Memorial Day 2014

When I am home on Memorial Day, I set my flag at half-mast.
At noon, I am standing at parade rest with the halyard in my hands.
When the air is right, I can hear the saluting cannon at Training Center Yorktown begin their twenty-one gun salute.
At the sound of the 21st cannon shot at 12:20 I come to attention, give a hand salute, and two-block the National Ensign.

I love the fact that the echo of the cannon shots travel to me over the very ground upon which General George Washington accepted British General Cornwallis' sword in surrender and won this country's freedom.

Thank you to those who gave all

"I would love you if I could"

"I would love you if I could"

never held a sadder conversation in my life

she walks into a room like nobody's business

fine black suits her well and she knows it

laugh lines her squinting eyes only when she looks at me

stops me dead

powerful curves pack perfectly into a black cocktail dress

many powers she holds in her fingertips

granted to the few who know her well

oh the way she moves her hips

Can only imagine the conversations/what she feels
when she lays her soft gentle shoulder against the bedsheet late at night

touch her hunger belly
plunge her most intimate feminine depth
feel the fire inside
muss her hair all up

Mother's Day 2014

My mother was the first born of Pauline Lukas and George Flury in Columbia Station, Ohio, just outside the bluecollar West end of Cleveland. She was born in the loft of a dirt floor garage on the rural acreage her parents had just purchased. My grandpa later built a house with his own hands on the property where they eventually raised nine children.

I asked my grandmother once why she turned out to be a farmer's wife when I knew she had been raised in the city of Lakewood. Gramma told me, "I *never* wanted to live on a farm ... it was your grandpa who had some kind of dream and took us all out there. One year, he brought home a cow, handed the reins to me, and said 'Take care of this'."

So. My mom grew up on a rural farm miles from civilization during the depths of the Great Depression. I have her graduation picture from Columbia High School Class of 1948. She was beautiful, and smart, too ... she was a lifelong member of Mensa who always had stacks of library books with torn pieces of newspaper marking her place along with Life, Saturday Review, and Time magazines scattered all over the living room when I was growing up. She gave me toy computers twice at Christmases in my youth ... how she found computer kits you built and ran with rubber bands and marbles in the 1960s still astonishes me to this day.

She also had the lifelong habit of saving chewed pieces of Wrigley's Spearmint gum on the windowsill over the kitchen sink. I thought this was a really odd habit when I was growing up. Until I realized as an adult later that when she was a kid growing up in 1933 ... 1935 ... 1937 ... she *never knew* when she would have another penny to buy a new stick of chewing gum.

One year in the early '80s while I was in my twenties, I was living at home with mom, in college on the G.I. Bill. I took her out to John Ascuaga's Nugget Casino for a Mother's Day dinner. We had to put our names on a waiting list of about twenty minutes. Mom went to play her nickle slot machines, I stopped at a blackjack table and threw a $5 chip on the felt. When they called our names I had parlayed that into $180. We had a very nice dinner.

Before I could return to the Coast Guard in 1985, I had to settle my mother's estate. When I packed up her household goods from our three bedroom ranch house in Reno I found an empty big, red, tinfoil-wrapped heart-shaped chocolate box I had given her some previous Mother's Day, my Fourth Grade report cards of straight A's when a Science teacher finally lit a fire under my ass in school, and two pieces of chewed Wrigley's Spearmint chewing gum on the windowsill over her kitchen sink.

Mona Marie Louise Flury
Born August 27, 1930
Died December 10, 1985