A Memorable Holiday

Are you enjoying this holiday weekend? Is there such a thing as a bad holiday? It's always nice to have some extra time, but it's important to stop and think why we've been given a holiday. This one more so than some others.

I think the 4th of July is another one of those holidays we should stop and think about. Our last one was pretty memorable. We did something quite different than we ever had in the past. My son had recently gotten into model rockets so we decided to shoot some of them off. We ended up not launching any rockets because of how windy it was, so no "rockets' red glare," but we did launch something that wouldn’t be affected by the wind: we decided to launch one of my daughter’s dolls.

Yeah, weird, I know. Earlier in the day my niece’s boyfriend was helping my daughter color one of her dolls with a Sharpie. My daughter calls it a Barbie doll because it’s the size of a Barbie, but it was a Troy doll from High School Musical. My daughter cut the doll’s hair and our niece’s boyfriend gave it a mustache. They thought it looked like Ben Stiller from one of his movies. I don’t remember how the conversation got from there to substituting “Ben” for a rocket, but it did. We even gave him a red cape. He didn’t go very high (dolls are much heavier than model rockets), maybe 20 feet, but we still considered it a successful launch. It still looked funny and gave us all a good laugh.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that Ben Stiller was a superhero, did you? Have you noticed how popular superhero movies are lately? They’ve yet to make a feature length film of my childhood superhero: the Green Lantern. I guess I liked him because he was just an ordinary mortal that was given a special ring which granted him superhero powers by “the Guardians of the Universe” because he was a good person and could be trusted. Society has always seemed to have a fascination with heroes, especially super ones (e.g., Greek and Roman mythology). Of course the only ones that actually count are real life heroes.

I think that what this holiday's about: real life superheroes; just mortals who have been called upon by the Guardians of our "universe" (nation) to protect our freedoms by giving their all.

Others have not been called upon to give their all, though they were willing to. They deserve some memory engrams as well. We don't need to just sit back though, we can be their sidekicks; something many of us didn't do very well at during the Vietnam War. And the least we can do as sidekicks is to remember these heroes during this holiday.