When a friend of my husband asked him for a copy of the poem “Little Irish Mother,” I offered to type it out for him. As I read it, I felt guilty for considering the poem to be pure corn:

…she’s lonesome when the evening shadows fall;
Near the fire she “do be thinkin’,” all the “childer” are away,
And their silent pictures watch her from the wall.
For the world has claimed them from her . . .

I wondered why I, who absolutely adored my mother, failed to be moved by the teary sentiment that drips from each line. Then memories came flooding back of my own mother, and I realized that she was never like the mother in the poem, and two generations later, most mothers are even less like that. They ski, play tennis, water raft, and sky dive. It is a rare mother today who sits in a rocking chair waiting for a phone call from a neglectful grown child. She is more likely to attend a writing class during the daytime, then phone a friend, dress up to the nines and go out to dinner, followed by a movie or a stage play. After that, she goes home to her computer to e-mail her 40-year-old child who complains that he never hears from her anymore.

Although my mother last gave birth in the ‘30’s, she was never part of the “shawl and rocking chair crowd” even after we grew up. While her children and grandchildren were always the center of her world, she never lost her enthusiasm for shopping, dining out, and traveling, and she especially enjoyed playing the slot machines at Las Vegas. Once I stepped away from my slot machine asking my mom to watch it for a minute; she dropped in a nickel and won $200! Unbelievably lucky, three of her cards were winners one night at Bingo and as an undercurrent of murmuring grew in the Hall, she said later that she was afraid of being tarred and feathered.

She was a better than average dancer and many nights when she and Dad closed their store at midnight, they stepped out to the local clubs. Though she hadn’t been able to fulfill her dream to dance professionally because of her father’s objections, when we were in junior high, she taught the three of us kids to dance to records played on our basement jukebox. We learned to do a dreamy two-step to Sinatra ballads, and a swinging jitterbug to Tommy Dorsey’s “In the Mood.”

My mother and father, though quite different from one another in many ways, did share an interest in all things political. Loyal Democrats for years, they voted three times for Franklin D. Roosevelt. By the time he ran for a fourth term, disillusionment had set in. When President Roosevelt made the wartime decision, aided and abetted by Congress, to confine hard-working, loyal Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, my parents temporarily switched parties.

After my father’s early death, this basically shy woman built a new liquor store and ran it for years, even doing her own complicated bookkeeping. This was highly unusual in our small town in the 1950s. She was not only a "mere" woman in a time when women were considered secondary to their men, but an uneducated one at that, having left school after the 6th grade.

As intelligent as she was, Mom could sometimes be Queen of the Cliché. She had a cliché for every occasion. For example, if my brothers and I were silly and giggly when we came to the breakfast table, she sternly warned us, “laugh before breakfast, cry before supper.” And if we were sad or worried, she reminded us that, “it’s always darkest before the dawn” and “when it rains, it pours.” Sometimes when she felt that she was not looking her best, she would gaze at her image in the mirror and sigh, “I look like the last rose of summer.” Of course, she had a cliché for her luck with slot machines and punchboards also: “Lucky in cards, unlucky in love!”

In my jumble of memories, I picture my mother as ever young, not childish, but childlike. Once she and her visiting sisters reminisced and giggled late into the night on the eve of a very important occasion in my life. Finally, I called out, “Hey, you guys. I’m getting married in the morning. How about a few hours of sleep?” I smiled in the darkness when I heard their voices descend into conspiratorial whispers as they attempted to stifle their laughter.

There was a bit of the Gracie Allen about her in her later years. Once when she was staying with us, I called Goodwill to pick up two boxes of used clothing I had set on the porch for them. When I came home from work, she informed me, “For some reason, a box of your clothes got left out on the front steps. But don’t worry, I carried them all back in for you.”

Twice in her life my mother faced a gun. She often told us the story about a frightening episode that happened one summer day, in an unlikely decade and in a neighborhood where you wouldn’t expect it because everyone was poor together. “I heard a noise on the front porch,” she said, “so I went to the door to see who it was. A man stood there pointing a gun at me through the screen door. I was terrified, so I let out a blood-curdling scream.”

“Everyone had their doors open because of the heat,” she continued, “and Mrs. Kautz in the house next door heard me, and she screamed out the door also. In the next house over from hers, Mrs. Miller heard Mrs. Kautz screech, so she screamed, too. I was told later that women shrieked all up and down the block. I guess the robber was stunned to hear screaming coming from everywhere in the neighborhood, because all at once he turned and ran away.”

