The Secret is Out

All families have secrets. Some are deliberately kept out of embarrassment or shame. Some are kept because someone somewhere along the way decided to hoard the information because it gives them power over other family members still in the dark.

And some, like the one I'm about to divulge, are kept because the knowledge was assumed to be so widespread that there was no need to continue to tell the story.

My older brother Dale has hosted a Memorial Day cookout for the last several years. Our families - mom and dad, aunt Ginger, my other brothers and their spouses, me and Warren, miscellaneous children and grandchildren from very young to mid-20s - make up the core party. Friends - his, mine, ours - are added from year to year.

This year was no exception. I invited a colleague from the courts and his girlfriend to join us. She is from Kentucky, which is where my dad is from, so some time was spent with the two of them determining where each of them hailed from (not too far from one another, as it turns out). In a discussion about the water sources in the various hollers, the guest told how her family hired a dowser who found a natural spring 50 feet down when they moved to the farm.

"It was the best water," she said, and you told tell from her smile and the way her eyes lit up that she was remembering the sweet taste as she spoke.

The discussion turned briefly to dowsing and the art of it. Dowsing is one of those folklore items that I always attributed to the hills culture and had never seen demonstrated. No one has ever come up with any explanations of how and why it apparently works. Small wonder it is called "water witching" in some parts - there is a mystical, magical air to it.

So you can imagine my response when my mom, sitting in front of me, turned around and said "well, you know your dad can dowse for water."

If my mother had announced that she had a full-sized head of Elvis tattooed on her backside, I could have not been more stunned.

"Oh, didn't you know that?"

No, mom, I didn't know that.

I looked across the table at my brother Mark, who was sitting there with his mouth agape.

"Mark, did you know that?"

Mark shook his head. Nope, never heard it.

Mom prattled on. Dad dowsed with straightened coat hangers. If we had a pair, she'd have him demonstrate.

"Oh, and by the way, Dale also dowses."

Now Mark was looking as if mom had said she had Elvis in a rhinestone suit tattooed on her backside and was taking off her shirt to show everyone. He and I both had the "so who was the keeper of this information all these years?" look on our faces.

About that time, my brother Dale walked back in the house from an ice run that he and Warren had just made. We accosted him the moment he entered the kitchen.

"What do you mean, you know how to dowse for water? What's this all about?"

Dale, my most easygoing brother, laughed heartily. It was nothing to him, just something he could do. In short order, he had a pair of wire cutters and was cutting two coat hangers open to make them into dowsing rods (imagine two very tall Ls). Five minutes later, all of us were in the back yard.

Dad lead the demonstration. Hold the rods by the short base (with the long parts on top) in front of you, perpendicular to the ground and parallel to each other. Use an easy grip and don't put your thumbs over the tops of the rods.

He then proceeded to walk into the yard. Four or five steps and the rods started to move towards each other, then crossed. Dad stopped and Dale spoke up.

"Drainage ditch under the ground there."

Dale took the rods and walked in another direction. The rods soon crossed. Another underground drainage line ran near the property line.

Who wanted to try?

My nephew Matt took the rods and started walking towards one of the known sites. Sure enough, the rods starting crossing one another as he neared the unseen ditch. He laughed - a short "HA!" Matt was so delighted he walked away and started again in the same direction with the same result.

"HA!"

Several of us tried the rods. As it turned out, those of us who were related by blood - all the Nelsons - had the touch. My mom didn't. Neither did the guest who brought up dowsing in the first place.

Matt took the rods back and started towards the picnic tables. As he came up to the cooler, holding iced down sodas and beers, the rods started to swing and cross again.

"HA!"

When Sam arrived an hour later, we had him try it, without telling him what to expect or where the ditches were. When the rods started to swing towards one another and cross as he neared one, he reacted just like his cousin Matt did.

"HA!"

The afternoon eventually moved on to the stuff of cookouts - food, storytelling, long conversations, laughter. We flowed from house to yard and back again. Someone kept taking my chair in the ring in the yard, so I sat inside and caught up with another nephew. The mountain of deviled eggs disappeared one by one, as did the hamburgers. My colleague endeared himself to my mother by praising (and consuming) her brownies. My niece Lizzie played with her cousin's two children, ages three and five. Matt secured the dowsing rods in his family's car; we teased him about taking them to college this fall and using them as a pickup line with the coeds.

In short, it was a Memorial Day cookout a lot like any other Memorial Day cookout.

Except for the family secret that is now out in the open.

We're all a bunch of water witches.

Lest We Forget

There is a local story getting a lot of chatter and some press, involving a young farmhand caught on video brutalizing the cows and calves at the dairy at which he works. He is being charged in a neighboring county with multiple counts of cruelty to animals; bond is currently set at $100,000.

I'm not about to defend or excuse the actions of the defendant, assuming the charges are proven. I am, however, going to call attention to an element to that story that no one is mentioning in all the loud calls for his punishment.

The defendant is a 25 year old Iraqi war veteran.

Our veterans are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with serious traumatic injuries - some of them physical, some of them mental. They are starting to fill up our courts as defendants, sometimes charged with crimes of violence. One speaker I have heard in recent months attributes this to the fact that today's soldiers are sent over multiple tours of duties and so have repeated exposure to the trauma of the war zone. Where the Viet Nam era veteran typically did one tour in Nam, today's military personnel may do five or six tours in the Middle East.

