AN APRIL 19TH 251 YEARS IN THE MAKING: The memory arm of this machine informs me that five years ago on this day, I said goodbye to Mel, a Navy veteran I called friend at my town’s National Cemetery. The arm also reminds me that I said hello to two Army veterans, Bill & Tom, that my boys knew as grandfathers & I left pennies at their markers, as I have on visits before & since April 19, 2021, to note my thanks, remembrance, & love.
     I exited more awed than usual by the simplicity of a place where small white markers tell grand stories of unknown sacrifices made for freedom. Extra awe was inspired on my last visit by the first & still only quarter I’ve seen on a marker. The quarter meant a visitor was with the warrior lying underground when he made the ultimate sacrifice for his country. Every white stone marks a sacrifice made. Those sacrifices, unless one is standing in front of a marker with a familiar name, made by unknown people for unknown beneficiaries.
     Those efforts for freedom take on an extra significance due to an April 19th on a village green in Lexington, Massachusetts 251 years in the rear view mirror. A day that will be celebrated on Monday as thousands embark on a 26 mile trot through Boston. A day that led to freedom of religion being displayed by a mandir sitting in what used to be a field where I & my neighborhood buddies chased an occasional wayward baseball or by my spending this Good Friday & Easter just past worshipping my God in my church. A day that has allowed since 2016, the American public to have the same poor choices & results for state & national offices as the Cleveland Browns have had with starting quarterbacks.
       A day approximately 75 unknown men led by Captain John Parker, stared down 700 soldiers from the finest army in the world. The day after Misters Revere, Dawes, & Prescott rode the Boston night to warn, “The Regulars are coming.” Not the British, because everyone was still British.
      Eight men made the first sacrifices that required a payment of lives for freedom. Ten more sacrificed with blood, wounded by musket balls. Sacrifices made for ideals & a country still 14 months from Thomas Jefferson’s breakup letter to George III. Sacrifices without the benefit of a white burial marker. Sacrifices whittled down to a paragraph or less in an 8th grade textbook.
      Sacrifices that allow us to debate politics, religion, or any other subject, & to not agree, even as we seem to have lost the art of disagreeing without being disagreeable. Some so disagreeably wrapped in the red, white, & blue, they demonize or deify, wish for desolation or cover in decoration, depending on others views of their prejudices. Both the left wing & the right wing conveniently omitting the fact they are part of the same bird.
      Those pennies I left seemed then, seem now, will seem on a later visit, too small a payment on a 251 year mortgage of sacrifice. Sacrifices made by those that returned & those that didn’t, from 75 in a New England meadow to the veterans of multiple conflicts permanently resting in the shadow of Lookout Mountain in my fair city. From our Civil War to world wars becoming so civilized we gave them numbers to Chosin to Tet to present day. Thank you veterans, especially those under white markers named William, Tom, and Melvin for my opportunities to disagree & sacrifice only pennies…