"You must be important!" A moment outside a local diner.

 Today I rode to two Honor Guard ceremonies. After the second ceremony, I went to a restaurant a half mile away. When I left, a woman held the door for me. That actually happens a lot when I am in a dress uniform. Women hold the door for me.

Outside she looked at my uniform, waved in the direction of my medals and said, "You must be important. I mean, look at that stripe down your pants legs. Impressive."

I said she was right. Leaders have the stripe, enlisted soldiers do not. (I could have added that generals have two stripes, but that seemed like Too Much Information.)

She smiled and said, "I knew it! Now you be careful on the roads!" I was putting on my bike helmet as she spoke.

Walking and Creating Habits

Aristotle was the first philosopher to say that we are what we do.  I have brilliant friends who disagree with this premise, but I believe it.  All of my adult life I have begun new habits to reach goals or simply because it seemed like the right thing to do in the moment. 

On May 14, 2020, I took the first of 19.9 million steps as I left Lancaster General Hospital and walked home from surgery. The surgery reassembled the 20-odd pieces of my shattered elbow to 70 percent of its former function.  

I decided on that day I would walk 40 miles per week.  Importantly, I decided I had to walk at least 40 miles per week, not and average of 40. More on that later.

Starting New Habits

For me, making habits often starts with a decision in the moment that lasts for years.  

In February of 1986, I quit smoking. I had a cigarette after breakfast and never had another one.   I started running a few months before I quit--about eight miles per week.  The two weeks after I quit, I ran 65 miles so I would be less likely to start smoking again.  Eventually running injuries led me to begin riding a bicycle.  

In 1987, I went from riding 1.5 miles and gasping afterward in the spring to 40-mile rides in the fall.  In 1992 and 1993 I rode from Lancaster to Canada.  The bicycle habit reached 10,000 miles per year from 2002 to 2006.  I still ride every week and whenever I can.

In the fall of 2007, when I re-enlisted in the Army, I started training for the Army fitness test.  I ran sprints and shorter distance to increase my speed on the two-mile run--the Army standard distance. I also did 100 pushups and 100 situps every other day.  

In November of 2012, my wife told me she was going to do an Ironman Triathlon. I decided I would too. I had never swam the length of a pool. I never swam at all except dog paddle as a kid and in Army Water Survival Training. I got a coach and swam five days a week until I could swim 2.5 miles without stopping (176 lengths of a 25-yard pool).  I also had to run long distances. 

Ending Old Habits

Since every week has just 168 hours and for much of this time I had a job, making new habits meant ending others.  When I started riding a bicycle seriously, I sold the last of the 12 motorcycles I owned between 1972 and 1992.  Motorcycles are so inherently dangerous that I practiced panic braking and high-speed figure 8s twice a month. When I rode the bicycle so much I did not ride the motorcycle regularly, I sold it.  

I took my last Army fitness test in 2014. By 2015, I stopped doing pushups and sit ups and pretty much stopped swimming.  By 2017 I stopped running. In 2019 I got a knee replacement, so I will never run again.  

In 2016, I started doing Yoga. After two years, my bad knee kept me from practicing. I tried to start again after my  2019 knee replacement, but the other knee hurt, so yoga ended. Around 2019 I started Duolingo language practice and I started meditating. Both of those continue to this day.

What Do You Do?

We ask each other what we do for  a living because what we do for 40 or more hours per week defines who we are.  I retired nine years and quickly found  it is much less defining to say what I did than what I do.  

For the first years of my retirement I often answered parent when asked the "What do you do?" question.  From 2015 to 2021 the first job in my life was either caring for my struggling sons or getting help with caring for my sons.  

 

In 2022 I started making combat medical kits for soldiers in Ukraine. I worked in a warehouse in New Jersey 2 to 4 days a week for most of the year.  Since November of 2022 I have had no central focus, just helping with Ukraine when I can. Later this year I will be all but full time working for President Biden, Senator Casey and all who support Ukraine. I will also work against all of Putin lovers. 

After that I am likely to move to Panama for a while and make new habits.  But not walking and riding. They will very much continue wherever I am.  In the 46 months since I left the hospital, I have walked just over 10,000 miles or just over 50 miles per week.  The weather in equatorial Panama is either hot or hot and raining so I should be able to walk and ride a lot.  

 

Beautiful Sky Over the Moment of (Near) Death: War and Peace, End of Part I

 

The Emperor Napoleon and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky

In the final scenes of Volume 1 of War and Peace Prince Andrei Bolkonsky lies on his back bleeding from a head wound and looking at the beautiful sky.  Napoleon rides through the battlefield, surveying the carnage of his defeat of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz.