The problem of traumatized veterans has become so great that there is now a special program in the Veterans Administration, funded by Congress, called the Veterans Justice Outreach Initiative (VJO). VJO focuses on vets in the criminal justice system, linking them to mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, and other needed services. Nationwide, judges are establishing Veterans Treatment Courts, similar to mental health or drug courts, to help get our veterans back on track.

If we are going to send our soldiers to a war with no end, exposing them to the horrors of battle, and expect them to do their duty, then we owe it to them when they come back scarred and damaged to get them the help and services they need.

On Memorial Day, we watch parades, we decorate our family graves. I'm about to head out to watch Warren's daughter march in a Memorial Day parade myself. It is easy on Memorial Day to wave a flag and thank a vet.

It is harder to remember on all the other days of the year that all of our vets need our support and our help. Even when - especially when - something goes wrong.

Our veterans deserve better and so do we.

Decoration Day

Monday is Memorial Day and Warren and I, like many others around here, will observe it in part by visiting area cemeteries in which his and my family members are buried.

Memorial Day grew out of Decoration Day, a direct result of the Civil War. That war touched every town in every state east of the Mississippi River (and some beyond). Small wonder: almost 10% of the nation served in the respective armies of the North and South. Some 20% of the soldiers serving, 2% of the nation's population, died in that war. Decoration Day began officially in 1868 to commemorate the war dead, and it still officially honors all those who died in wartime in service to this country.

In this part of the country, central Ohio, many families still observe Memorial Day, although we tend to treat it as a family holiday rather than a military remembrance. It is a time to head to the cemeteries, clean the graves, talk about the family buried there, and put out bunches of flowers. Boy scouts and veterans groups will beat many of us there to make sure fresh flags are in the war markers of the veterans.(Local history being what it is, local markers go all the way back to the Revolutionary War.)

We will arrive bearing flowers and trowels and, in some cases, statuary or balloons for the graves. In some ways, Memorial Day is as close as we, mainstream white Ohioans that we are, come to observing Dia de los Muertos. We do not feast at the cemetery, but we celebrate our deceased family members by remembering them at this time of year.

Decorating the family graves is a tradition my mother, father, and I observe together and one in which Warren has joined. One of the cemeteries we will visit is a large, open cemetery a ways from town, where my sister and my dad's parents are buried, and where someday my parents will be too.

At that cemetery, my parents and I have lots of friends, both dead and alive. Although that cemetery dates back to the late 1800s, a large section of it has been opened and used since 1950. My parents bought a plot there in 1955, when they had to bury their baby daughter, and bought their own plots at the same time. My dad's parents bought the plots next to them.

Over the years you get to know who's there in a cemetery and who their family is. Nearby is John Link, a close friend of my dad's, who died of cancer in his early 20s. My friend Laurie's dad is buried in the next section over; Laurie and her mother have probably already been out there this weekend. Denny and Marlene Schultz, whose friendship with my parents started back in high school, are just around the corner. Denny died a number of years ago; Marlene just a month ago. There is a little feeling of Our Town in that cemetery sometimes and I wonder how Marlene, who had a wonderful, bubbling, giggling laugh, would do in the setting that Thornton Wilder imagined.

We visited this cemetery a lot as I was growing up; it was on the route to or from my grandparents' farm out on Hogback Road. Although I didn't realize it then, I can appreciate now how much my mother must have missed her baby, who had died suddenly at three months. While my parents took the time to clean the headstone or just stand silently, arms around each other, we kids would use the time as opportunities to explore the nearby graves. Visiting the cemetery was not a macabre experience but a natural part of the rhythm of my childhood.

One of my favorite grave markers of all time is in that cemetery. I must have read it a hundred times as a kid and still always stop and read it every time I am out there. I will read it Monday, in fact. It is the stone for Alfred Livingston, who died in 1911 at the age of 70. Alfred Livingston was a sergeant with Company D, 121st regiment of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and his stone proudly notes that he fought at Chickamauga, marched with Sherman to the sea, and marched in the Grand Review of the Armies in D.C. at war's end. The 121st was organized in Delaware, so I suspect that he was a local farm boy who went away to war.

I have often wondered what stories Alfred must have had to tell when he returned at the war's end. I wonder whether he participated in any of the veterans reunions, and whose memories he marked every year on Decoration Day. I like that his marker notes what must have been the greatest adventure of his life.

This weekend, the cemeteries all around here are full of family members pulling weeds and planting flowers. Some of the small towns in the area will hold Memorial Day parades and observances in the local cemetery. All of those ceremonies will include a recitation of the Gettysburg Address, because that is what you do on Memorial Day around here.

Monday, Warren and I will visit his parents' grave and make sure the flags are in good order. They both served in World War II: Art in the Army and Ellen in the Red Cross. Later in the day, I will clip Ellen's peonies, which are in full bloom right now, and we will join my parents, with their own bunches of peonies, and decorate the family graves in other cemeteries.

Decoration Day has taken on some different meanings since its official start in 1868, but here we are, 141 years later, still carrying our flowers and our memories to the cemetery on Memorial Day, and still looking after our dead. I think Alfred Livingston would approve.