Memorial days....

Every day is Memorial day for me. I am filled with nothing but memories that won't leave, that sit with me, sometimes won't shut up. Today is officially a day where Americans honor the dead who served in wars. But the inference is always wars 'over there' elsewhere. There are so many people who battle for a lifetime wars of physical and mental illness.

People who live in the streets with no homes, no families, broken lives and broken hearts. Soldiers of Life...the same people we sometimes flippantly refer to as the walking dead...people so tired and hungry they appear to be glazed over in a frost of the soul.

I've lived through wars since childhood. First watching my mother's face freeze as Cuba threatened to shoot missles at us. As the night skies were strobbed by long slender lights I watched, waiting for martians and bombs to come kills us, The weekly bomb drills where in school we ducked under our desksm squeezed our eyes closed and held our breaths until told it was all clear.

Watching the '67 War blow by blow on television when the media followed soldiers on the battlefield and reported live. A war where Israel took back Golan and the Rebbe said to keep going...the '73 War of Cyprus and Greece into which I flew on my way to kibbutz life in Israel. Sitting on a grassy knoll outside the airport at 19, I was oblivious to my own safety, my only thought of my father's death occurring months earlier and the necessity to carve a life out of nothing, penniless.

My father's parents came to America due to war in Europe. Russian Jews who settled in Baltimore, their personal battles continued to affect my father who married a non-Jewish woman, and they declared him dead. My father was a 'dead' man who spent his life trying to retain an identity stolen from him by a tradition that rendered his two daughters to live forever without his family. I inherited his desire to form a life as a Jew, so deep was the void and pain of his loss I immersed myself in the war zone known as Chabad after returning from Israel. I returned from Israel primarily because of being shocked at the secularism,-even in '73- of having married male kibbutzniks make passes while I drove a tractor, clubbed carp in the kitchen or picked olives, grapes and rimonim.

Vietnam seemed to infuse every aspect of high school while I was there, work, travel and social life. We were in the streets trying to turn everything that wasn't yet turned upside down, inside out or scrawled over with graffiti by followers of BPanthers, the Chicago 7 or Weathermen. Our soldiers came home to be spit on, scorned....I was already ensconced in a world without television, radio or newspapers. I prayed 3x a day for other things, mostly for clarity and a secure place in a confusing world...a religious husband so I could live the life that escaped my father's dreams, in life and death.

As the Middle East and all its surrounding countries conflagrates daily, it will be so until eternity as all parties claim righteously that land is theirs or was stolen from them. By the year 2025 (approx.) it is estimated that the last of the Greatest Generation will have passed on...the memories will dwindle slowly after them as many children of survivors will take another generation to forget if they haven't done so already. Those children who deliberately Away from the misery of their parents pain and chose to live a strictly secular life and those who were told nothing by parents who could not even speak of the horrors they survived.

It is early evening, unusally cold this time of year, May and its in the 50s...a man has been sorting through the dumpster outside my apartment window. He seems to be collecting anything he can reuse and its amazing what my neighbors consider 'garbage.' I've cooked two pieces of chicken, made cabbage salad and homemade biscuits, enough for two. I excuse myself now to fix whoever this warrior of life is, a hot dinner in hopes that for this one day, he has a happy memory.