The Park
Sunday morning. Sunday’s a day of reflection, when one dials back one’s engagement, to let the world “just be” to consider where one has come and what it means. Do we not need one day of respite? I think so.
Life in ordinary time, the work week, never slows down. The press of events, things happen, change, and one must respond. A big event for the nation of the past few days was the dying of John McCain. He was of my generation, a Vietnam War veteran. The last few years of his life were spent in the Senate. Certainly that was an up-grade to the five years he spent in the Hanoi Hilton as a captured fighter pilot. McCain’s life has reached its end. It is up to others now to tell the story. The funeral in the grand cathedral in Washington was magnificent in ritual, and in spoken words of familial love and sorrow. A son, a daughter, and two presidents expressed deep respect that a great man has fallen. And so it goes –as Kurt Vonnegut would have said.
Of course the payback for the thinly veiled words of criticism, of repudiation of the tyrant now in the White House and his sycophants has immediately followed. McCain and the ideals which he upheld are incoherent to our President and his Republican 
supporters. Ironically a number of these individuals sat in proximity to the McCain family at the funeral.
We went for a Sunday morning walk in the park yesterday. On a warm late summer morning the two grand kids ran freely up the grassy hill and down again. So much to see in the great 
outdoors for children two and three years old. Everything is new, interesting, stimulating to the imagination. Question: what is this green thing in my hand? Answer: a walnut. Next comes throwing the walnut at dad, then at grandpa. Finding the walnut in the grass and throwing it again. How fast can I run barefoot down the grassy hill? What about riding my bicycle down? Then there was a go at the playground, climbing and riding on the teeter-totter. I called it a see-saw so many years ago when I was a kid. The very best part of the morning was joining with dad and mom for a ride on the teeter-totter.
Ironically, –of the memory of such mornings is an entire lifetime fashioned.
Watching the full length of Meghan McCain’s eulogy of her father is well worth it.
