I first published this post on June 22, 2012 when Adele was burning up the airwaves the first go round. Since “Hello” is on every five minutes now, I thought I’d run it again.

Budge loves Adele. If I try to talk to her when “Set Fire to the Rain” is playing, I get a look that’ll curdle milk and a shush that would make Nancy Pearl blush with pride. Since I don’t like getting snapped at by my beloved, I usually sit quietly and listen to the song. It was during one such session that I decided Adele is the latest artist to add music to the long and storied list of stalker songs.

Now, everybody knows what a stalker song is, right? You know, one of the songs your ex dedicates to you on the late night radio romance show that sends you scurrying in a mad dash down to the police station at the butt crack of dawn the next morning to file the restraining order? Stalker songs!

Some of the more popular stalker songs masquerade as being romantic ballads. Take U2’s “I Will Follow” as an example. On the surface, the jerk finally realizes he should have paid attention to the chick when she was sending him the “come get me” signals. Now though, she’s moved on. What does he do? He lets her know right up front, “If you walkaway, walkaway I walkaway, walkaway…I will follow …” Not a healthy response to rejection.

Still, U2’s little ditty is mild compared to some of the masters of shade watching. I remember Def Leppard coming out with “Two Steps Behind” when I was in high school and thinking, “Wow! What a cool love song!” Once I realized though that the “shadow” he sings about — “you can run, but you can never hide / From the shadow that’s creepin’ up beside you,” — is actually HIM, the song took on a newer, more sinister slant.

Now,  I realize guy stalkers are the ones who garner the most press, but they aren’t the only ones who put out stalker songs. The fairer sex has its share of scorned lovers who want to get even. I mean, look at how the girl in Carly Simon’s hit song takes catching the object of her affection with someone else: “You belong to me / Can it be, honey, that you’re not sure / You belong to me?” Guys, if a girlfriend says that song tells exactly how she feels about you, it MIGHT be time to pull the trigger on that move to Europe you’ve been contemplating. Of course, if your ex takes her cues from Blondie, moving overseas won’t matter because “One way or another [she’s] gonna find ya / [she’s] gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha!”

Dude, if she dedicated “Someone Like You” to you last night on Delilah’s show, you MIGHT want to leave the lid on that pot!

What trips me out the most though is seeing how long and flourishing the history of stereo stalkers has been. For example, if you get past the funky organ and funny name, “96 Tears”, which I always thought was an upbeat little tune, turns really dark. How would YOU interpret the stanza:

Since you left me you’re always laughin’ way down at me
But watch out now I’m gonna get there
We’ll be together for just a little while
And then I’m gonna put you way down here
And you’ll start cryin’ Ninety-six tears

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a lead in for a Criminal Minds episode if ever one existed! I can see the voice over and pull-away shot of the girl struggling, chained to the wall of a dark basement right now.  Of course, one might expect stalkerish or otherwise odd behavior from a guy who legally changed his name to a piece of punctuation.

What concerns me most, however, are the people who don’t realize a stalker song when they hear it. NO SONG illustrates this more clearly than that wedding standard, that classic “ode to eternal love”, that promise of constancy. Yep, I’m talking about the one, the only “Every Breath You Take” by the Police. I have attended two weddings (against my wishes, mind you) where this was the song played at the altar for the lovely couple.

Did no one in the wedding planning stages ever think to LISTEN TO THE LYRICS? This isn’t a song about a happy relationship blossoming into ripe old age with grandchildren around the rocking chairs on the front porch! This is a ballad to insanity and obsession! I can’t believe it wasn’t the theme song to the all-time scariest stalker movie ever — Fatal Attraction. Just look what the guy says in the first stanza:

Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break, every step you take
I’ll be watching you

He ends EVERY stanza with “I’ll be watching you!” Who is this guy? Santa Claus? If I go to a wedding and see “EBYT” on the program, I’m praying they include that part about speak now or forever hold your peace, because I’m standing up on the pew and screaming “Dude, you are marrying a Glenn Close clone! Fly you fool! Fly!” Notice I said, “Dude” because even though the song is about a guy watching a girl, no guy gets to pick out the music at his wedding so the bride has to be the mental case.

Gentlemen, we have found him, now we just have to bring him in.

