Yesterday
my post touched a chord with several people who responded to it. Thank you for
your comments. Today, I am going to talk a bit about my Memorial Day as a follow
through.
First,
I will begin with the fact that I have been an avid student of the Law of
Attraction and other natural laws for several years and I am constantly learning
to let go and let God, so to speak in my travels. As I let go, I receive
intuition, and that has always been the case, but in the past I rarely acted on
it. For the last several years, I've truly challenged myself to go with it
and see what comes.
I
worked as a sales manager at a car dealership for several years and one of my
previous salesmen has been on my mind several times in the last couple of weeks. I don't
know why, and I'm learning to not be concerned about that anymore. I stopped
being an employee of that car dealership in 1997, and I know this salesman died
right around 2008.
Back
to the present, I had this desire to go to the closest National Cemetery for
Memorial Day, as I saw a blurb about it and thought it would be good to go since
I have never done that. So, I went with it. It was a great event, a
beautiful cemetery that first began in 2007. After the event, I decided to walk
part of the grounds. Even though it is a relatively new National cemetery, there
are well over 10,000 soldiers buried there. So, you know it's coming, right? I
walked three or four rows reading their names in my head acknowledging them, and
I found this:
I
wasn't expecting it and I didn't know where he was buried or even if he was. So,
I was thinking about his guy I hadn't seen in years and has been dead since 2008
and I am led to his tombstone. Out of over 10,000, I went right over to his.
Wow. That's incredible.
Jerry
Block was a very special guy. I met him long before I hired him at the car
dealership. He used to own two men's stores, one in Fairfield and the other in
Napa. He was what they now call morbid obese back then, When I hired him at the
dealership, he was about one third his previous size. He found that he had
diabetes and he became an advocate of a healthy lifestyle. He walked everywhere.
He was kind and generous and fun to be around. He took what he did seriously and
was most serious about giving excellent service. He lost toes and other portions
of his feet to the disease, but he just bought special shoes and kept
walking.
He
mentored others about diabetes and gave talks and was especially focused on
youth and obesity and what that can lead to since he knew from experience. He
was selfless in desire to serve others and help them avoid his pain and
suffering. I loved Jerry Block. He had such a large heart, and besides that, he
was a great employee.
So,
I saw Jerry today, and I thought, this was why I came here today even though I
enjoyed myself and was touched by the moving ceremony, much as the man whose
back I thought said it well surrounded by many hundreds of people:
After
a couple of hours at the Sacramento Valley National Cemetery, I drove on to the
State Capitol at Sacramento. Right across the street from the front of the
Capitol is the Fallen Peace Officer Memorial under a huge oak tree. Here are a
couple shots of it and my dad's name on one of the plates.
Ralph Minion was my dad and he
worked with another officer above his name, William D Huckaby. A few years ago,
I arranged to go to the Highway Patrol Academy in West Sacramento, CA and got to
see where my dad trained. They have a big quad area with a fountain in the
middle and fallen CHP officers names are on small brass plates around the top of
the fountain and recruits are supposed to polish those names periodically to
remember that what they do is a dangerous job. I also got to see the graduation
plaques for my dad and my uncle Durward in the CHP dayroom.
Last, we went to Mare Island
which used to be a major shipyard building submarines and many other types of
ships. They have a very old cemetery there though it is very small in
comparison. All in all, a wonderful day of rememberence and enjoyment at the
same time.
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