

We take so much for granted in America. That we can move anywhere we like, that we can vote, that we can start a business and fail and start again and succeed beyond our wildest dreams. That our government--though imperfect--can actually get things done. That we can vote the rascals out when we choose. People still die for simple things like this across the globe.



We're so rich, we can afford to make our environment a priority. I'm often reminded, when I hear people whining about carbon footprints, that San Francisco Bay is cleaner now than when I was a child, though the Bay Area population is eight times what it was then. We've cleaned up the Cayahoga River in Ohio, ("Burn on, Big River, Burn On" songwriter Randy Newman once wrote), cleaned up the mighty Columbia, and have preserved millions of acres all over the U.S. from development by making them national preserves and parks. I was in Sao Paulo, Brazil once and even though that country has the ninth largest economy in the world, the river adjacent to the airport road was a sewer--filled with chemical pollution, human waste, and old refrigerators. Not a priority there.



We so often shy away from patriotism in America, at least it seems we have in the half century since we won the second World War. It is almost as if our riches embarrass us and we hesitate to show the flag. Europeans--whom we spent most of the 20th century propping up during their endless wars, dictatorships, and slaughters--have so often told us we're arrogant, uncouth and unsophisticated that we seem to have come to believe them. We duck our heads so they won't notice have far above them we have flown.



Everyone wants to live here. In the 1980s, and 1990s nearly a million legal immigrants each year came to America. We absorb them and see them everywhere. They are Americans now.

Once in my life I have seen an amazing show of the flag in my country and that was in the days after September 11, 2001. Suddenly, spontaneously, American flags popped up everywhere. On houses, on businesses, in windows, on automobiles. The flag stores in Orlando, where I was living at the time, were sold out and had to start taking orders. Though the intelligentsia later decried this, it was somehow so comforting. It was as if one's neighbors were saying: "We're in this together." And the country, as a whole, seemed to stop what it was doing and turn and say to the bad guys: "You got us once you bastards. Now try it again."



It is such a beautiful flag. It represents an experiment created by men and women who pondered such things in the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment. They gambled together their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to make that flag ripple in the breeze of history.



We ought to thank them on this Fourth and show the Stars and Stripes that so many have fought and died for since that first Fourth of July in 1776. The land of the free and the home of the brave: we need the brave today as much as we ever have. When you have something good, there is always some knucklehead who wants to take it from you.



Show the flag for our soldiers, for our founders, for our grandfathers and for our children. For the new Americans around us and the old Americans too. We are so privileged, we are so rich, we are so lucky. We're America.

Many of the postcards here were loaned to me by Russell Hughes, an Orlando postcard collector. Hughes was a teenage soldier when he was captured in December of 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, and put into a German prison camp where he very nearly starved to death. One day, in April of 1945, he and his fellow prisoners awoke to find their guards had deserted. He and a friend appropriated some linens from the home of the camp's commandant and sewed together small American flags that they pinned on their ragged clothes. Thus adorned, they began to walk toward the Allied lines. When they encountered some Russian troops, the Russians recognized the emblems on their torn uniforms and pointed to the American lines. They headed there on foot and were eventually rescued. To Hughes and men like him, the U.S. flag is more than a symbol. Perhaps it is no wonder he collects these beautiful cards.

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