Thirty years later, it happened to her again. A 1963 letter to me said: “Just a few words to let you know I’m in good health but still nervous from the ordeal I went through Saturday night. There isn’t another shock to compare with the one you get facing a gun pointed at you. It’s a wonder I didn’t drop dead for I was close to passing out, but I did have enough strength to hand him all the bills in the cash register. He wanted all the change but I was too scared to pick up a paper bag to put the silver in, so he grabbed the coin tray to remove it. When that failed, he ran out of the store. I locked the door and called police. So far they haven’t caught up with him.”

Throughout her life, my mother was in love with Love. She loved sad love songs, romantic stories, and sentimental poetry; she loved pathos and passion. And she found tears to be therapeutic! How often I remember her saying, "I had a good cry, and then I felt better!"

A rare difference between my mother and me involved our opinion of cats. I cherished them; she merely tolerated them. Her German mother had loved only white cats and the yard was filled with wild cats when Mom was growing up. “Every time I turned around,” she said, “there was another cat looking in the window at me!” Speaking for myself, it sounds like Paradise.

My mom never tired of eating out, and she dearly loved sweets. When her appetite lessened with the passing years, she would declare after half a sandwich that she was so full she just couldn’t eat another bite. My husband would tease her, saying, “Gee, that’s too bad, Bert. We were going to order pie for dessert.” She always played her role to the hilt. “Pie? Pie? Did someone mention pie? Well, I guess maybe I do have a little bit of room left for that!”

This was a woman who was miles ahead of her own children in accepting the changes wrought by the passing years. Sometimes she understood our offspring better than we, their parents, did. Long hair? Rock and Roll? Without pitting them against us, she won their undying affection with her quiet acceptance of the music and hairstyles of her teenaged grandchildren.

Seven years after my mother’s death, while searching through a box of important papers for a document I needed, I discovered that, thanks to my packrat tendencies, I possessed forty years of her letters to me. The first one was written in 1950 when I went away for my first semester at Valparaiso University in Indiana. It was the first time I had been away for that length of time, and her loving and newsy missives furnished me with a valuable lifeline to my home.

When I reread them, I discovered a soul even greater than I remembered, and a gift of words both simple and profound. The letters often follow the garden-variety letter-writing school of thought that we were taught as children: I am fine, how are you; current weather news; the state of everyone's health; political and financial ups and downs. But there is an underlying current of concern and caring in her simple utterances and her most prosaic words, as well as flashes of wit and profound insight.

No, she never sat knitting in a rocking chair, waiting for something or someone to brighten her life. Even when arthritis and osteoporosis ended her dancing and her travels and left her in constant pain, my beautiful mother still brightened our lives with the love she gave so freely, with her sense of the comical, and with her honesty and compassion. I miss her every day of my life.

At the dinner table recently, I said to Denis, “I’m so full, I can’t eat another bite.” Five minutes later I stood at the counter preparing a dessert intended for my immediate consumption. That’s when it hit me. I looked at him and said, “I’m turning into my mother.” I should be so lucky!

Autobio.7
Language

Feline Psycholinguistics
By Carolyn Cummings

Webster defines psycholinguistics as the study of psychological factors involved in the perception of and response to linguistic phenomena.

My three felines and I perceive and respond to linguistic phenomena everyday. I wonder if that’s what Webster had in mind.

We start our day with yoga. The felines engage in a bit of playful drama as they arch their backs to begin their morning stretching exercises. I become a copycat as I perform the human counterpart called ‘the cat- dog’ stretch. Next they sit on the floor extending one hind leg into the air burying their heads beneath their tails. I follow their lead with my own leg lifts. As they lick the fur on their backs I do my version of ‘the spinal twist.’
Stretching their front legs and paws far out in front with their back ends high in the air shows me it is time for me to relax into the ‘child’s pose’. We come up for air, yawn a few times, take another deep breath and exhale. Three feline voices purr in harmony. There is no better sound to start the day.

The next order of the day is when the felines strut down the hall to their feeding bowls. They practice patience, as they sit and watch me fill each bowl with practiced precision. If an unpopular flavor has been dished up, a frown will tense up between Ellie’s enormous blue eyes. Frowns speak volumes. I try again with another flavor. Ellie is a finicky, fussy eater. Emily Ann and Rocky will eat anything. I rescued all three of them when they were kittens. I think they remember that.

