13: I Hope You’re Hungry
1. The word pie is in piece.
2. I can’t understand how the official rules of Scrabble say not to use slang but they allow “za” to be used for “pizza.”
3. While driving to Roanoke last week I saw a red barn on the top of a faraway ridge that looked just like a Monopoly hotel.
4. Not being a gambler, when it comes to lottery tickets, the only thing I scratch is my head.
5. And yet, I bought one and played in solidarity with my older sister who is sick. Our younger sister has been visiting her every Wednesday and bringing a lottery ticket for them to play. I posted a picture of my $10 ticket on Facebook today and asked them, “What’s the best thing to scratch this with?”
6. Lately, I’ve been reading the memoirs of musicians of the ‘60s the way my father used to read the WWII stories of his generation.
7. Holy and holocaust both come to mind when I look at the Vietnam wall, which I can’t do with a dry eye.
8. “They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. – Tim O’Brien (who was drafted during Vietnam, a war he did not believe in) from his book Things They Carried
9. Recent studies have shown that genetic changes stemming from trauma can be passed on to offspring, meaning that a person’s life experience can affect subsequent generations. – More on that study HERE.
10. “Only Jim,” I thought when I heard he had taken pictures of clouds from the airplane window on his flight home from Houston. “There are a couple of the World Trade Center buildings before they came down, taken from the highway. Can you believe it?!” my mother asked. We were able to piece together their travels through the photographs, the video Jim took, and the few stories they told before they died. In the video, we see Dan trudging around like someone much older than he was, snapping pictures in Washington D.C. In the photographs, we see him at the Vietnam War Memorial. The images match the story he told us when we were all together for Jim’s funeral. At the Vietnam Wall, Jim and Dan were looking for the name, “James Sullivan,” a Hull Village military pilot who was shot down in Vietnam, the oldest of a family we all grew up with. Someone, who overheard them talking, pointed right to it. “I fought with Jimmy Sullivan in Vietnam,” he said. In Jim’s package of photographs that were developed after he died there was one at the memorial of Jimmy Sullivan’s name. – From the Jim and Dan Stories, the book I wrote about my brothers who died a month apart in 2001
11. My first thought when I woke up this Monday morning was ‘if I had a real job, I’d be calling in sick.’ I’m not really sick but am in recovery from an extra full fun weekend that included a PFLAG house party, dancing to rock and roll at Dogtown, fellowship and feasting at the Ceremonial Day of Gratitude at the local Chinese Medicine Clinic, having the grandkids over and reading their homemade books about zombies. – More from The Not So Sick Day HERE.
12. In 2011 I joined a Facebook group that consists of people who grew up in the same small Massachusetts beach town I did, called ‘You know from Hull when…” The first thing I posted was: You know you’re from Hull when your 10 years old and spend your bus money to a buy a pizza at Paragon Park and then have to walk home all the way to the village with pink flip flops that keep coming apart.
13. ‘You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. This is how prayer works.” – Pope Francis.
______Thirteen Thursday
November 12th, 2015 12:27 am
I try unsuccessfully to not scratch my head, but have no problem resisting lottery tickets.
That “za” is huge!
November 12th, 2015 5:51 am
2 I did not know that !!!
November 12th, 2015 8:39 am
Tom O’Brien does not know the insides of all soldiers. But I do agree that many carried that burden when they knew the war they were in was wrong. But, then again, what wars are ‘right’?
November 12th, 2015 9:58 am
So true, Tabor. He spoke for himself and probably for many in the Vietnam War who did not choose to go and did not understand why we were in that war. The book is good. It’s fiction based on mostly true events and in the whole I think he does portray what it was like well. Not your typical war book, more of a look at it through the psyche.
Here’s what I wrote yesterday on a friend’s Facebook post about Veteran’s Day and with a picture of his WWII Vet father: My dad was 19, fought in the battle of the bulge in Patton’s army and had some hellish stories, one of which he only told me the year he died at 85. Mostly it was being among the troops that freed Buchenwald Concentration Camp that he never recovered from. He joined with his four of his brothers and often said, ‘we thought we were going to a football game.’
And then one picture of himself (my age) from the Vietnam War era when he was in the Navy: I’ve been watching all these PBS specials on vets and being choked up for days now. Just boys not meant to do or see what they did. Makes it hard or poignant to look at your sweet innocent face here.
November 12th, 2015 12:54 pm
I don’t think the Vets of the Korean War or The Vietnam War were treated well, at all……Seeing all the Horror of war and how inhumane people can be to other people had to have been incredibly difficult and wounding, as bad as a bullet through the heart…….
What your father saw in WW2 had to Haunt him for the rest of his life……It is all so very very sad. There is no “good” War.
November 12th, 2015 1:14 pm
Can honestly say I have never heard anyone refer to pizza as “za.” Have heard rave reviews about the Tim O’Brien book. My T13
November 13th, 2015 8:06 am
When my father was two years old, he was badly burned by falling into a pot of boiling water. When my brother was born, his back bore the same pattern of scars on his skin as my father’s.
My father was police officer when I was born, and I had a huge mole shaped like a bullet on my chest when I came from the womb (it was later removed). (The first incident is more believable about genetic than the second, but my mother always though the mole came from her worry over my father’s work.)
So I certainly believe stuff can be passed down through the generations.
November 13th, 2015 7:37 pm
#9 is very interesting. A great factoid to save for a feature story.