So, after all that explanation, I’m back to Adele. I don’t know WHO screwed this girl over, but I can tell you she isn’t happy about it. I can’t say for certain because I haven’t listened to all of her music, but all the songs I have heard have, “stalker chick revenge” written all over them. I mean, if a girl was singing to me, “For me, it isn’t over . . . ” in a smooth calm voice after she has “turned up out of the blue uninvited” because she “couldn’t stay away [she] couldn’t fight it” I am on the first thing smoking bound for Tristan de Cunha and I’m not looking back.

First though, I’m gonna swing by the house and pick up my bunny rabbit. Know what i mean?

Love y’all and keep those feet clean!

Buckley, Christopher T. The Relic Master. New York.
Simon and Schuster. 2015. 380 pgs.

As I begin this review, I have to confess a slight bias. This novel is historical fiction, which happens to be one of my favorite genres AND it is set right at the beginning of the Reformation in Europe, which just happens to be one of my favorite historical periods to read about and study. If author Christopher Buckley wanted to write a book just for me, The Relic Master would do quite nicely.

Dismas is a former Swiss mercenary now earning his bread as a relic finder. His occupation in life is to procure holy relics — items like the bones and other body parts of saints e.g. the jawbone of St. John the Baptist OR something intimately associated with a saint or holy figure such as a piece of the True Cross — for clients among the clergy, nobility, and merchant classes who desire to have something extra holy around the house to shorten their souls’ church-mandated stay in Purgatory.

Our protagonist makes a comfortable living obtaining relics for his various clients but by far his two wealthiest patrons are Fredrick the Wise, Elector of Saxony and his nemesis Albrect, Archbishop of Brandenburg . . . among other purchased titles. Dismas has a good life and he prides himself on always dealing in strictly authentic relics and avoiding fakes and forgeries regardless of how lucrative the payoff or how clever the subterfuge. As long as Dismas adheres to this rigid code of ethical business dealings, his life moves along languidly and mostly uncomplicated. Unfortunately, a personal disaster seems to necessitate a foray into the putrid world of relic forgery and once Dismas steps across his hitherto sacrosanct line, his languid pace of life turns highly complicated.

Just as a read, I enjoyed the novel. It is accurate in the areas it purports to be accurate and for me nothing is worse than slipshod historical references in a supposedly historical novel. Buckley obviously did his research. His writing is expressive, but sparse which actually lends a nicer historical touch to the work. The characters, both historical personages and those purely fictional, are presented as three dimensional and possessing agendas of their own rather than one or two main characters surrounded by a supporting cast of flat, wooden page fillers. Indeed, some of the more minor characters are the most intriguing.

The novel gives a good look at the seedy world of the late medieval Church machinations just before Martin Luther so explosively turned the One True and Holy Church into the Roman Catholic Church on one side and a thousand Protestant denominations on the other. It is briskly paced and engrossing.

On the other hand, the sparse prose leaves little space for description. Settings have to be guessed at just from place names. No real effort goes into showing the medieval countryside, but I may notice that only because I’m interested in seeing the medieval countryside. All told, however, The Relic Master is well worth the short time it will take to read it.

Love y’all and keep those feet clean.

I was a freshman at Laurens District 55 High School on a bright, bitterly cold day in 1986. My third period class, just before lunch, was Honors English I with Dr. King. She told us anyone who wanted to could go get their lunches and bring them back to eat in her classroom. She’d gotten a TV from the library and had it all set up to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger carry a civilian — a TEACHER — into space.

I remember the line I picked was more crowded than usual so I was later getting my lunch tray than some of my classmates. When I walked back into Dr. King’s classroom, all behind schedule, she was sitting at her desk with tears creeping down her cheeks and the handful of my friends who’d gotten there on time sat in stunned silence staring at the television set.

I walked closer and got to an angle where I could see the screen and close enough to hear the announcer. That’s when I saw the now infamous smoke plumes hanging in the azure Florida sky. The man on the news keep repeating something like, “It seems a serious malfunction has occurred with Challenger. We don’t know what has become of the crew.”

I remember the room being quieter than the grave . . . more silent than I thought I would ever hear a high school classroom become in my life. Unfortunately, I was wrong on that count because 15 years later, I was the one weeping silently on a day in early September as my normally rowdy first block English II class sat in stony and complete silence watching another pair of explosions play over and over again on a much newer television.

As a young teenager, I had no idea how to process the Challenger disaster. We didn’t know at the time, it would be later in the day when the crew cabin was located, that the entire crew was dead. I didn’t know what to do with such public death. To be honest, I hadn’t been exposed to much death at that age. All my grandparents were very much alive, as were a slew of beloved great-aunts and great-uncles and other extended family galore. I certainly couldn’t understand the magnitude of an event like this.