I pour Special K cereal into my bowl, not too unlike the cats’ bowls. I enjoy cereal and coffee as I open the morning paper across the table. Emily Ann and Ellie enjoy this exercise each morning. They take turns finding appropriate locations where they can sit on top of the newspaper. We mimic soft noises to each other as I comment on the depressing state of the world. They look into my face and blink their eyes, those gentle, but wise, blue eyes. I remind each of them how grateful I am. They show their own versions of gratefulness by pressing their heads against my cheeks accompanied with some cat chatter and sweet purring sounds. There is no better way to start the day.

Knowing that my daily routine and theirs will soon take different courses, they find their three favorite napping spots, sometimes in a strip of sunlight resting across the floor, sometimes in their wicker chairs in the atrium. Cat naps fill up their days.

In the late afternoon (the felines know the exact time of day), the window sill becomes their look-out station. As though they were sitting for a portrait, three feline siblings line up on the window sill, big Rocky in the middle, with sisters Emily Ann and Ellie on each side. They begin their patient watch. When they see me approach our house, they line up inside the door….my welcoming committee of three.

They know that I will tell them how glad I am to see them as I walk in the door.
They know my routine; that I like to sit in my recliner and read the mail before checking the telephone messages. With my dinner preparations begun, the felines wait at their bowls. They are experts at voicing their catty disapproval if there is an unnecessary delay in their evening meal.

After their meal is finished, paws are licked clean, and their coats are groomed to a luster, the felines pursue a playful game with feathers and balls, sometimes involving all four of us.

If, by some happy phenomenon, a Lakers game is on television, Rocky goes to his footstool in front of the screen. When I finally settle into my recliner to watch the game, Rocky settles into my lap. This seventeen pound, handsome Himalayan mix sits up like a human, resting the back of his head against my shoulder. He looks up at me, blinks his big blue eyes, purrs with contentment, and returns to his ballgame. His head turns from side to side catching the action of his favorite purple and gold players. Sometimes he touches my cheek ever so gently with one of his oversized front paws. We are Lakers fans, Rocky and I.

When they are ready to go to bed, the three cuddle together, one cat tumbled into the next like a continuous knot. They know that I will make all kinds of noises about how much I appreciate and love them. They hear it every night. They know they are extremely lucky. I know I am, too.

There is no better way to end our day.

Ophelia, who usually gets very agitated in the car, was docile as Julie petted her and talked to her in a soothing voice. It was a gray, rainy day. I parked the car, and we skirted a large puddle as we walked into the cat clinic. It seemed quieter than usual. There were few cats being boarded in the cages and only one other person, a man, in the waiting area.

One of the aides, a young woman with a nice smile, greeted us and took us into a room in the back with an examining table. She was very sympathetic toward Julie and patiently explained the procedure. Julie had tears in her eyes and I was more upset about how Julie was feeling that about the cat’s fate. I began to feel teary, too.

The aide went out and come back with a form and a bill. I had to sign the form attesting to the fact that Ophelia had not bitten anyone in the last five days. (To my knowledge she had not bitten anyone in the last twenty-one years.) The bill read: “Euthanasia $39.90.” I do not know how this strange figure was arrived at since there was no breakdown on the statement and no indication of a death tax. I remember my wife telling me that when the old Dayton’s department store had a sale all the sale items were priced to end in ninety cents. Maybe the vet was running a sale.

Dr. Thomas came in. He was a stocky man of about forty and wore glasses. He looked somber. I thought that it must be tough for a man trained to preserve life to take it away. He asked us some questions about how Ophelia had been acting. He then described the procedure, much in the same way as the aide had, except that he said Ophelia’s heart would stop within a minute rather than within seconds.

Julie had told me earlier that she did not want to witness the event, but she had apparently changed her mind and remained in the room. During this time Ophelia stayed on the floor. The aide came in with an old white towel with light blue vertical stripes. I then knew where the ninety cents charge came from—it was for the towel. Or maybe it was $9.90 for the towel.

The aide picked Ophelia up and put her on the towel on the table. Dr. Thomas came back in the room with a syringe filled with a colorless liquid. This was a tranquilizer they both explained, used to calm the cat before the fatal injection. The aide held Ophelia and the vet injected the fluid into her hind quarters. Julie took Ophelia on her lap, but the cat resisted at first.

“I thought this was supposed to calm her,” Julie said. Dr. Thomas and his assistant left the room for a few minutes. Julie and I petted Ophelia and we both began to cry.

