On the way to the Port of No Return

I'm at that difficult age. Old enough to think I know it all but not yet old enough to believe I know it all better. That day will come I know (didja see what I did there?) though tomorrow, as I also know, is promised to no one.

I hope on this Saturday morning, folks gathering in a place I have been to but once (so far) in my life, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which is in both Portsmouth, Maine and Kittery, New Hampshire, have a brilliantly beautiful mid-April day for an annual sad and somber duty.

This is the weekend that surviving family members and friends, in an ever-dwindling number, gather to remember the USS Thresher (SSN- 593), a nuclear powered newly-constructed submarine whom the ocean took and kept, along with her crew and civilian technicians on April 10, 1963 another quiet casualty of the Cold War that the Soviet and American Empires waged with one another for nearly five decades.

Though officially no shots were fired during the decades, lives were lost and changed and the path and progress of history was re-routed innumerable times as 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' were transformed from intellectual conceits and abstractions to concrete and real values and goods.

As we have all learned in the course of our own time on this orb, if it doesn't cost anything, it's not worth anything and fifty-one years ago 129 men paid with their lives for us to have the luxury to be forgetful of their (and others') sacrifices if we so choose.

That so many take for granted what others died to pass to us is both the challenge and the curse of our democracy. There are hurts that never heal and memories of what might have been but wasn't that cannot rhyme and will not end. This is one of those days of trial and tears for a ring of remembrance that can never look up and never look away.

Lost Harbor by Leslie Nelson Jennings:
"There is a port of no return, where ships may ride at anchor for a little space
And then, some starless night, the cable slips, leaving an eddy at the mooring place . . . Gulls, veer no longer. Sailor, rest your oar.
No tangled wreckage will be washed ashore."
-bill kenny