It started during the War of 1812. The United States was at war with Great Britian. Major George Armistead, the commander of Fort McHenry in Baltimore, was preparing for an attack by the British. He ordered two flags from Baltimore flag maker Mary Young Pickersgill. He specified that one flag be made, “so large that the British would have no difficulty seeing it from a distance.” The two flags cost $405.90. That’s $5,037 in today’s dollars. On September 12, 1814, 5,000 British soldiers and 19 ships attacked Baltimore. On the night of the 13th, they started bombing Fort McHenry. It went on for 25 hours. On the morning of the 14th, the large flag was still flying. Francis Scott Key was being held on a British ship on the Patapsco River. When he saw the flag still waving, he was inspired to write, “Defense of Fort M’Henry.” It was later set to music and re-titled “The Star Spangled Banner”. But it took awhile to catch on.

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He was called “the man who saved the world”, and you probably never heard of him. I hadn’t, until I saw a story about his death on the Evening News. This morning, I read his obituary. Stanislav Petrov is someone everyone should know about because without him, the world would be a very different place. And many of us would not be here today. The obit written by Sewell Chan in the New York Times reads like a doomsday novel that would be made into a movie starring some big name Hollywood superstar. Petrov was a 44 year old Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces on September 26, 1983, when he went on duty at a secret command center outside Moscow. It was there that the Soviet military monitored its early warning satellites over the United States to determine if we launched nuclear missiles. Suddenly alarms went off. Chan writes, “Computers warned that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched from an American base.” “For 15 seconds, we were in a state of shock, “he (Petrov) later recalled. We needed to understand, “What’s next?”.

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How much of our lives do we spend on hold? We have the world of information at our fingertips if we want the news, weather, traffic reports, to buy something, pay for a purchase, or see how our friends and family are wasting their time on social media. There is a commercial for e-bay that says it all. You see women watch other women walk by in a dress, then shoes, and then a purse, and the watchers go right to their phones and order the items on line. The new iPhoneX doesn’t even make us push a button, or use our fingerprint to open the new phone. It will recognize our face, and only, our face. You can’t ask for much better customer service then that. I don’t know what happens if you’re laughing or crying.

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It started when we moved into the new house. The previous owner had bird feeders hanging outside the kitchen window. They attracted small colorful birds, and unfortunately, squirrels. I filled the feeder with birdseed, and I’d catch the squirrel hanging upside down on top of the feeder helping himself to a free meal. I changed feeders, and I haven’t seen the squirrel since. But the birds kept coming, and I’ve become fascinated. I’ve learned that they are finches. Small birds the size of sparrows. They are of varying colors that you can only find in nature. Reds, yellows, orange, purple, and black decorate their fine feathers. I now find myself sitting at the kitchen table watching and marveling at these little creatures. I can’t say I ever paid much attention to birds, but seeing them up close, and supplying free meals has given me a whole new appreciation.

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Our environment is under attack. We have a president who wants to turn back the clock 50 years and undo decades of work that made the planet cleaner, safer, and healthier.  He doesn’t believe in global warming. He appointed an EPA Secretary who wants to essentially destroy the department. He wants to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. He wants to bring back coal. He wants to shrink the size of National Monuments to allow for development and mining. The world’s largest salmon fishing area in Bristol Bay, Alaska is being threatened by a mining company that says it sits in an area that could hold the largest gold and copper deposits in the world. The Gulf of Mexico has gotten two degrees warmer which allows for bigger, stronger hurricanes like Harvey that is crashing into Texas this weekend. Looking at the big picture can be too overwhelming. But we all have a level of personal responsibility.

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It’s been two and half years since the initial reconnection was made. My brother mentioned that a childhood friend, who lived across the street from us, had asked about me in a Facebook group. When I joined the group, I received a friend request from my cousin Regina, who was also part of the group. These were the first steps in restoring 45 lost years. My father came from a large Italian family. He was one of five. Together they had 19 children. I am the oldest grandchild. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, we saw each other all the time. We would spend birthdays and holidays together. My father and his older brother Frank bought a two family house together in 1954. Frank and his wife Gloria and their seven kids lived downstairs, and we lived upstairs. Regina is Frank’s second oldest child. But, everything changed during my college years.

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It started with a unexpected invitation to Ireland, and a seventeen year old letter. My brother-in-law was renting a cottage in Adare, and asked Maureen and I to come and spend a week. We had been to Ireland back in 2000 on a tour. My mother’s cousin Joe and his wife Mary were living in Moyvane, County Kerry. My parents had visited them back in 1974. My mother gave me a letter Mary had written to her with Mary’s phone number. I called back then and spoke to Joe while we were on a tour stop. But we weren’t able to get away to visit them. Fortunately, I saved the letter.

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When you travel by ship, you move into a new community. But there are two segments to the population, those on vacation and those who are working. They can take you around the world from the Midwest to Manila. The majority of the crew was from the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Ryan, a bartender from the Philippines, has been on the ship for almost ten months. He missed the birth of his son back in February, and has yet to hold him. He Face Times at night with his school teacher wife, and tries to get his son to react to his voice. He will be home for three months, and then be off again on another long cruise.

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Alaska is about man and nature living in harmony. In the 1970s, when the country started to understand the importance of protecting and saving the environment, the Alaskan commercial fisherman and the government joined together to save the salmon for themselves and future generations. Our last stop in Ketchikan is “The Salmon Capital of the World”. You can see clearly what’s being done on a visit to the Macaulay Hatchery in the capital of Juneau where they breed millions of salmon and release them into the bay. You can over look a tank with millions of tiny salmon as they start a life cycle that regenerates the population for future generations. Commercial fisherman will tell you they never want to catch all the salmon in these waters. They always want to come back for more.

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The vastness is what you notice first. We started up the Inside Passage from Vancouver, British Columbia at 7pm. The ocean was still. The wind was bracing. The sky was streaked with clouds against that sky blue that only nature can achieve. It’s hard to tell how far away the mountains are in the distance. The peaks of brown and gray edge the horizon, and make you feel you haven’t actually left the earth. On the first night, I watched the sun set late and last over North America. It wasn’t totally dark until almost ten o’clock. The atmosphere is silent accept for the wind which seems to blow in waves as the ship pushes north.

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