Dear Friends in Christ,

 During the summers of the late 1940’s, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s house in Baltimore. My cousins on my mother’s side lived a few doors away from her. One of them was just a couple of years younger and so we would hang out together. In the summer that I turned nine, our grandmother decided that I was ready to take the two of us off to the Saturday matinee at the Irvington Theater about two miles away. 

She would give me the money since I was older than my cousin. This carried a great deal of responsibility for me. I had to manage the two dimes which would get us into the theater, the four nickels for the trolley ride ( five cents a piece each way), and two nickels for our boxes of Jujyfruits.  

On the first trip up Frederick Road on the trolley to the Irvington Theater, it dawned on me that if we were going up hill to get to the theater, then it would be down hill to return to our grandmother’s house. So, even before the trolley ride was over, my cousin and I had come to an agreement. We would use the two nickels intended for our return trolley ride for extra boxes of Jujyfruits, and he and I would walk back to grandmother’s. 

We settled into our seats with two boxes of Jujyfruits apiece. The lights went down, the silver screen came alive. There was something thrilling about that, especially when one of the movies had been produced by MGM and was introduced by that marvelous roaring lion. First the previews of coming attractions, then a news reel, then the first show, usually a western, then one or two cartoons, then the serial, then the second show which, if we were really lucky, would be the Three Stooges. 

As we came out the Irvington Theater into the bright late afternoon sunlight, we would begin our two mile walk to grandmother’s. During all the times we did this, though we might have been thinking it, neither of us ever suggested that we might have been better off with one box of Jujyfruits apiece thus having fare for a trolley ride. 

On the way down Frederick Road, we passed two cemeteries. One was a large commercial one, but the other was Baltimore’s National Cemetery. I knew what a National Cemetery was, the place where those who had served the United States in the military were buried. Many of the graves were just a few years old and contained the remains of those who had died in the recent war, the Second World War. We knew about people going off to war, our uncle had served in the Pacific on a Destroyer Escort.  

Sometimes we would pause for a while and look through the wrought iron fence at the neat rows of graves. I don’t remember ever talking about what we were viewing. But I do remember that around special days, such as Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, American flags were placed at each grave. This of course was a tribute to those who had served and had died on behalf of the rest of us, on behalf of my cousin, on behalf of me.  

Then, during my seventh grade year at Arbutus Elementary School, our class went on a trip to Washington DC and over to Arlington and the great National Cemetery with its tomb of the Unknown Soldier. And, just in the past year, Beverly and I visited the American Cemetery in Tunisia where the bodies of the men who were killed in the North African campaign of the Second World War are buried. In the case of the former, I believe that I was too caught up with the memorable ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown to really comprehend the enormity of what the Cemetery was all about. But, in the case of the latter, it hit me. 

Perhaps it was because these dead warriors had been laid to rest so far from home, perhaps it was because of my book knowledge of what they had been through before death, perhaps it was because I was a bit older than my days looking in on the Baltimore National Cemetery or at Arlington, and probably because of all of these, I was moved to tears. Here were buried the remains of men who lived and died in the midst of war’s fury. They must have known fear and uncertainty, yet along with their comrades they served and gave.  

On this Fourth of July, even as we celebrate and give thanks for the founding and the endurance of this nation of ours, men and women are still serving on behalf of each of us in the meanness of war. I cannot forget that, and I hope that you can’t either. No matter my stance on war in general or on the particular wars of the moment, these fellow citizens, mostly young people, represent me.  

Ah the cost of humankinds inability to “beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.”  I did not think of it as I walked to grandmother’s past the Baltimore National Cemetery, or at Arlington, or even at the American Cemetery in Tunisia, but I have recently. It was on the eve of the Fourth of July in 1863 that the Battle of Gettysburg climaxed. There was a terrible death toll in that battle, and a few months later in November President Abraham Lincoln dedicated the battlefield cemetery:

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. 

Years ago, a grandmother sent off her grandsons to the Irvington Theater for the Saturday picture shows. Each Saturday on their walk home, they past an outward and visible sign of America’s story and the cost paid by many in the course of that story. President Lincoln called the work of the warriors at Gettysburg unfinished. So too is the work of the Fourth of July unfinished. What Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and others proclaimed is still a work in progress. And we, the living, need be dedicated to the process of progress.

Bill