Feel Right Here

As backyard grills fire up across the land and swimming pools open to inaugurate summer, it can be easy to lose sight of what we’re called to remember on Memorial Day. Even ceremonies marking the day can focus more on veterans than those who lost their lives in service to the nation.

So here’s a photograph taken by John Moore in 2007 of Mary McHugh grieving at the grave of her fiance, Sgt. James John Regan. Regan was killed in Iraq in February 2007 by an IED explosion.

Regan was to marry McHugh, a medical student at Emory University, when his Army service ended. He was killed in February 2007 by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

“Jimmy and I were so excited to stand up in front of God, our family and friends and declare our love for each other,” McHugh said. ”Only God knows why we were deprived of that opportunity, but it doesn’t change the sentiments I have.”

Regan, an All-American lacrosse player and All-State football scholar at Chaminade High School in Mineola, graduated from Duke University five years ago. He was deeply affected by the 9/11 terror attacks, which claimed many lives in Manhasset, and turned down a position at financial services firm UBS and deferred a scholarship to Southern Methodist University Law School to join the Army in 2004. He had earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

After reading a love letter Regan wrote to her, McHugh said in a passionate whisper, “Jimmy, we never got to wake up next to each other every morning. Jimmy, I will wake up every morning and thank God for the opportunity to love and be loved by you.”

You can read more about Mary and Jimmy here. The same blog has similar stories and photos, including a post on Todd Heisler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photographic series that documents the grief of Katherine Cathey following the loss of her husband, 2nd Lt. James J. Cathey.

After arriving at the funeral home, Katherine Cathey pressed her pregnant belly to her husband’s casket, moaning softly. Two days after she was notified of Jim’s death in Iraq, she found out they would have a boy. Born on December 23, 2005, he was named James Jeffrey Cathey, Jr.

Since James Cathey was killed in a massive explosion, his body was delicately wrapped in a shroud by military morticians, then his Marine uniform was laid atop his body. Since Katherine Cathey decided not to view her husband’s body, Maj. Steve Beck took her hand, and pressed it down on the uniform. “He’s here,” he said quietly. “Feel right here.” [...]

The night before the burial of her husband’s body, Katherine Cathey refused to leave the casket, asking to sleep next to his body for the last time. The Marines made a bed for her, tucking in the sheets below the flag. Before she fell asleep, she opened her laptop computer and played songs that reminded her of “Cat,” and one of the Marines asked if she wanted them to continue standing watch as she slept. “I think it would be kind of nice if you kept doing it,” she said. “I think that’s what he would have wanted.”

We’re Just Not Far Enough Away to Understand It Yet

Today kicks off a holy week of a different sort for America’s librarians – Preservation Week. Though the phrase may most quickly conjure up an image in your mind’s eye of Nicholson Baker meticulously working to safeguard a brittle copy of a vintage newspaper, Monica Hesse invites us to consider the changing face of preservation efforts. Here she writes about the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress, which is currently working to preserve the very items that more often than not were donated to the Goodwill after failing to catch anybody’s eye at yard sales.

We’re talking mix tapes, computer programs and games comprised of several floppy disks, and VHS tapes of “Silver Spoons” and “All My Children”. Though the endeavor certainly invites some degree of wonder or mockery, Hesse is quick to remind us that the fleeting diversions of our recent past may just have more to say about us than we realize:

Maybe preservation is overrated, really, if what we’re preserving is the rise and fall of Susan Lucci’s hair, the never-ending “American Pie” franchise, the extemporaneous Twitter feed (yes, the library saves those, too). Those of us who live in this time are cognizant enough to be frequently embarrassed about this time. No one looks forward to the day when she may curl up with her granddaughter and a remote control, and say, “Let’s watch the hero of my youth, Snooki.”

