Spring Activities

Spring 2019 is behind us, every scorchingly hot 3 mile run lately has shown me that.  Springtime was a good time.  (Cherry Blossoms.)

I had my fourth, and hopefully last, eye operation in April and am on the road to a full range of activities after a year and a half layoff due to an achilles strain and then my detached retina woes.  I started running in May, half a mile at a time at the start and now up to 3 miles three times a week as I slowly progress.  (My eyebrow marked, I wait for surgery.)

I traveled overseas for my first time ever, to England and France with layovers in Eire. Once a boy has seen the sights of gay Paree, you can't keep him down on the farm anymore.  (One of the private gardens of Versailles.)

I restored old friendships, like traveling in Europe with my former running buddy Rhea and her husband Eric, and kickstarted my return to running by trying to keep up with her on a 2 mile run in an Oxford park.  Back in the states, I made sure to engage in traditional DC events like viewing the Cherry Blossom trees blooming on the Tidal Basin ( a few days after their peak) and viewing the new dinosaur display at the Smithsonian.  (Jogging in England, just like olde times.)

The Cherry Blossoms 2019

Washington is famous in the spring for its flowering and beautifully colorful blossoming of the Cherry Blossom trees around the Tidal Basin, gifts from Japan when we were their friends (after WWI), before we were their enemies (WWII) and now we're their bosom buddies (post Occupation, but pre-Trump).

Pink and white natural colors of the blooms are riotous, but the wildlife don't notice.

I was in Europe, my first trip overseas, when the blossoms were at their peak.

But when I got back, I traversed the Tidal Basin a few days after The Peak and it was singularly still beautiful, before it subsided very quickly into the green leaves of the actual growing phase of these special trees.

The tulips of spring

Now that spring is done, looking back I did participate in certain traditional springtime viewings in the District.

I walked through the National Tulip Library bed, enjoying the colors of the multi varied flowers there.

It's by the Tidal Basin, so you can get a two-fer by circumventing that body of water, viewing the blooming cherry blossoms along the water and affording yourself the pleasure of seeing the nearby emerging tulips as well.

I like seeing the outliers, in this picture a single red tulip that somehow got into a white tulip bed to the left of center.

The colors of spring

On the last day of spring, here are the colors of spring.

The perennials I planted last year.

Any run down any street in town shows nature's beauty.

The District especially reveals springtime's riotous colors.

Happy Fathers Day

Happy Fathers Day, dad.  We all sure have missed you these past 33 years.

In Bedford, Virginia

Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, which was a brilliant success, albeit a hard fought battle involving close to ten thousand casualties and over a thousand deaths for the Americans alone, and in retrospect, it was a close thing; many things could have gone wrong and changed the outcome perhaps.  In Bedford, Virginia, resides the National D-Day Memorial.

Why Bedford, a small out-of-the-way town in rural Virginia?  From Stephen Ambrose's book D-Day, p.328: "About 60% of the men of Company A came from one town, Bedford, VA: for Bedford, the first 15 minutes at Omaha was an unmitigated disaster.  ... all the Germans around the heavily defended Vierville draw concentrated their fire on Company A.  When the ramps on the Higgins boats dropped, the Germans just poured the machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire on them.  It was slaughter.  Of the 200+ men of the company, only a couple of dozen survived, and virtually all of them were wounded."

Can you imagine the dreadful rumors that swept through this small, thighs-knit farming community in the days after the well-publicized lands in France?  Especially after the first few Western Union bicycle messengers pulled up in front of residences in town and delivered telegrams to the households, a sure sign of a death in the family or a missing-in-action notification during the war.

These heroes who never returned home again, the vast majority of the men who left that community for the war, most of them lost in the first hour  of the greatest military enterprise in world history that literally saved world civilization, are called the Bedford Boys.  Freedom involves great and noble sacrifice sometimes, far from home and loved ones.

75 years ago today...

...the greatest military endeavor in history was undertaken and it succeeded after a ferocious fight and it literally saved world civilization.  On June 6, 1944, American, British and Canadian forces stormed ashore on five Normandy beaches, catching the defending Germans by surprise and by gaining a lodgment on that Longest Day, put a crack in Hitler's Fortress Europa, a growing fissure that a summer of desperate fighting by the mighty German military machine (two thirds of it was fighting the Soviets in the east, thankfully) that the Germans couldn't stanch and seal off or rebuff.  (The killing ground on Omaha beach.)

On Omaha Beach 1,000 GIs were killed that day trying to get ashore, yet succeeding waves of Americans continued to enter the deadly maelstrom and the day and the beach was won, by a thread.  On Utah beach to the right more effect was achieved the naval bombardment and a bombing run by the Army Air Force and the troops met light resistance and pushed on inland.  On the left the three Commonwealth beaches, Gold, Juno and Sword, were being contested and won by the Allies.  (The Canadians coincidentally aimed their initial thrust at this unique stand-alone house on Juno Beach, now known as the Canada House.)

Virtually every single father of the friends I had as a boy was a WWII veteran, whether they saw action or not, they served. My uncles served in the Mediterranean, the Philippines, the vast Pacific and my father served on two hard-won islands on the road to Tokyo.  (A lonely statue in Normandy a couple of miles off Gold beach of a weary British soldier resting at the end of the fighting on the Longest Day, marking the furthest point inland the Allies reached that day.)

My mother left her home in a small Colorado farming town on the plains as a teenager and went to Sn Diego (and met my father before he was shipped off overseas) to help build airplanes.  The Greatest Generation.  (Quiet reigns at the Canadian cemetery in Normandy as hushed visitors visit the gravestones of fallen Allied heroes; the American cemetery overlooks Omaha beach and the British cemeteries are scattered about France but the biggest one in Normandy is in Bayeux, largely still looking as it did, a Norman medieval town, because it was the largest city seized by the Allies on that day, the largest city, Caen, took all summer to acquire and it was a pile of rubble when finally taken.)