Previous post
A quote: “So do all who live to see such times; but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” ~~ Gandolf, Lord of the Rings/Fellowship of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein
I’ll start with a story …
**************************
Supper’s done, kitchen put to rights and I take my favorite place to say good-bye to another day with prayers to see the next. The boy comes to lean up against me on the porch swing.
“I really miss pop-pop.”
“Me, too” my eyes water, “He’d be so proud of you, punkin. Supper’s because of you. That wild turkey never stood a chance.”
He laughs, “Daddy missed but I gotta’em, just like pop-pop taught me.”
Before Reset, my darling might not have died. But punkin might not have lived. .
He settles in to read, I return to my prayers.
**************************
Now, it’s your turn.
.
.
.
.
.
. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Lloyd says: Suggestion: Give a listen to Riley Green’s: I WISH GRANDPA’S NEVER DIED
GWB says: “Why are you walking back there, Michael?”
“It’s a safety issue, grandpa.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, I heard you used to go hunting with Mr Cheney when you were younger…”
Roy Correy needed only close his eyes and remember: he was twelve years old, big enough to be trusted with a .22, and Grandpa had taken him out to a friend’s field to shoot pheasants.
How simple things had been back in those days. Grandpa had fought in the War — back in those days it was World War II, not Vietnam, and the Energy Wars were still in the future — and he was in a mood to talk about his experiences as they tramped through the bean stubble. He hadn’t been on the sharp end, not like Uncle Bob, and not like the two cousins of theirs who never came back. But even as a supply sergeant who’d helped oversee the trucking of the vast amount of materiel needed to keep a modern mechanized army operating, he’d seen he’d seen his fair share of Man’s Inhumanity To Man.
And we thought we’d learned those lessons. The US has been a good friend of Israel, to the point of having to go through the original Energy Crisis when we helped them in the Yom Kippur War, back when I was in first grade. We put an end to segregation, and I could be so proud of Grandpa and what his generation had achieved, both as soldiers and as members of civil society.
Six years after that crisp fall day, America was discovering what its government had been doing behind closed doors — the secret Cold War human cloning and genetic engineering projects, justified because the Soviets’ projects might well be ahead. In the warm afterglow of the fall of the Soviet Union in fire and lightning, people were still willing to see the children touched by those experiments as innocent victims, and save their condemnation for the scientists.
Now the mood of the country was changing. More and more the talk of “Frankenstein science” was not aimed at the people who’d run those secret labs, but at the people who’d come out of them. People like him, a clone of one of Michigan’s most famous astronauts.
Was it just that they were no longer cute little kids, so they didn’t get that automatic sympathy? Or was it just the fact that, humans being humans, some of them would do something that put them in the news for all the wrong reasons — and their personal failures were treated as a flaw in their “unnatural” origin, rather than their individual character?
For whatever reason, the mood of the country shifted, enough that the new Administration was putting one after another restriction on an entire category of people, solely on the basis of how they’d been brought into being. For the umpteenth time Roy wished he could ask Grandpa for advice — but Grandpa had gone to his reward almost a decade ago.
3 Comments