One of the benefits of a disposable culture is that we can dispose of it, brush it all up with a Swiffer, lose it with our latest upgrade. The term papers that went missing with your ancient Dell weren’t good anyway — the only thing they would reveal to later generations was that students have never understood the difference between “affect” and “effect.” Let it rot, leave it be, allow us to forget cultural behaviors that haunt us. But then, our recent past is not any trashier than the pop culture of more distant pasts; the difference is that much of that trash ended up in the garbage. There is meaning in the gleaming blond of Ricky Schroder’s hair; we’re just not far enough away to understand it yet, and by the time we are, the tape will have disintegrated.

Maybe the archeologists of the near future will be able to sift through our floppies, our flash drives. Maybe they will sit down for hours and master all of the levels of Rise of the Dragon, and hidden in the source code will be all of the secrets of humanity, and we will completely understand who we once were.

You Are Witnesses of These Things

Yesterday we were blessed to celebrate Daughter #5′s baptism. Her head still smells like chrism. She was quite the trooper — no tears despite a solid dousing of water at the end.

All five of our children have been baptized in that same basin. Back before the construction of our parish’s current worship space, the basin would be brought in and set upon a table whenever baptisms were scheduled. Once the new sanctuary was complete, the parish led a fundraising effort encouraging kids to donate their small change to mount the basin in the new baptismal font. Nowadays the little kids like to sit on the floor in front of the font and watch. Daughter #4 joined them yesterday — perhaps she thought she’d be able to see better from there.

The Gospel reading was the epilogue of Emmaus – “You are witnesses of these things” — good stuff. What a gift.

Active Idleness

Today was Record Store Day (RSD), an annual initiative launched a few years back as part of an effort to remind people just how much they once loved their local record stores. It has quickly become a popular tradition, luring thousands of music lovers back into the aisles of nearly forgotten small businesses in search of limited release singles and LPs. Digital downloads don’t take up a lot of shelf space, so the product is largely vinyl as CDs have nearly gone the way of VHS.

While I’m all for reminding folks about the value and importance of local record stores, I have mixed feelings about RSD. Limited releases disappear quickly, and most stores are besieged early by long lines of customers looking to either lay claim to rare releases by their favorite artists or double their money by grabbing some records to sell on eBay. Record stores would likely benefit more if the focus was less on the limited nature of RSD releases and more on long-term exclusivity. Some RSD releases subscribe to this notion, encouraging customers to place special orders with their local stores, but most don’t.

I’ve tried to stay away from the feeding frenzy the last couple of years, but I’ve failed to find the strength to opt out. There’s always a record or two on the list that seems worth the minor hassle. Bruce Springsteen’s a regular, and this year there was the Civil Wars’ cover of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, the Baseball Project’s tribute to Harvey Haddix, and Sara Watkins and Fiona Apple teaming up to cover the Everly Brothers, among others. Suffice to say, once again I came home with more than I expected to buy.

But witnessing the carnage as customers quickly made their selections and lined up to check out in hopes of queuing up for another store set to open a few streets over at 11am, it seemed like RSD had come up lacking again. What was missing was the great gift of record stores to the music-buying public — there was not enough browsing. Perhaps Leon Wieseltier said it best when eulogizing DC’s Melody Records earlier this year:

It is a matter of some importance that the nature of browsing be properly understood. Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon what flaneurie is to Google Earth. It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations. On Amazon, by contrast, there are no accidents. Its adjacencies are expected and its associations are probable, because it is programmed for precedents. It takes you to where you have already been—to what you have already bought or thought of buying, and to similar things. It sells similarities. After all, serendipity is a poor business model. But serendipity is how the spirit is renewed; and a record store, like a bookstore, is nothing less than an institution of spiritual renewal.

So maybe take a day sometime next month and spend an hour or two browsing the racks at your local record store. Perhaps they’ll have a few of the less limited RSD items on hand, but just maybe you’ll come across an album you either didn’t know about or set out to buy. Odds are, it’ll be clearly meant for you.

Babies Galore?

