I had dinner with my mom last night. Just the two of us. At her table, we live moments that we dare not think may not be available to us, some day come tomorrow.
All those times, all those childhood lunches and suppers and mornings out the door with a warm something in the tum and caress to accompany me on the day. When she invites me over now, I am a legatee to all those tables set over the years with her love and sense of family togetherness.
Can we teach virtue now during a family moment together at the table? The villainy of hard edged culture and live wire competitors for the heads and hearts of our young citizens are great.
As I child I could wander a small Texas town in dwindling light of any day or come in past dark from an Airman’s softball game on an Air Force base with little devilment to accompany me. When I schooled in Europe, away from family as a child, I carried that America with me, ever the little American stranger in the wondrous strange land. Anchored to home, as if the tetherball pole back on the Texas school ground was my own spine.
Sense of nation generates when the portal from childhood is not turned into a vacuum that draws the innocent into states of being and nothingness just for the sport of destroying serenity and the common American ethos.
Child book series such as Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and the great Bobbsey Twins were already 60, 50, 40 plus years old when I stumbled on them in the 'little shelves' area of one of my childhood libraries. What a discovery. I could read, reread, all the adventures, learn about an America that didn’t exist anymore and nary could a ghoul, terminator or vile epithet be found. I was left alone to become a child while being one. Would that such was available to children that live in their Xbox or Cyber attack games.
Modernity is harsh. Perhaps the dinner table is the last real place to congregate and ask the young among us, is this a good day to be an American and what did you find in the library that you want to share with us?
Pass the tofu please.