I remember the rest of the day being subdued, which was always unusual in our public high school. I finished classes and wrestling practice then went Granny and Papa Wham’s house where a newfangled television network called CNN played footage of the explosion over and over. The three of us ate supper and both Granny and Papa talked about other times such a huge event had happened in their lives like the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the day FDR died. On the ride to Fountain Inn earlier in the afternoon, Mama told me she remembered exactly where she was (the gym at Gray Court Owings School) and what she was doing (playing four square) when the principal announced JFK had been assassinated.

Now I could join the adults. I had a touchstone event in my life, a “where were you when” moment. I wish that moment hadn’t come at the expense of seven lives. I remember that night watching President Reagan as he gave his speech and said,

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’

In the thirty years since that fateful January moment as a freshman in high school, I’ve been witness to other monumentally historic events. I lay in the floor, again at Granny and Papa’s, and watched the Berlin Wall fall. I saw the horrific events of 9-11-2001. Worse, I sat with eerie feelings of deja vu in 2003 watching the coverage of the Columbia shuttle disaster, but nothing hit me quite as hard as watching Challenger explode on tv seemingly thousands of times. I guess because it happened when I was young enough to still believe the world was a bright and good place and the shock of seeing that it wasn’t stuck with me the longest.

So, help me remember those seven brave men and women now thirty years gone and also remember I love y’all, and keep those feet clean.

Budge and I undertook one of the longest and wildest trips ever outside our comfort zones this past weekend. Some friends of ours wished to attend a retreat for our church leaders in Asheville, NC. Unfortunately for them, they don’t have any extended family living nearby to take care of babysitting duties. I was feeling particularly magnanimous so I offered our services to watch their children at their home while they attended the two day retreat. Although stunned and somewhat skeptical at first, they eventually realized we were sincere and we made final plans to look after the children from Thursday afternoon until Saturday afternoon.

All FIVE of them, ages 10, 8, 6, 4, and 2. Three older girls followed by two boys.

As I’ve mentioned before, Budge and I have no children. It’s not that we never wanted any because we discussed having children before we married and as several of the new couples in our circle of friends at the time began having families, we waited for the little dot to turn into a plus sign for us as well, but it never did. We agreed once it looked like we wouldn’t be having children naturally that we didn’t want to pursue fertility routes and we had a couple of reasons.

First of all, fertility treatment is ungodly expensive in both money and effort. At the time, Budge was in college and I was teaching  high school so we had neither the money nor the time to put in and as we grew older and both were teaching, it was apparent that even with a double teacher salary, we’d still be strapped to afford the cost of anything other than just the most basic treatments and we both knew given our medical history of weirdness, the likelihood of a simple fix was on par with the likelihood of Switzerland starting the next world war.

Our second reason was based on observation. We’d seen other infertile couples go the route of medical intervention and not only end up nearly bankrupt, but also at one another’s throats. We saw infertility split up two couples, but what happened to a third couple was even worse. They finally got the natural child of their dreams and promptly made her the center of their universe. No child deserves that level of pressure. The girl is a tween today and she is, predictably, a holy terror — spoiled, arrogant, selfish, and able to wring whatever she wants from doting parents who remember how hard it was to get her.

We decided neither one of us wanted that.

We thought about adoption, but at first it was a serious money issue as well. Then, by the time we got the money part sorted, we realized through some preliminary research it would be a waste of time to apply with my load of mental health issues and Budge’s physical health troubles. So, we have happily resigned ourselves to being fuzzy baby parents and one of us dying alone in a nursing home forgotten and unloved.

But, I digress.

We got to our duty station around five on Thursday and left around five on Saturday afternoon. In the interim, we learned a tremendous amount about just exactly we’d missed out on for years. The first thing I noticed is five children consume more food in a shorter time than a plague of locusts. Mom left a roasted pork loin which seemed to have belonged to some prehistoric piggus giganticus extremlius for the main course and a small produce department’s worth of roasted veggies for sides. One look at the spread and I thought we would eat off such a massive amount of food for our entire time sitting.