The vet and the aide returned. He had an electric razor and she had a syringe containing a pink liquid. The assistant put Ophelia back on the table on the towel. We continued to pet her. Dr. Thomas shaved the fur off of her front right paw, exposing the vein. Ophelia instinctively licked it once. The doctor injected the liquid into her vein and after about two seconds said, “She’s gone.”

The aide asked if we wanted to be alone with the animal. Julie said no. Julie petted Ophelia a few more times and kissed her. The assistant took the body wrapped in the towel. We walked out to the front and in a few minutes the aide gave me Ophelia covered with the towel in a cardboard box without a lid. I put the box in the trunk of the car and we drove home.

When we got home Fran asked to see the body. I took out the box and showed it to her. Ophelia was curled up in a ball looking like she was resting comfortably. Fran touched her fur. “She feels smooth,” she said.

Julie and I grabbed a variety of garden implements from the garage and headed out to the evergreen tree, with the box in hand. I began to dig. After a minute or so, Julie excused herself and went into the house to watch Oprah. The ground was muddy and rocky. Fifteen minutes later Julie reappeared and helped me finish. We dug a hole about two feet square and two feet deep. It began to rain heavily and we heard thunder. Just like in a grade B horror movie, I thought. I wrapped Ophelia’s body in the towel and placed it in the hole. We frantically filled in the dirt and ran into the house, our clothes dripping with water.

That happened almost ten years ago and although it was upsetting, particularly to my daughter, it’s good to keep it in perspective. It may be that Ophelia is in cat heaven, chasing birds, playing with toy mice filled with catnip and eating human tuna, but I doubt it. She had a good life—better than a lot of cats and better than some humans. She always had food and shelter and even health care. She, like most cats, was able to manipulate her environment to get love and attention when she wanted it. My daughter loved her and through her was able to express her need to nurture. But as a society we often seem to care more for pets than for people. Humans may be harder or more dangerous to love. We spend billions on pets—they now have their own supermarkets—but seem reluctant to help the poor and the homeless.

I knew a man who once worked for Ralston Purina. He told me that whenever they changed the flavor of the pet food they received letters from customers complaining about the new taste.

Oh, my God, this is it!

The Japanese suicide plane is zeroing in on me as I stand transfixed on the deck of LST 605 just forward of the bridge. Seven kamikazes are attacking three LSTs waiting their turn to hit the Mindoro Island beach on December 15, 1944.

LST 472 is ahead of us. A suicide plane plunges into its deck, sets it ablaze and sinks it.

LST 738 is astern. Another suicide plane crashes into her. LST 738 sinks.

Now it’s our turn.

The veteran gunners of the 605 pour fire into the diving plane. The PT boats surrounding us send up a withering wall of forty- and twenty-millimeter and fifty-caliber machine gun shells.

The plane is about to hit. Knowing I am near death, I stand paralyzed with fear. Too numb to even pray.

At the last second, the sheer weight of the anti-aircraft barrage flips the plane over, and it plunges into the sea just off the port side with a tremendous explosion that almost lifts the 328-foot, 4,000-ton ship out of the water.

Know you are the luckiest person on earth, saved from a crushing, flaming death 10,000 miles away from your beloved wife and seven-month-old son.

Rewind.
The Mindoro invasion armada lands 10,000 army troops and supplies on the morning of December 15 and as rapidly as possible pulls off the beach and returns to the relative safety of Leyte Island, 300 miles to the southeast where the invasion begins. All the troop transports and protective cruisers and destroyers disappear over the horizon. All but one—LST 605.

The instant the 605 slides up on the beach after her narrow escape and opens her bow doors, its 150 Navy passengers making up the base force of Motor Torpedo Boat Task Unit 70.1.4 trample over each other in a mad dash ashore to get as far away from the beached ship as possible.

I must organize a crew to unload the ship and let it return to Leyte, but I have no one to organize. All day long the ship’s exhausted crew works to remove 2,100 tons of cargo. All night the crew labors on. The next morning, still not completely unloaded, LST 605 is a lonely, sitting duck.

I post two seamen to guard the supply dump on the beach, jump into a jeep and drive off to select a site for our base camp. Seconds later I hear the roar of an enemy aircraft, look back and see a twin-engine “Sally” try to fly into the 605’s bow doors. Under heavy fire from the ship, the bomber crashes about fifty yards short of its target into a pile of fifty-five-gallon aviation gasoline drums, sending a sheet of flame over the ship’s bow, incinerating several crewmen manning the twenty-millimeter cannons. Thirty seconds ago I was standing with the two seamen—-thirty seconds separate me from another appointment with death.

