July 6 '06

Thirty-one years ago, when I was five years old, my father brought a guest home for dinner. 

He was smallish in stature, had a cane, a head of near completely white hair and was all friendly smiles, even to the tactless little girl who demanded to know why he walked so funny.

“I broke my leg,” he told me.

“I broke my finger once. My sister slammed it in our bedroom door,” I answered. I held up my bent pinky finger as proof.

Admiral James Stockdale’s broken leg was hardly the product of a careless sibling. 

After his plane was shot down over North Vietnam in the fall of 1965, (he also broke a bone in his back when he ejected) his left leg had been bent sideways from the knee at a 90 degree angle while he endured a savage beating by a mob of civilians. And that was just the beginning.

He spent the next seven and a half years as a captive, four in solitary confinement and two in leg irons. In spite of relentless, brutal torture by his captors, He became the leader of the American POW’s resistance efforts, creating communications systems and encouraging morale among the prisoners.

He slashed his wrists with shards of glass from a broken windowpane to demonstrate his willingness to die rather than capitulate, and upon discovering his nearly dead body, his torturers backed off.

He didn’t tell me any of that, of course. He just commiserated over my finger and gave me a ride on his damaged limb, which didn’t bend and therefore, made a nifty horse.

He stayed at our house for three days that first visit, helping my dad, who was working on a book about the POW experience.  They remained friends until Admiral Stockdale’s death July 5^th.

The obituary put out by the Associated Press made me angry.  It emphasized the Admiral’s ‘stumbling performance’ in the 1992 Vice-Presidential debate, mentioning his truly heroic military service almost as an afterthought. 

Admiral Stockdale was deeply grateful of Ross Perot’s good treatment to the POW’s during the war; Perot called the whole world’s attention to their plight and threw big welcome home parties for them on their return.  When Perot asked him to be his running mate in ’92, of course he said yes, not necessarily for any burning political ambition, but because that’s what a man of honor does for someone he considers a friend. By all accounts, he hated being in the public eye.

Obviously, he endured a lot worse in his life than slings and arrows for his public speaking, but it makes me sad to think a generation of young people might read the AP piece and only remember this man, this truly great American, for a poor showing in a televised debate. 

He was the only three star officer in the history of the Navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor, which he was awarded in 1976.

In addition to his 26 combat decorations, he had 2 Distinguished Service Medals, 4 Silver Stars, and 2 Purple Hearts.

He served as president of the Naval War College and the Citadel. He was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.

He held 11 honorary doctoral degrees and wrote several books.

He was also a very kind, friendly man who let an obnoxious five-year-old girl climb all over his badly healed leg and didn’t scare her half to death with the truth of how it had been broken.

So thank you, sir, for bouncing me on your knee thirty-one years ago, and for making a fuss over my finger.

July 24, '05

It's been a million and seven since I've written on this thing, my apologies. It's that time of year, though, the family is in town and we've been goin' mach ten with our hair on fire. It's blistering hot out to boot, so we've spent every waking moment in some body of water or another. Summer...Gin and Tonics and pre-cancerous lesions are the order of the day.

I'm actually writing this from Finny's karate class. There's no one here today but us and some guy with the worst comb-over I've ever seen. Honest to gravy, it looks like a joke. Like a comb-over mixed with Ron-Popeil spray-on hair. A spray-on comb-over, if you will...he's young, too! Can't be over 45, for cryin'..has he not heard the jokes? What the frug?

Jokes on me, I just got back from the bathroom and I had a big fat smear of chocolate on my face. HA! It's not even noon and I've been found out. Is it my fault that when I opened the fridge this morning, there was a huge bowl of cookie dough staring me in the face??

Last night just the gals, my sisters and I and various and sundry friends went out, because sitting on the deck at mom's house and drinking g&t's was getting old, and we thought it would be funner to sit on the deck of the Bayside Grill and pay 8 dollars a pop to drink them instead. And you know what? It was. We laughed and laughed and our kids were nowhere around.  Our extremely rough-looking waitress was sporting a, and I'm not making this up, house-arrest anklet.  Which confused me, because clearly she was out of her house, but I guess you can leave to go to work.  How awkward can you get, closely inspecting someone's anklet because you assume it's touting some cause?

"Oh, what's your anklet for? I haven't seen that one, is it for ovarian cancer or something? What's that say.... Property of Hennepin County...I don't get it....Oh wait a second.....oh...."

Tomorrow we're taking all the kids tubing down the apple river, and we've booked a fishing pontoon for an afternoon on Lake Minnetonka, assuming we aren't all dead from exhaustion by then.  Molly hasn't taken her bathing suit off in a week. When I finally do peel it off, I'm afraid her skin will all come with it.

So I did that triathalon on Sunday, and it was super fun. I beat my last time by seven minutes, mostly because I didn't waste time in the corral combing cream rinse into my hair and changing into my fetching biking shorts. Nope, this time I was all business, baby, outta the water, onto the bike, BOOM no messing around for this cowgirl....my kick-ass-take-names demeanor slowly dissipated as bike after bike sped past me and my wicked- witch-of-the-west mobile....it was still fun. I'm doing another one at the end of August, and Miguel has found me a new bike.  Knowing he spent a bunch of dough on new wheels for me will ensure I actually use it.  Fitness through guilt.  Whatever gets you there, you know?

It's three days later. I couldn't finish the last blog because the chicken came off the grill and I hadn't eaten in at least 20 minutes and was quite faint. All my over-indulging has stretched my stomach to the size of a hefty bag...another gluttonous American...Take that, Al Qaeda, I stuff myself with great defiance!

Anyway, the chicken was delicious. The same cannot be said for the dessert I made, a humongous triple batch of brownies.

"Why Katie, how do you wreck brownies?" You may be asking.

It's really easy. You use olive oil instead of regular vegetable oil.  It makes them taste like crap, crap that no amount of vanilla ice cream on top of them can remedy. And let me tell you something, nothing turns my family hostile quicker than bad dessert.  Burn the burgers, throw rotten, slimy lettuce in the salad, serve the beer warm, whatever, but don't you wreck dessert! The shame...the shame...

That bike that Mike promised me has not yet materialized, through no fault of his, one of  our shoe reps promised it to us and has since gone AWOL. No biggie, I'm sure bikes at good deals have become scarce since everyone in the country has Lance Armstrong Fever.

I have to get Meg to a birthday party, so I'll leave you with this: I made a roast beef sandwich for lunch, and Molly was licking the juice off the counter top. I told her to stop and she told me it was yummy Beefonade.

Beefonade...it's not just for breakfast anymore.

© Katie McCollow, 2004 • katie.mccollow@mac.com