It lasted one meal and everyone would gladly have eaten more. You can’t fill these kids up! Every day at ten and two they had a snack scheduled. Among the five of them, they ate more for a snack than some small countries produce in all agricultural endeavors and NONE of them is the tiniest bit obese. I nearly hit the floor when Mom and Dad told us an average food bill for a month once they got back on Saturday. Their FOOD BILL is more than our MORTGAGE and Mom is an amazingly frugal shopper!

Budge learned, to her dismay, children do not understand the concept of “sleeping in.” I had to go home each night because Keaudee has to go out at midnight and again at six in the morning so Budge caught the first light duty alone.

My wife is a wonderful human being, but saying she is not a morning person is a bit like saying a hurricane is not a normal wind. It doesn’t do the reality justice. She has to EASE into the day. I call her five times at seven minute intervals to gently get her up and ready for school. She was not prepared for mornings at this home.

The children are trained that they may not leave their rooms until seven AM regardless of what time they wake up. An alarm actually sounds when they can leave their beds. If you have ever been to a greyhound track you have a good general idea of the first fifteen minutes of morning at this home. The seven o’clock alarm bell sounds and five doors swing open in unison as ten pattering feet scramble down two flights of steps to the kitchen where everyone starts putting in breakfast orders all at once. Only after a forty acre field of cereal grains and a tanker truckload of milk disappears down five precious gullets does anything start to move in order.

Budge was standing stunned in the kitchen by the time I got there at eight both mornings.

I could go on about the amazing amount of energy in a house with five children and how routines and lists and chores were all that saved us from curling up in the fetal position and sucking our thumbs in gibbering madness, but you get the general idea. I have to say it was an amazing time though.

Through our babysitting challenge I learned somethings about myself. I learned I take silence for granted. I spend most of my day most of my days alone and unless I talk to myself, it is silent. Budge and I sit in silence each evening reading or watching DVRed television. In a home with five children, silence is non-existent even during mandatory “quiet time!” Someone is always talking or singing or snoring, but it’s never quiet.

I also learned I’m more selfish than I thought I was. I love these five kids. They really are GREAT kids who have been raised with a great amount of intentionality by two very dedicated parents, but they ALWAYS need SOMETHING. One needs homework help, another needs help finding a shoe, and yet another needs a diaper changed. I was in constant “helping mode” and I have a new respect for parents because when you become a parent, your idea of “me time” changes drastically. Budge and I just caught up with everything we wanted to tell each other YESTERDAY afternoon because when you are acting as ringmaster for a five child circus, you barely have time for a quick, “Hi, sweetie!” Much less any real communication.

Still, in the end I wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything. We managed to successfully keep all the house walls standing and no one lost any blood, so we were hailed as a rousingly successful pair by the Mom and Dad. Now part of me can’t wait to do it again, but another part of me is chasing that first part down with a hatchet and I think violence may occur . . . not unlike being in a house with five children!

Love y’all and keep those feet clean.

Benjamin Franklin once said the only sure things in this world are death and taxes. Ol’ Ben was right except before death comes sickness and along with sickness comes medical bills. So, I guess this day and time the only things sure are being taxed to death while owing medical bills all the way to the grave.

I’m in such a queue right now.

Last year was one of the worst years Budge and I have endured medically. It seems everyone got sick. Budge found out about a severe iron deficiency she has which has to be treated by iron infusions twice yearly and believe you me, the center doing the infusions is EXTREMELY proud of their product. Then, I had my carpal tunnel surgery and while I am pain free and feeling like a champ since my wrists don’t seize up on me anymore causing my hands to open so that I just drop whatever I’m holding, bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome abatement it turns out ain’t cheap. Even the fuzzy babies haven’t been immune. We even lost my beloved Suki to cancer just last month.

It’s been a tough year and we’ve got a couple of thousand dollars in medical bills and vet bills stacked up against us. I’m extremely thankful we do have medical insurance, but while I was under the impression medical co-pays and medical bills were going to get LESS expensive under the banner of Obamacare, it seems the exact opposite has occurred.It really sucks.

THEN, there’s the taxes. Now I don’t know what genius in the government (is that a mutually exclusive statement?) decided having property taxes due in January was a capital idea! Let’s see, we just got through the holidays, income taxes will be due any time now, so how else can we mess with the citizens’ heads? Oh, oh, oh! I know! Let’s have a couple of hundred dollars of property taxes due RIGHT AFTER all the end of the year financial outlay!

