July 5, 2006
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I wrote this letter to a friend about our 4th of July experience, and I thought I would share it on here.
I had a good 4th myself, and I hope you did as well. Usually the 4th of July is not much more than another day, except with lots of fireworks popping around outside and people hollering and getting drunk- and a bad day to go out due to crowds, traffic, and police looking for people to pull over.
However, this 4th was really nice- grilling, great home-made food, fun stories, and a boat ride on the lake I lived on until recently. We enjoyed it with my parent’s good friends, their german neighbours Anna and Ziggy. Funny, that one of my best fourth of July’s was with people from another country. Of course, they are American citizens now, so I won’t say non-Americans. In fact, they are almost the best example of where most of us came from- and the original idea of coming from a hard, painful life of poverty and stife and ending their lives with successful children, a beautiful home and a peaceful life. Yet despite all that, they still use what they have to serve others- they use their healthy bodies to help others(they are in their 80′s now I think, late seventies at earliest, but they were pushing their boat out of the cove with poles almost as well as I could!! Talk about healthy and strong!!! They are always helping my Mom out with physical work, and they are OLDER!). Ziggy lost some of his family through starvation during the time of the war (WWII), was kept prisoner after the war since he was German and lived in poland I think. They both have their own incredible stories of life as young adults during and after the war in Germany. Anna was raised Christian, and Ziggy became a Christian.
Yes, when I think about it, they really are a unique example of where our country came from.
And it is interesting to hear both their support of our country, and their questions about choices people in our country make. The way we always leave food on our plates (sometimes, just to be polite)- how parents let their children eat a whole apple, but the children just throw most of it away when the parent could easily just cut the apple off the core and give a fourth of it to the child. Ziggy shared that he gets really angry inside when he sees this- because he had to watch family members slowly starve to death. Anna knows that you can’t give starving people the food you save, but she says she buys less food by saving it- and uses the extra money to give to those very starving people in the world, or to fund her helping others in poverty. Most of us, myself included, just do not think about that very often. And if we did save that extra money, we’d just use it to go out to Outback Steakhouse for a special family dinner instead.
They also have interesting conversations with people who say “I’m poor.” or “I just don’t have any money”- when, compared to many other places in the world, even those people would be well off. Their own poverty stories always ‘win’- but the point isn’t to beat them, but to encourage them to look at what they have, to appreciate it, and to work hard to change their situation if they do not like it. Sometimes they cannot help it, but most of the times they can at least do something. Anna says that a lot of Americans have forgotten that there are LOTS of “old fashioned” ways to do things that we can still do now- but either do not know we can do, do not know how to do, or do not want to do.
I looked out at their beautiful porch, around at their lovely immaculate house- their yard with elegant flowers planted all over and a trellece with climbing flower vines just now blooming… the green grass and wondeful landscaping… and I think to myself, “If anyone has earned it, they have.” And the fact is, they don’t hire people to do their yard- in their eighties, they use their free time and energy to, by hand, personally plant, tend to, and make their yard look so elegant. In their “spare time” they went over and painted my Mom’s porch for her and Dad (since Mom and Dad physically just cannot do that), and Ziggy- who can fix most anything, yet never went to any kind of school to do it- will help with their plumbing or a broken kitchen device.
When we left, they said, “If you ever want to drop by, just do it. Oh, it’s nice to have warning, but that’s not important. I don’t know about ‘Southern hospitality’, but the way we see hospitality- it means opening your home to let people who need to stay, or need to get food, to come when they want.”
Sorry to flood your email again! I didn’t quite mean to.
But I thought that I would share an interesting, and enriching, experience while it was on my mind.Until later,
Patrick