Veteran's Day revisited

What did you do to celebrate Veteran's Day? If you're like me -- not much. Most continued the work week uninterrupted -- I work a government job so I sat at home and got paid for it. I can only imagine what someone in the military felt. I've never been there. Maybe they felt a reverence for those brave brothers and sisters who died or sustained wounds for their country; may be they felt the heart breaking pain of rejection, their contributions unappreciated.

I'm often reminded that I have a Polyanna perspective of war. Or perhaps it is more a one-dimensional, read-it-in-a-book kind of feeling about it. I tick off the cost of the war with a counter on this website. That doesn't begin to count the cost.

Now and then something crosses my path that makes me sit up and stop taking for granted that people will continually be there to put themselves in harms way to preserve my freedom, my country. Today it was the realization that volunteers continue to devote their lives to the care and maintenance of strangers' graves. All of these years after the end of World War II, people maintain graves for soldiers -- American, English, Australian.... Men who died and were buried on foreign soil. One web site "In Honored Glory" drives that message home and provides a few stories behind 'he gave his life for his country.' The photo below shows the well kept Margraten Cemetery in the Netherlands.

A dear friend is compiling information in a book -- the stories behind the names that grace military installations around the world. Fort Hood. Ramstein Air Force Base. Camp Lejuene.... The men and one woman who performed beyond all expectations and are honored with their name linked to a military installation -- yet we have forgotten who they are and what they did. I hope she soon gets the book out in stores so we can read it and never forget.

Looking through the 85 stories on In Honored Glory, I met Carl Genthner. He was probably the first man shot at a picturesque Belgium town, Malmedy. Carl Genthner was a medic, an ambulance driver, one of the few people out there bent on saving lives, not taking them. Malmedy will aways be associated with Carl's death and those of more than a hundred American prisoners of war.

"By about 1400, 113 Americans had been assembled in the field by the Café. They included 90 members of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion (all except three from Battery B), 10 men from the five ambulances, the military policeman who had been on traffic duty at Five Points, the 86th Battalion engineer and 11 men who had been captured by KGr. Peiper before reaching Baugnez–eight from the 32nd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, two from the 200th Field Artillery Battalion and a sergeant from the 23rd Infantry Regiment." -- History Net

These men were herded into the center of a field and German soldiers began shooting them, one by one, like target practice. They were infected with the blood sport and took more and more pleasure in their shooting prowess. A convoy of German soldiers drove by during the massacre.

There were five who lived to tell the story.

It may be painful to read, yet there's something powerful and even hopeful in knowing that we are part of a country that includes such people who can rise to the occasion even unto the point of giving their lives. The men who were senselessly used as targets and those who gave their lives to save innocents or their fellow soldiers. Each war has too many of these stories. Each person who died had lived and left a footprint on this earth and their contributions to protecting freedom should mean more to us than a date on a calendar.

Another website, The Red Cross Holiday Mail for Heroes offers the opportunity to send Christmas cards to our soldiers. If anyone missed celebrating our heroes during Veteran's Day, here's a second chance to let them know, if not how much we appreciate them, at least let them know they are not forgotten.

I Feel the Need to Knit

A few days ago knitting fanatic Peggy Vincent emailed me about the above pictured cupcakes. On this delightful website, instructions are given to 'knit' marzipan -- excellent instructions, I might add. I'm not sure marzipan knitting will reap as wide an appeal as knitting now has, but it is worth checking out what creative people are doing.

Having spent several years as CEO of my own little cottage cake baking industry, I know a bit about novelty decorations and probably feel more sure of my leaf tip than I do of my number seven knitting needles. Inevitably I begin each knitting project in fear of a dropped stitch. But the need to knit is strong.

My theory: knitting and crisis go together. It brought women together during World War I and II. Whether of Allies or Axis countries, women knitted woolen squares to sew together into blankets for the soldiers. My mother, born in 1912, remembered making these squares as a child. With her mother and other women of the little Ohio community, they gathered in the church fellowship hall armed with needles and yarn. The Red Cross distributed the finished blankets to the wounded. When the recipient touched the hand-knit squares, he would recall loving hands of his own mothers, sisters and wives.

Eleanor Roosevelt could host a tea party and talk politics with her husband and his cronies. She manipulated four double-pointed needles and turned out sock after sock for soldiers fighting World War II. Her knitting spoke as loudly as her words.

I recall one pre-teen summer, waiting my turn to model my 4-H sewing project at the annual style show. I looked out from the stage to see someone’s mother placidly knitting a pink sweater. Knit and purl, knit and purl. Her eyes were watching the stage as her hands did something completely different. She appeared to be an island of control and peace in the lively audience. I wanted to leap from the stage and sit by her side and ask, "Will you teach me such confidence, please?"

A recent move from the Midwest to the South, sapped more than my confidence. With my brain already full of details for the sale of one house, purchase of another and the move from one to the other, the need to knit overwhelmed me. I couldn’t concentrate long enough to follow a pattern. I simply needed to knit.

With some wonderfully forgiving yarn that makes anything look special, I cast on stitches. Forty, fifty, it didn’t matter. Enough stitches to keep me happy. And I sat, knitting the stitches from one needle to the next while my brain whirled with thoughts of this new life ahead of me. No purl, no counting, no thought of what I was making. Just knit, knit, knit. When the end of the skein appeared, I cast off the stitches and gazed at the thing I had created.

My blue collar work ethic requires that everything be useful. So, one more look at the rectangle, admiration for the even stitches and then I knew. "It’s a cat’s blanket."

And, with that declaration, I reached for another skein of yarn. Four cats needed traveling blankets and my soul needed lots of knitting as I unraveled our home and knitted it together in a strange land.

Today, young women have discovered the edginess of knitting as well as the soothing feel of stitches sliding from one needle to the next. Speakers and lecturers, preachers and teachers tell of spotting people of all ages listening and knitting in time to the words’ rhythm. My son, a heavy metal musician, described girls at the concerts, heads bobbing and bodies gyrating while knitting, knitting, knitting to the bash and groan beat. Their knitting needles, as fat as nunchuks, wobble and click, turning yarn, thread and ribbon into something as edgy as the music.

Women of all ages and backgrounds -- and yes, men, too, pick up the needles and gather in knitting groups and classes. Peggy, who introduced me to the cupcakes, helped a master knitter teach a group of young women the basics of the craft. This group began with only five or six members but has grown to more than twenty. They share knitting and one other thing in common: cancer. While their hands create projects of yarn, they fight off cancer and visualize knitting their bodies back to good health. With each knit or purl they zap one more cancer cell, one more malignancy.

Knitting begins with needles and yarn, but with each stitch, something else seems to grow – determination, confidence, good health, solace, even a community. Maybe we can knit and purl a peaceful world.

I feel the need to knit.