For Somber Reflection

I will not be partying today or going to a sale. My uncle by marriage was killed in a Consolidated B-24 Liberator in the Second World War. A cousin died in training. This is not the day for me to open my pool or throw a keg party. Lieutenant Nathan M. "Ned" Hatkoff, Aunt Redi's talented husband, and fearless cousin Ralph Shepard, who kept up with his brother champion diver and later prisoner of war Al Shepard, today I think of you and the noblest sacrifice that kept me from ever knowing you. Dad, I think of you too, trying to join the glider corps, and passing all the mental requisites before an army doctor found your cancer. I guess I was lucky just to have been born more than twenty years after the aforementioned events. Families do not necessarily want heroes, just sons that come home intact (and daughters too in this "liberated" age). The price of freedom is paid in blood.