So here’s the deal, amigos. I’m casting about for ways to make up a deficit in our household budget and unlike my government, I can’t just print more money and pay everyone off. I also don’t have anyone or anytwo or anythree for that matter whom I would dare approach and ask for a couple thousand dollars to tackle that deficit.

However, I’ve been thinking and while I don’t know anyone with the resources to help me out individually, I’ve got over 2,000 followers for this blog, such as it is. So, I’m bringing my case to y’all. According to my math 1 x $2,000 = 2,000 x $1. I’ve got a tip jar up and running to a PayPal account and while I hate asking anyone for anything, when the ox gets in a ditch, some of us have to take a big ol’ bite out of our pride and ego and let the need be known.

So what I’m asking is, any of you who don’t mind or who think I’m worth it or whom I may have made laugh or think sometime in the last eight years, could you be bothered to drop a digital buck into my tip jar? I appreciate anything and honestly, if I don’t get a dime, I’ll still feel the same way about all y’all. You’re my audience — my congregation if you will — and I’m going to pass my hat around and hope for the best.

Thanks, everyone. I hope your 2016 is off to a great start. Love y’all! Keep those feet clean.

Painting of the Second Battle of Ypres, 1915

In many ways, 1915 is the redheaded stepchild of the Great War. It’s not that nothing happened during the year; a great many spectacular things took place such as the introduction of poison gas onto the battlefield, a ramping up of war in the air, and the perfection of trench warfare. It was also the year of several great battles, but none of them have yet attained the historical cachet awarded to other clashes.

This was the year the armies settled into the bloody, futile routine of trench warfare. No-man’s Land became a byword and propaganda fulled the fires of hatred between the British Tommies, German Fritzes, and Ottoman Johnny Turks. Most notably, when Christmas 1915 arrived, no one tried to meet in the middle of the wasteland between trenches for a friendly game of football. The war rolled on as usual; it was a time of tremendous bloodshed.

1915 saw Loos, Artois, Champagne, and 2nd Ypres become bloody battlefields on the Western Front while the East saw slaughter in the Caucasus Mountains and the historic Great Retreat of the Russians. The Ottoman Empire joined the war and Churchill convinced the Entente Powers to launch the monumentally disastrous Gallipoli Campaign which helped draw world attention away from the tragedy of the Armenian Genocide the Ottomans were perpetrating at the same time.

Italy joined the war when the Entente finally convinced her she would gain more in an Entente victory than if she threw in with the Central Powers. Shortly after her entry the First Battle of the Isonzo River made that alpine stream run red. Before 1915 ended, Italy and Austria-Hungary would fight the Second, Third, and Fourth Battles of the Isonzo and before the Armistice ended the War, these two enemies would fight SIX MORE battles up and down that river valley where trenches could only be dug with dynamite and rock shrapnel mixed with steel to increase the deadliness of any bombardment.

In the air, German Ace Max Immelmann began writing the book on aerial combat and though he would die in a hail of bullets and a flaming crash, his Immelmann Turn would outlive him and be the great legacy of the lonely Eagle of Lille. It was also in 1915 the Fokker Scourge utilizing the Fokker Eindecker single wing aircraft would drive the Entente pilots from the skies in droves and for a time, Germany held complete sway over the air.

On the seas, Germany unleashed her U-boats and they proved greatly effective so long as they refused to abide by standard rules of naval warfare and alert the ship they intended to sink. This “unrestricted” submarine warfare eventually lead to the sinking of the famous Lusitania British liner with the loss of over 100 American lives and very nearly brought America into the war three years before she would eventually join.

Other than the U-boats, however, the sea was generally a quiet place. Some commerce raiding took place on both sides, but the British Home Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet would both remain in port watching and waiting for some great encounter.

So 1915 was far from uneventful, but the actions of the year remain largely footnotes in the history of World War One not because they were unimportant, but because all the battles of 1915 paled in comparison to what was to come in 1916 — the year contemporary writers called “The Breaker of Nations.” 1916 would see the main great naval battle finally take place at Jutland, but most of all, it would be ruled by two words: Verdun and Somme.

This is the last Great War Wednesday post of the year. I’ll pick back up in January or early February to look at the events of 1916. Until then, have a great new year and keep your feet clean.

This was originally published December 13, 2010 and for the record, I still wear only shorts and Crocs, even in winter.

I’ll be the first to admit that the inside of my head isn’t a place most people want to visit, much less live or even stay for a while. It gets weird in here at times, even for me and its MY head. I think strange things; not so much “bad thoughts” or “thoughts I shouldn’t think” as much as  “where the blazes do these thoughts come from?” I’m sensitive to odd things. Odd moments make me emotional. Strange things can make me cry.

