A Volume From My Parents' "Library of Kindness"

I think that Washington, DC which is replete with monuments, should be a model for me individually to memorialize what is elevating and ennobling in my life. In my case, I won't manage to build such inspired physical shrines to commemorate my influential people and events, but I would like to make some comparisons.

Certainly, in your case, Mom and Dad, you deserve a "thank you" of arching grandeur since your service to my family during our recent move to Virginia has been grand. However, I know that you're not expecting anything. As with those memorialized in DC's monuments, you didn't give service with any intentions of being thanked.

Using Abraham Lincoln as an example, he was self effacing in the Gettysburg Address: "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." It is interesting to note, however, that history actually has long remembered what he said and remembers less what the soldiers did there at Gettysburg.

This point illustrates that memory has a great deal to do with how well chronicles are written, what is celebrated, and what is erected to remain behind. Personally, any of my monuments to-date are largely internal, but I need to make these more tangible, especially to write them down. While I lack skills carving in marble, my words here are not any less vital to my individual remembrance than DC's monuments are to national values and memory.

Therefore, I will call my internal monuments not the National Archives or Library of Congress, but instead, my "Personal Archives," that house a "Library of Kindness" which has been shown to my family and to me.

Volumes can and should be written about all that you have done for me, Mom and Dad. As with Jefferson, Lincoln, and others with monuments in DC, some of whose greatest phrases have been carved in stone, I'd like you to know what a lasting impression your kindness has inscribed in my soul.

As the pediment to cap off my thoughts here, I'll make a comparison to how, like ancient exemplars, you serve as worthy models to emulate. The builders of the Washington, DC monuments used excellent Greek, Roman, Egyptian and other models from antiquity. However, these ancient peoples did have some false doctrine, building to pagan gods and goddesses like Athena. Notwithstanding, the virtuous and noble structural foundations that these cultures produced endured and, in my opinion, were improved upon, if not architecturally, than probably idealogically in the Washington, DC monuments.

Mortal men like Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Washington, were real, not fictitious, and, no doubt, mortals, not gods, but their greatest deeds have been made into memorials of lofty design and purpose that raise visitors' vision far above the present-day DC skyline. These memorials inspire me, similarly, to want to be a more upright, stalwart, articulate defender of freedom.

On a more personal level, Mom and Dad, you motivate me to want to follow your example and be a better husband, father, son, and citizen.

The photo below reminds me that Luke and Noah look up to their grandparents, and I will do my best to instill that uplifting, enduring regard in them:


The picture that follows may have been taken around Mount Vernon, but for me, the trail shown below represents family togetherness. Jessica, the children, and I love you, Mom and Dad, or, as Luke would call both of you, "Grandpa." Thanks for what you've done all along our family's path!