Before the battle Prince Andrei admired Napoleon. But lying on his back with the shaft of the unit flag in his hand he feels himself dying and that this world has no longer has meaning for him. He sees Napoleon and does not care.  

Napoleon thought Andrei was dead, but seeing him move, he orders Andrei to be taken to an aid station. The agony of  being lifted onto stretcher convinced Andrei he was, in fact, alive.

Reading this passage, I remembered lying on my back on the side of Route 230 northwest of  Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.  In the middle of an S-turn my Suzuki 550 motorcycle shook and flipped into the air. I was launched at 75mph, bounced and skidded and rolled to the ditch on the opposite side of the road. The visor of my full-face helmet had been scraped away. I looked straight up at a lovely, blue mid-June sky with scattered, puffy clouds.

I felt no pain.  At first the peace and beauty of the sky, the silence around me, led me think I was dead. Some moments later, I knew I was alive when a man who was painting his house ran up and covered me with a drop cloth. He said, "Don't move" and told me help would be there soon.  I looked down and saw the ligaments inside my knees, the skin was burned away on the left side of both knees because of the way I landed. Seeing inside my knees woke the pain.  My moment of eternity was over.   

In his book The Nearest Thing to Life James Wood surveys dozens of novels to show how real life is brought to life in fiction. He uses scenes with Prince Andrei illustrate the beauty of the reality brought to life in novels. 

The delight of re-reading Tolstoy after 25 years is in the scenes of pain and pathos and beauty he paints so well.

Ukraine Community Day at Penn

 

Prometheus Choir

Yesterday, I went Ukrainian Community Day at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia.

By the time I arrived, I could only watch the performance on a video screen in the lobby with others who arrived late.  Which made me very happy to see that the Ukraine event had filled the auditorium which has seating for more than 900.

On the wall of the lobby hung fourteen drawings under the title Etching Room 1: Safety Instructions. 

Safety Instructions is the first-ever U.S. exhibition for Kyiv-based artists Anna Khodkova and Kristina Yarosh, founders of the print studio Etchingroom1. Infused with subtle humor and sharp sarcasm, Safety Instructions is an artistic exploration into the fragility and transience of safety within the modern world. Employing diverse techniques, including etching, silkscreen and drawing, the 14 graphic works on display make their public debut in this very special exhibition.

On view through June, Safety Instructions is part of Ukraine: The Edge of Freedom, exploring the country’s stunning artistry and rich cultural history while uplifting artists calling attention to the challenges the nation has been facing.

Honor Guard: Real Military Life

 

I recently had a Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard service on a cold afternoon in Lancaster. We all arrived before our time to report. The time we gather is a half hour before the graveside ceremony begins.  

We practice the ceremony for a few minutes. We concentrate on the very precise way we fold the flag.  Then in a very military way, we wait.  This particular ceremony happened right on time. I have been to others that were delayed from a few minutes to almost an hour.  

All of us are required to leave our phones in the car, so we actually talk to each other. And we don't take selfies.  I have my phone shut off in my jacket pocket because I ride a bicycle to the ceremonies. I am the only one who has ever ridden to the ceremonies, so there are no bike rules.  

At the most recent ceremony I attended, I met another Tanker.  He is younger than I am so we trained on and served in different tanks.  But we still spent years in turrets and had a lot of fun talking about "the best job we ever had."

After I left the active duty Army at the end of1979, I grew a beard and was a civilian for almost two years.  Then I joined a reserve tank unit for three years. I was not ready to re-enlist in the active-duty Army, but 12 weekends and two weeks in the summer sounded just right, especially because I could fire tank guns at least twice a year.  

Now that I am well past any sort of military service, participating in a ceremony to honor fellow veterans a few times a month gives me a lot of joy, and just enough feeling of being back in the military. 

March for Ukraine on Ben Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia

 

More than a thousand people gathered on the famous steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art today to support Ukraine in its war against the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about the event today. A very good article. 

The marchers lined up with three long flags forming a procession that stretched several hundred meters along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway between the art museum and the Franklin Institute.

More than Two Thousand Mark the 2nd Anniversary of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine at the Lincoln Memorial

 

Today more than two thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on the Capital Mall in Washington DC to mark the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  

The event celebrated the courage and tenacity of the people ofUkraine in their struggle against Russian invasion and atrocities.  

It was clear from the signs, that while the majority of Americans, more than 70%, support Ukraine in its defense of its own nation, Trump and the cowards who worship him want to abandon Ukraine and all other American allies.  

Glory to Ukraine!!!