As the “Sally” roars in, both seamen flop onto their bellies in the sand. A sheet of steel flies out of the cauldron of fire and scoops out the underbelly of Seaman Fuellhart. When Seaman Genaro sees the mutilated corpse of his buddy, he flips. Physically unscathed, Genaro is traumatized. When I see him several days later his black hair is snow white. One reads about such events in fiction and scoffs, but Genaro's hair is snow white.

The 605 finally empties her belly, slides off the beach and gets underway. Her crew has little respect for the 150-man base force of MTB Task Unit 70.1.4.

Recently, I search the Internet in vain for a 605 survivor, so I can apologize to its seven officers and 200 enlisted men for the rotten, cowardly way we behave December 15, 1944.

LST 605’s crew was battle tested. I recall them screaming at the U.S.S Nashville to “for God’s sake shoot!” as a suicide plane smashes into the invasion fleet’s flagship on December 13 en route to Mindoro. The Nashville doesn’t fire a shot. The kamikaze and its two 500-pound bombs disable the light cruiser, killing 133 and wounding 199. The tragic event foreshadows daily kamikaze attacks—-the heaviest Japanese aerial counteroffensive of the war to that point. Not one ship in the second supply convoy to Mindoro gets through wave after wave of unremitting suicide plane attacks.

Our task unit of twenty-six PT boats suffers one-third casualties and wins a Navy Unit Commendation. I’ve got ribbons with battle stars and nightmares for several years after World War II. We lose one boat to a suicide plane and two boats to “friendly” fire from our destroyers who mistake seventy-eight-foot-long PT boats for twelve-foot Japanese suicide boats used to ram our ships at Luzon with TNT-loaded bows. My good friend Mike Haughian catches a “friendly” destroyer’s five-inch shell in the chest. We even the score by shooting down a Marine Corsair that makes the mistake of flying over Mangarin Bay immediately after a suicide plane lands on one of our boats. Our PTs shoot at anything that flies, including U. S. Navy PBY flying boats.

Even today I hate the sound of a loud, single-engine aircraft. It reminds me of the nightly visits of “Putt-putt Charley” and the eerie whooooshing sound of a “daisy-cutter” bomb dropping on a nearby random target and mowing down any object or person stupid enough to be standing up within two hundred yards.
As terrified as I am during daily attacks, nothing frightens me more during the Mindoro campaign than the certainty of death, as I stand petrified and trembling on the deck of LST 605 the morning of December 15, 1944.

MY FAMILY By Fred Strong

A spool rocker. A hand-written 20 by 30 inch framed Marriage Certificate. A box of old photos. The only things, except for memories, that survived the trip from the farm in Ohio to Arizona and California.

A rocking chair with turned handles and legs made by a craftsman. They don’t make them like that anymore. It languished in the garage for twenty years until we had it refinished, and now stands in a place of honor in the living room. Grandfather’s hand-written Marriage Certificate with scrolls, names of witnesses, and relatives in a scalloped frame, hangs on the wall in my study.

A box of photos. Who are these people? I recognize some of the names, but others don’t mean anything to me. Here is grandfather and grandmother sitting stiffly in front of the fireplace, looking a little bit like figures in a Grant Wood painting. Here is father looking improbably young, and mother holding a baby. A group picture of students in front of the three-room schoolhouse in Richfield Center. That little guy in the corner of the first row is me.

Memories of life on the farm. There are lots of them. The house with room for all, and a porch with views of the maple trees on the lawn, fields of grain and pasture for the horses and cows. The big red barn with stables and a barnyard. A haymow and strawstack on the floor above. A ladder high up on a little platform and window in the peak. Lots of places for exploration.

We knew that grandfather came to this part of Ohio in1873, bought the land and made a family farm. We knew the neighbors and relatives in the little country church and schoolhouse. But we never knew the family history. Why? Grandfather died before we were born. Father, an only child, was busy on the farm. We were busy with our own lives and plans. We should have talked with father about the family. We did not, and he did not volunteer any information. The family origins remained a mystery until Mary took a class in genealogy and found a long family history.

