Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Stevie and Ben Visit the Viet Nam Memorial

One Friday night in April, 2006, Bill took the boys to visit the Lincoln  Memorial,
and  then the Viet Nam Memorial, both on the Mall in Washington.  It was 9 PM.  Ben
wanted to climb up and sit on Lincoln’s lap.  Stevie read aloud my favorite, Lincoln’s
Second Inaugural Address, etched on the Indiana limestone wall of the Lincoln pantheon.

At the Viet Nam Memorial, approximately two hundred yards away, Bill found on the
wall two soldiers named Steven and Ben, and he explained  what happened to those
nineteen or twenty-year-old boys, those who were once nine and seven, just like Bill’s
sons now.

It was dark, and Bill did not see that he had parked in a handicap space and found a
$250  parking ticket on his windshield!  I told him if he wrote a journal entry about this
Friday night’s experience and e-mailed it to me, I would pay the ticket! 

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