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Yesterday was Veterans Day, which started as Armistice Day which commemorated the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front in Europe, at eleven o’clock am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.  In many parts of the world, people take a two minute moment of silence at 11 am as a sign of respect for the roughly 20 million people who died in the “war to end all wars”.

I visited the grave site of my father and my uncle at the Gethsemane Church Cemetery in Upsala and then I stopped to see Bob Holmen Sr. and Aymer Nelson who live in an assisted living facility in Albany.  I found them in the dining hall sitting down to lunch.  The staff offered me a plate and I joined a woman and two men at a table.  The food was great.  Pork chop, squash and potatoes.  The dinner rolls were very tasty.  I visited with a Mr.. Wolf who used to own the John Deere dealership in Albany.  He had once attended A Prairie Home Companion at the Fitzgerald and he was bold enough to go up on the stage and visit with Garrison afterwards.  His daughter and Garrison had a lengthy conversation.

Before I left I went back to Bob and Aymer and thanked them both.  Bob was on a destroyer in the Pacific and Aymer went on the beach at Normandy on D Day.   My dad served on a destroyer escort in Pacific.  He was a radar man, spending hour after hour in the bowels of a “tin can” while the fighting raged around him.  In one of his journals he wrote: “The two months at Okinawa were hell.”   We owe a great deal of thanks to all of those men and women who have fought to protect this country.  War is hell, but the warriors are not to blame.  When you meet a man or women in uniform, simply offer them your hand and say, “Thank you for serving”.

The show this week is live from The Saint Augustine Amphitheater in Saint Augustine, Florida.  Special guests include The Nashville Bluegrass Band and Floridian vocalist, guitarist and harmonica heavy JJ Grey shares his own brand of southern rock and soul.  The usual cast of characters will entertain you.  Enjoy the show.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph  of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”  Theodore Roosevelt