That history spans four hundred years and eight generations. It covers the period of the great migrations from Europe and across America. Genealogy traces names and dates and relationships. It is not the same as a family history. But it can be a record around which history can be understood. This family history began with:

Elder John Strong, 1606 to 1698, being of the Protestant persuasion, emigrated from England to America in 1630. He was part of a flood of some 24,000 newcomers who arrived in Boston in the decade after the Pilgrims, driven by the Thirty Years War and the English Revolution. During the three-month journey in a small craft his wife died. , He joined others in the town of Taunton where he met and married a second wife. Together they produced 16 children. Their descendants are many and constitute a big American family.

Thomas Strong, 1630 to 1689. A trooper and farmer. Some of his 15 children were given names such as Experience, Return, Thankful, and Submit. Perhaps this tells part of the story. His great-great-grandson was Captain Nathan Hale. …….. Back in Europe, Galileo proclaimed that the earth is not the center of the universe.

Waitstill Strong, 1677 to 1762. The family moved from the coastal area around Boston into the Connecticut Valley, along with others who made up the first group to move westward, culminating in King William’s War. Hundreds died, but the Indians were defeated and westward expansion continued. …… Isaac Newton published the laws of motion and gravity.

Deacon Waitstill Strong, 1703 to 1792. Indian wars continued, joined by the French and English which developed into a century-long conflict with North America as the prize for the winner. ……. The child prodigy Mozart brought his music to the world. The Industrial Revolution transformed life.

Another Waitstill Strong. 1746 to 1835. A farmer in Southhampton. The family expanded some more. The Revolutionary War brought a new country into existence. His cousin was Governor Caleb Strong who was a delegate to the Convention which formed the Constitution. The Louisiana Purchase expanded the country to the Pacific …….. Revolution in France brought Napoleon and European wars.

Waitstill Root Strong, 1788 to 1855. A farmer in Huntington, Massachusetts, he joined Moses Cleaveland in a mass exodus westward to the Ohio country after the War of 1812, attracted by good land which sold for only $1.00 an acre. His cousin John Stoughton Strong, founded the settlement of what is now Strongsville near Cleveland. …….Charles Darwin opened thought to the idea of evolution. Gold was discovered in California.

Lyman Emory Strong, 1844 to 1918. Came to northwest Ohio in 1873, purchased 80 acres in what was called the Big Cottonwood Swamp, ditched and drained the land, and built a house and barn. He called it Maple Lawn Farm after the maple trees he planted in the yard. ……. .Many cousins fought in the Civil War which broke out in 1861.

Fred Nelson Strong, 1873 to 1960. My father. An only child, he enlarged the house and barn. In addition to farming, he engaged in stock trading, traveling through the South to buy horses for resale to Ohio farmers. …….. The country came of age with the transcontinental railroad, telephone, radio, and, tragically, World Wars I and II.

So this is my family. It was there all the time, and I didn’t know it.

But it is a genealogy family. I don’t know them personally. They did not define the American history. It defined them As I think of the times they lived in, I realize they reflect their times, and I wonder. If some 24,000 people left their country in small fragile crafts to cross an ocean toward an unknown place, what drove them? If it was the English Revolution and the religious wars that preceded it, I need to know more about this history. And are there echoes in the present of people who cross the world in search of a better life? And what drove the mass movements westward after 1800? Their actions changed the country. Forests were cut down. Why did they call part of Ohio the “Fire Lands?”

The farm is gone. Why? In our case it lasted only 70 years. Now it is overtaken by the towns and is a subdivision. Where will this movement lead? New families move their separate ways. For what? For opportunity, or the promise of opportunity. Family history is lost. Even current history. Many of the older generation move into “retirement homes.” They think about grandchildren who have no time for them. The world moves ever faster. They think about how history repeats itself with new families and new/old conflicts.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The little village of Chardstock in Devon County, England, lies at the end of a narrow country road. There is a stone church, a pub, and some houses. A small house on the main road has a plaque beside the door stating that this is the Strong House where Elder John Strong was born. The house was built in the 1500’s and has seen much use over the years for various purposes. It has been renovated with help of the Family Association in America. We had made arrangements and were welcomed by the occupants. Two rooms and a kitchen with a big stone fireplace for cooking. For such an old building it was in surprisingly good condition.

On to the town of Plymouth which lies on a hill overlooking the harbor. A statue of Sir Walter Raleigh stands guard. Stone steps lead down to the quay where travelers boarded their ships for the New World. Then across the Dartmoor Plain, home of Widecomb Fair, and on to the Bronze Age site of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. Now we really are in ancient times.

We are still trying to connect the present with all of this past that seems so ancient. It makes you think and wonder.

n