Pearl Harbor and Dickens on the Square

Sometimes one day changes everything for a country. A single day becomes a pivot point that sets inexorable forces in motion. I’m writing this post on December 7th, which 73 years ago was also a Sunday and was one such day: The morning the Japanese navy launched a surprise bombing raid to destroy the biggest battleships in our fleet while they were moored at Pearl Harbor. It was a morning that changed everything for the USA and the world.

So today I’m adding a scratchy photo of my dad, Tech Sergeant Frank McBride, US Army Air Corps, sitting in a jeep somewhere in France during his 2 ½ years overseas during WWII.  Pop is still with us, 94 years old and doing fine, one of the ever-shrinking cohort of WWII veterans. With Pop in mind, today, Pearl Harbor Day, seems a good time to pause, remember, and thank those guys, even if it’s not Veterans’ Day or Memorial Day.

Now back to the war that also changed everything for the USA, that is to say, the war that insured that the USA would remain a sea –to-shining-sea nation. The war that, to borrow a phrase my author friend Jeff Brooks chose for the title of a fine Civil War novel, prevented the USA from becoming a permanently “shattered nation,” a nation irrevocably split asunder into two countries. Thank goodness the four years of death and sacrifice finally ended with the USA still a single nation.

It’s easy to understand why the USA mobilized everybody and every industry to fight back at the Japanese and Hitler’s demonized Germany 73 years ago. On the other hand, it has never been easy for me to understand why 153 years ago, America’s southern states did much the same thing, mobilizing everybody and every industry, to sever the national bonds and strike out on their own. It’s not for lack of trying. I’ve read an ample number of history books in which learned historians attempt to explain the “why” of it all as they describe the progression of events leading to Fort Sumter.

Nonetheless, I still have never quite “got” it. I’ve never understood the thinking that brought about the all-out effort to abandon the American national identity that had been growing for eighty years since the ragtag collection of colonies broke away from England, and through death and sacrifice, became a single American nation. But the Civil War surely did happen, and maybe we are stronger now for the terrible pain we brought upon ourselves back then.  I hope so.

Yesterday I spent five hours in the 112 year-old Clark Library here in Lockhart, as one of several local authors who were part of the annual Dickens on the Square celebration. Twenty-five years ago a feisty city librarian started the early December festivities to raise money for the library, blatantly imitating the Dickens on the Strand celebration in Galveston. I don’t know how things are going in Galveston, but here in Lockhart after 25 iterations, Dickens has become part of our town’s culture.

It helps that our library building is a Texas landmark that has a stage in front of a huge stained glass window, a U-shaped balcony, fine woodwork, and has been well-maintained and renovated. Just the place for we local authors to hawk our books inside the building, while outside a day-long series of choirs, dancers, ice sculptors, glass-blowers, animal shows and such take place on the street, sidewalk and library lawn. There’s a parade on Friday night to kick off the weekend and huge Yule log is ceremoniously set ablaze. It’s a fine time, and not too shabby for a little town usually only remembered for our surplus of BBQ joints.

I am pleased to have sold all the copies of my two novels that I brought along. Of course, Lockhart is a town of only 12,000 folks, and having lived here for over thirty years, almost every sale was to someone I knew by name.

I confess that it was most fun to sell my novels to a few middle-aged men and women who had been teenagers at Lockhart High School in the ‘80’s while I served as the school’s principal. It was a personal joy to watch the dawning recognition that, yeah, he’s still around, and has become something besides an old principal who has lost his faculty.