Liberated Eagle and World War I Documentary

I hope my readers had a good weekend. Ours started off with a lot of snow, so Friday night we just walked to Mariner’s for fish, then we had a quiet evening at home. Saturday morning we didn’t have to leave the house until 10:30, and they still hadn’t plowed our driveway or shoveled our sidewalk. Fortunately Travalon has four-wheel drive, but we wondered why we pay condo fees if we are just going to have to do those things ourselves. We went to a memorial service for OK Cap’s father, and Jilly Moose, Kathbert, and Richard Bonomo were there as well. Then Travalon and I drove to Sauk in time to see a rehabilitated eagle get blessed by a member of the Menomonee tribe and then released back into the wild. I didn’t have the clearest view to make a video of any of this, but I was able to see the majestic eagle soaring into the sky. We saw lots of other eagles too, many of them standing on the frozen part of the river by the dam. Travalon wanted to see Three Dog Night, and he found a reasonable ticket, so I went over to Rich’s house to blat with him and Kathbert. I’m just not enough of a Three Dog Night fan to attend their concert.

Sunday Travalon and I went to Crema Café after brunch, then we did the perfect thing for a frigid yet sunny day: we went to the conservatory at Olbrich Gardens. I loved seeing all the cycads and ferns; for some reason the Mesozoic Garden on campus has really got me excited about ancient plants. And who is the biggest beneficiary of this newfound interest? That would be the huge, half-dead Boston fern I rescued from church years ago that has never died but never exactly recovered, either. Now that I’m all excited about it being a fern, I’ve started misting it, and lo and behold it is getting some new fronds. I guess it just needed a little TLC. Travalon and I watched the disappointing Saints game – I kind of feel like their loss isn’t legitimate, considering that non-call of pass interference probably cost them the game. We met some people for dinner at Lombardino’s, then we visited the married B-Boy and Mo-Girl and their adorable daughter. Travalon had a gift for a girl from his job (I guess they had some extras), and it was all sorts of wonderful toys and socks and hairbands. We enjoyed seeing the Super Blood Wolf Moon and tried photographing it with limited success, but it was too cold out to make a ton of effort.

Yesterday both Travalon and I had the day off for the Martin Luther King holiday. We went to Fired Up and made a tile of a red panda, then we went to the annual commemoration up at the Capitol, with gospel singers and speakers and three little kids reciting the “I Have a Dream” speech from memory. We went out to Sauk again and saw many eagles, including one flying parallel to our car. In the evening we went to a movie called They Never Grew Old, which was actual footage of World War I juxtaposed with recordings of veterans recalling the war. There was one snippet of a terrified-looking teen about to go on an offensive, and I just wanted to hug him and tell him it would be okay, but it probably wasn’t – the casualties in this offensive were horrific, so odds were he was killed or injured. I highly recommend this movie, and the short documentary after the credits about the making of it that almost everyone in the theater stayed for. This was British soldiers talking about the Western front, and they said the Bavarians were really nice, family-loving people and they hated killing them. Interestingly, that genetic test I took several years ago sent me a message today that they had updated my results, so I could see that I have ancestors from Bavaria. Also Nigeria, and they said they are working on that one to find out which tribe. I’d love to know if I am part Igbo, Hausa, or Yoruba. I still remain, however, mostly English and Irish, so I will never achieve a tan.

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Rosary Ladies Two Nights in a Row

This week was unusual because the Rosary Ladies (who don’t get together often enough) got together two nights in a row. It wasn’t all the Rosary Ladies, since Anna Banana II is still in North Dakota, OK Cap and Luxuli couldn’t make it Wednesday night, and Jilly Moose had to work last night, but I still think both nights count. Wednesday a bunch of us went to Noodles, then Jilly Moose, Richard Bonomo, El Vegetariano, Travalon, and I prayed the rosary in our church’s library. Last night OK Cap, Luxuli, and I prayed the rosary in the church’s library, but then a priest came in with someone he was giving spiritual direction to and evicted us, so we went into the empty adoration chapel. (Adoration is STILL suspended because for some reason the parking lot repaving job that was supposed to take five days is taking at least ten.) Then we went to Takara Japanese Restaurant, where I burned my mouth because my soup was piping hot and I didn’t wait to partake until it had cooled a little. After that we went to a frozen yogurt place, but I was (sort of) good and didn’t have a whole bowl of it, just a couple of samples: red velvet and Irish mint. At least that cooled my mouth down a little. It’s still kind of numb today.

Speaking of rosaries, Toque McToque has one that came from a World War I soldier, and I wanted one myself, so today I googled it and found some beautiful brass ones for sale. I tried to bid on one on eBay, but my account was created in 2001 and hasn’t been used since then, so they suspended it, apparently back in 2007. It took a couple of phone calls to get that straightened out, but now my eBay account is working again, so I bid on a brass World War I standard issue rosary. The seller is right in my state! And now I can bid on all kinds of things for Travalon – after all, Christmas is just five months away.

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Turkey Army Photo

Here is a picture of Toque McToque and her Turkey Army in pickelhauben. Remember, photos don't lie!

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Turkey Army

As you can see, I have had writer's block for a few days now, but tonight Toque McToque told me something blogworthy. It all started because her sister has a sun conure named (terribly originally) Sunny, which she has to give away, so Kathbert and I were eager to make Sunny's acquaintance and see if she liked either of us. We were supposed to meet on Saturday, but that didn't work out, which is why I went kayaking with Rich instead. Then we were supposed to meet tonight... but that didn't work out, either. Since I had bought some delicious chocolate-covered raisins and almonds from the Nut Man for Toque, I stopped by her house anyway, and she was telling me about the wild turkeys she feeds every morning. Yesterday she didn't see them anywhere, but there was a hawk about, so maybe they were hiding. This morning she saw one, and then it called toward a field, and a bunch of turkeys came running, so she figured it must have been the sentinel telling the others, "She's here!"

