November 16, 2010 - "There's a first time for everything" - have you ever really thought about that old adage? What came before the "first time for everything"?

Background – Our family is not a military family, and while we have a great deal of respect for our nation’s service members, I found myself frustrated during a random question/conversation with my fifteen year old about the Medal of Honor.   I felt like it was something that I should know, and somewhat un-patriotic for not knowing it.  The question was “Is the Medal of Honor awarded to living soldiers too, or only deceased soldiers?”  I began an answer because I was sure I had to know, but quickly realized that I had absolutely no idea!  It was an important question, one that every American should know the answer to, and I told my son that we would absolutely look it up when we got home (or at least within the next few days, or weeks, or by the time….ugggh, stupid procrastination!).  Happily the universe had my back….

S.C.O.U.T. – THE VERY NEXT MORNING the news reported that President Obama will be awarding the Medal of Honor – for the very first time – to a living service member from the Iraq/Afghanistan wars!  I was literally stunned!  I went back and asked my son why he had brought up that question (I suspected maybe he had seen it on the news as well – although he doesn’t watch much news, and I knew I hadn’t seen this report yet so it was highly unlikely that he had – or maybe the school had announced the story) and he told me that his class had been reading a war book for the last few weeks and the President in the book had awarded the Medal of Honor to one of the characters.  It had gotten him thinking about the medal, what it meant, and who got it. 

I passed the information along to my son, who was equally stunned at the timing.  Timing, such a funny thing in this world…“Now that he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.  People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion” ~ Albert Einstein upon the death of his life-long friend, Michele Besso.