This and that again

I often fly our national flag outside my home. It’s a good flag, and I refuse to allow it to be seen as the possession of the Repuglican Right.

Memorial Day, yesterday, was a good day to hang out the flag. My good neighbour Betty stopped me today. She said how much she had appreciated seeing the flag, for as she explained, one of her sons was a 27 year Army Veteran who died just six months after retiring from the U.S. Army. She has a “hard time” on Memorial Day, and was heartened when she saw the flag outside my home.

This morning was beautifully cool, so after my walk I did some raking of the bare patches in the grass at the back of my house, getting the dirt ready to scatter some grass seed. I began to tug on a root, and it went on and on and on. It came out quite easily, being buried no more than 3” under the grass.

My pal Don Novak has his birthday on May 28th, so we had a joint celebration with friends Ben Morse and Jerry Koenke tonight. We ate at the “Lazy Lobster”. It’s hard to eat wisely in restaurants, with so many dishes laden with calorie ridden sauces. So I settled for two “appetizers” as my main course: a spinach salad, and mussels. Lord, the mussels were good! If you are nearby when I am on my death-bed, please feed me mussels!

We chatted politics, which got very boring as we agreed on everything! So I changed the subject to “where we were born, and at what time of day”. But that quickly led to my being asked questions about Winston Churchill (he was Premier of the United Kingdom when I was born). Americans of my generation are obsessed with Churchill, ghastly reactionary that he was.

I explained why Churchill was voted out of Office in 1945, and then told Don, Jerry and Ben much more than they needed to know about the marvellous post World War II Labour Government under Clement Atlee; with a brief excursus into British Constitutional law - all based on precedent. I love this stuff.