So why is Toque taming the turkeys? She said she is going to raise up an all-turkey army, and she will be standing there in her fatigues with a bunch of turkeys as tall as she is standing behind her menacingly, ready to face down anyone who might think to give her guff. She promised to attempt to get (or at least Photoshop) a picture of her Turkey Army, so I will be ecstatic to post that when and if.

OK, I know this post has nothing to do with WWI, but Toque is a "big" (she's actually quite petite) World War I buff, and it's her army, and I couldn't find a better label I have already used. It seems I have never blogged about turkeys (or even Turkey) before, but since Turkey had a significant role in WWI (blowing up the Parthenon), and Toque's army is turkey, there is a connection. Sort of.

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Remembrance Poppies? Forget It!

My officemate, who is half Canadian and has spent time in Canada, is even more into World War I than I am. She collects vintage posters and other WWI memorabilia. The two of us decided that, since the hospital we work at is adjacent to a VA Hospital, we would go buy some poppies to commmemorate the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. And if you could find Remembrance Poppies anywhere, you'd think it would be a Veterans' Affairs Hospital, right?

We went to the VA Hospital on our coffee break, full of optimism and soon full of coffee as well. (There are many coffee shops all over the hospital complex, but our favorite is the one in the VA Hospital, Etes-Vous Pretes Coffee.) Off we went to the gift shop, which sold toothbrushes (teethbrushes?) but no poppies. The gift shop suggested we go to the front lobby.

In the front lobby we saw yet more coffee and an information desk, behind which were several gentlemen, one wearing a Remembrance Poppy. When we asked where he had gotten it, he said a town halfway to the next state over! Not the answer we had been looking for. He suggested we go up to Volunteer Services, so off we went.

When we walked into Volunteer Services, the people in there (who all looked like vintage WWII era) looked up in surprise and asked what we wanted. When we said poppies, we wondered if they thought we were looking for drugs or something. (In my childhood we had next door neighbors who actually cut the buds off our ornamental poppies because they thought they were opium poppies. Surprise! They never made that mistake again.) Volunteer Services stared at us like we had three heads, until we started to wonder ourselves. Finally one of them said Remembrance Poppies are only sold on Memorial Day, not Veterans' Day. So back to our office we went.

Our solution to this deplorable lack of poppies was this: we found a picture on the Internet (see above), printed it on a color printer with the poem "In Flanders Field" below it, and hung it up prominently in our office. I don't want to hear anyone saying how the younger generation doesn't care about the sacrifices made by our elders! When two Gen Xer's try to find poppies and can't do it, how would you expect anyone younger to remember what they have never been told? My officemate says they had to memorize "In Flanders Field" in Canada, and I remember poppies being sold when I was a child, but have we all forgotten? What a terrible thing to do, when even now young men and women are being sacrificed in this deplorable war (not to mention all the Iraqi civilians!). Let us never forget what any of them have done for us.

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Ypres Creepers!

When I was a little girl, World War I vets were, if not plentiful, at least somewhat easy to find. On Veterans' Day they would stand outside of stores and sell those little plastic poppies. At that time I had no curiosity about what they had been through, but now that they are virtually all gone, how I wish I'd had the chance to ask them about their experiences! There is no more fascinating war to me than World War I, which seems so immediate and yet so distant. We can still watch footage of it, and yet it is already part of the irretrievable past. In the US we seem to have so little collective interest in this war. Once I went to the local war store (and was already getting funny looks for being the only one without a Y chromosome in there) and I finally had to ask where the World War I section was. While there were large and prominent sections devoted to the Civil War and World War II, and respectable sections on the Revolutionary War, Vietnam, and Korea, yet World War I, the War to End All Wars, merited only half a bookcase off in a corner. In my high school history class, we skipped right over the World War I chapter in our textbooks. When I looked up the World War I monument in Washington, DC on Google, it asked me, "Do you mean World War II monument?" No, I saw the monument when I was in DC and know it exists, yet Google itself thinks nobody would look for it. Why is that?

I have always thought World War I is a far more interesting war to study for precisely the reasons that it seems to be shoved off in a corner by the general populace, the unacknowledged cousin of the war family. Don't get me wrong, I hate war and don't find it glorious at all, which may be part of WWI's lack of appeal for people. What could possibly be less glamorous than trench warfare? Then there is the moral ambiguity: which side was right or wrong? It is easy to oversimplify the Civil War and say the bad guys were the ones who kept other people in bondage, and of course WWII has a fantastic villain to blame everything on... as if WWII didn't arise directly from the ashes of WWI. For this very reason, we have much more to learn from studying the causes of WWI than WWII. The latter could have been prevented if the Treaty of Versailles had not been so harsh; but how would we have prevented the former? And who was the Bad Guy? The US dithered for a long time about joining, and though they do not tell you this in history class, part of our indecision was which side to join. That's right, we almost sided with the Kaiser. Not a fact we wanted to remember 20 years later when Germany was definitely the enemy!

Also, because the US had such late involvement, we lost fewer lives. The War is regarded with much more interest in Europe and Canada. I think it is time we got more interested in it too. It is a very real war - grimy, disgusting, no clear good or bad guys - and it was the first war on such a massive scale. Sometimes I feel it is disingenuous to call WWII by its own name; maybe it should just be WWI, Part 2. It is a sequel. If, God forbid, there is ever a World War III, the circumstances leading up to it will be much more similar to things in 1914 than those in 1937! Which means that if we want to keep WWIII from ever happening, we had better stop skipping over those chapters in the history books.

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