I also do some strange things. They aren’t strange to me. In fact, they seem quite normal while they are in the planning stages inside my head, but when they break out into the open, they make people look at me oddly. I’ve rather gotten used to it.

I guess one of the strangest things I do — as far as others looking at me goes — is wearing my Crocs and shorts in the coldest weather, often with a short sleeve shirt and no jacket. Folks think this is strange behavior, and they are always asking me why I don’t wear a coat or why am I wearing shoes with holes in them and other, perfectly valid questions. Even though I wear Crocs all the time, they take on a special meaning in winter.

Yes, I do get cold. I am fat and so have a goodly amount of natural insulation and it helps more than you’d think, but my arms get cold and my legs get cold and sometimes, my feet are too cold to feel. Still, I’ve never told anyone before — not even Budge or Mama — why I intentionally let myself get very cold, to the point that sometimes it actually hurts.

Here’s why.

When I’m letting myself get cold, I’m reminding myself that, no matter HOW cold I get — how cold I LET myself get — I’m never going to suffer from the cold in any way as badly as others have. Enduring a tiny bit of frigid discomfort is my small, weird way of honoring those people whose memories lay like limestone blocks on my soul.

No matter how cold I get or how wet and frigid my feet get,  I’ll never be half as cold as the men — boys really — in the trenches of the First World War. My feet aren’t going to go numb and get frostbitten and develop trench foot. I’ll be going into a warm house or car shortly, not standing constantly in ankle-deep water that doesn’t freeze only because the constant movement of men keeps the ice broken up.

No matter how cold I get, I won’t be anywhere near as cold as the political prisoners of the Soviet Union’s GULAGS. I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich my first year as a teacher. It was hard. These were men, and some women, enduring the Siberian winter with nowhere near enough cold weather gear, working with bricks that would freeze to their hands. Not enough to eat, never warm for months at a time. Ice and snow everywhere, and all the time knowing you’re here because of your beliefs and principles — not any “crime.”

I read Night as a senior in college and I’ve never looked at cold the same since because God knows I won’t be as cold as the poor souls of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Mauthausen or the other hundreds of concentration camps spread throughout the Nazi Reich.

Every time I feel the cold, and especially the biting winds,  slashing into me so I feel myself trying to “draw in” for some relief, I see rows and rows of wretched men, women, and children standing on the appelplatz with snow on their shoulders and no shelter from the Polish winter winds. Standing in the elements, freezing to death for the unspeakable act of being born Jewish, Gypsy, Polish, or Russian.

I think of them trying to sleep on a wooden plank with a “blanket” — more of a worn bed sheet — for warmth, knowing through the winter blackness that dawn would bring no hope, no reprieve only more cold.

PLEASE understand I in no way claim kinship with the Shoah victims. Nothing I could inflict upon myself would approach the deprivations they endured, and certainly a few shivers and goosebumps can scarcely bring their suffering to mind, but I do attempt  to remember. And so, to honor their memory.

When I get bitterly cold, I know a warm shower, hot meal, and invitingly comfortable bed with mounds of warm quilts or an electric blanket await me just inside my home.

So, I know I’ll never fully understand the plight of the homeless in America’s cities, huddled about burning trash barrels, sleeping atop steam grates, stuffing their rags with newspapers — all the time trying to raise their temperature just a degree or so.

All the while enduring not only the biting cold, but also the biting stares of those who’ll never have to worry about their next meal or where they will sleep or what will happen to them if the temperature drops again tonight. Knowing that there, but for the grace of God, do I lie huddled while my fellow-men walk quickly past.

I’m trying to honor and remember these brave, damned souls who fought against Old Man Winter. From Valley Forge with its bloody footprints in the snow, to the bitter winters around the Chosin Reservoir and Inchon during the forgotten Korean War, to the Arctic and Antarctic explorers and all the snowbound, ice rimed humanity in between, in war and in peace, but always in cold.

Men and women, some fighting for God and king, some just down on their luck, many freezing to death far from home, but all denied the most basic human right — the right to be warm.

So that is why I often wear Crocs and shorts without a jacket in winter. It’s not much, but it’s the least I can do.

To give honor; to remember.

Love y’all and don’t forget to keep your feet warm, dry, and clean.