W hat do you know? The Washington Post ran a story today reporting that, shock of shocks, Catholic opposition to birth control is not meant to be interpreted as opposition to sex:

Ashley McGuire fell in love with the Catholic Church five years ago, after reading its teaching against artificial birth control. McGuire, then a skeptical Protestant college student, initially saw the ban as a mandatory march to “domestic slavery.” But the more she read, the more she was blown away by the idea that sex — and women’s bodies — must be about more than physical pleasure.

Yet the images the church uses to promote its own method of birth control freaked her out. Pamphlets for what the church calls natural family planning feature photos of babies galore. A church-sponsored class on the method uses a book with a woman on the cover, smiling as she balances a grocery bag on one hip, a baby on the other….

McGuire, 26, of Alexandria is part of a movement of younger, religiously conservative Catholic women who are trying to rebrand an often-ignored church teaching: its ban on birth control methods such as the Pill. Arguing that church theology has been poorly explained and encouraged, they want to shift the image of a traditional Catholic woman from one at home with children to one with a great, communicative sex life, a chemical-free body and babies only when the parents think the time is right.

The movement sees an opportunity: President Obama’s decision this year to require most religious employers, like employers in general, to provide contraception coverage. The move angered Catholics so much that it cracked open a discussion about contraception that has been largely taboo for decades because there’s so much disagreement about it.

“More priests have given sermons on this in the past few weeks than in the last 50 years,” said Janet Smith, a conservative theologian who teaches at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.

Read on.

Say a Prayer for Jack Tramiel

Jack Tramiel passed away on Easter Sunday at the age of 83. His name might not ring a bell, but to the many (like me) who grew up with a Commodore 64, I guess he was a sort of our Steve Jobs, though different in many key respects:

Unless you built your own PC in the garage, there was once no cheaper (serious) computer to be had than the Commodore 64, the brainchild of Jack Tramiel and reportedly the most successful model ever sold (17 million.) “We sell to the masses and not the classes,” said the Commodore king, who died Sunday at age 83.

The Polish-born Tramiel was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, had the equivalent of a 5th grade education. After coming to the U.S., he started fooling with gizmos as a typewriter repairman in the U.S. Army, later founded Commodore to import typewriters, then got into bargain electronic calculators and digital watches. That set off his first price battles with Texas Instruments. “Business is not a sport. It’s a war,” he said.

The first Commodore PC launched in 1977, coincidental with the arrival of the Apple II and Tandy/Radio Shack’s popular TRS-80.  The Commodore 64 emerged in 1982. Designed for easy modification/software writing by hobbyists and with a price tag ($595) far below  IBM and Apple desktops, the 64  became  a huge hit.

May he rest in peace.

Not a Partisan Perspective

Yesterday in The Washington Post, Melinda Henneberger echoed the rising call for a greater conversation on the issue of abortion – one not relegated by the media to marginal viewpoints or by legislators to invasive, unfunded mandates:

No matter how we feel about abortion, we’re repeatedly told, we are just gonna love that our most fringe representatives are allowed to speak for us! Only, we don’t. We, huh? Yes, though I’m not for re-criminalizing abortion, I am for re-thinking it. (Which won’t, in my view, ever be accomplished through shaming, punishment, or chasing pregnant women around with trans-vaginal probes.)

My only judgment on those who feel otherwise – as most people I know do — is that we just don’t see this one the same way. This is certainly not a partisan perspective; as someone who doesn’t think corporations are people but does think unborn children are, I don’t really have one of those. I do, though, hope the day will come when we will look back on both capital punishment and abortion as we now look back on slavery – as a wrong so culturally accepted we couldn’t see it at the time.

“Choice” is predicated on the idea that life is complicated, full of contradictions and moral gray area, and that’s all true enough. But views on this issue aren’t so cut and dried, either, and neither are those who hold them. Which, I’m sorry to say, you’d never know from reading the news.

Click here to read her essay.