are you reading?

In the past, it has been fairly futile to create one of these blogs for a group. We have done well to keep it going. I am hoping Aaron, Lyn, Jonathan, and Lauren will use this as a means to keep up with some of us as they are in college this year. We seem to keep up with the folks in the "real" world, but college kids drop off the radar for a while.

Just a reminder for those who can't seem to get back on to post. Remember you go to www.blogger.com to sign in. I didn't give you a username or password, so you are on your own to remember that. When you get to the next screen, you want to create a new post. Then, after you've typed into the grayish box, you'll have to scroll below it, just as you do on comments, and click Publish Post.

Our only news here is that I'm back in school, we took a vacation last Wednesday, and the kids are gone the 18th. One of Lyn's 2 roommates will be a Walton Scholar from Honduras. Aaron will have a roommate again as well. I'll be teaching teachers this year. Scott is almost fully recovered from his Bell's Palsy at last.

Love you all.

Burkett's Great Loop Coincidence

Most of us already have read this, but I thought it might be nice for visitors to see.
------ Original Message ------Received: Thu, 07 Jul 2005 12:21:50 PM CDTFrom: Burkett Nelson <vagabum@usa.net>To: vagabum@usa.net
Subject: Great Loop July 7 2005Wednesday, July 6, 2005
Thanks for your words of encouragement, prayers and e-mails. Please keep them coming even though I haven't been able to personally respond very much. My sister Martha suggests she and I sign up for the TV reality show "Race Around the World" for the million dollar prize. Thanks but no thanks. When I go around the world by whatever means it eventually happens to be, I want to go more slowly and visit the sites of the type we are having to pass by on this marathon. Marc and I are traveling rather fast but he needs to get home before his work season begins and before he and his girlfriend Amy spend their life savings on cell telephone overage minutes. The following has so many odd coincidences you'll have trouble believing it all and will wonder what the heck it has to do with my Great Loop narrative anyway. (And nothing unusual happened today to tell you about, so you may as well hear a little Nelson family trivia).When writing of the family reunion I had to miss over the Fourth of July weekend, I mentioned my Grandfather "Daddy Bob". His real name was Robert Donald Nelson, so my father, my brother Bob, my son Robert Burkett and I all inherited at least a part of his name. In July of 1918, he was wounded in the First World War 2nd Battle of the Marne in France. Young German corporal Adolph Hitler (who was the same age as Daddy Bob) was gassed in the samebattle. Poet Joyce Kilmer (who wrote that he didn't think he would ever see anything as lovely as a tree) and President Theodore Roosevelt's son were killed in the battle. Future war heroes, but not yet famous Eddie Rickenbacker was in the air over and Douglas McArthur was on the ground of the same battlefield at the time. Daddy Bob was hit in the head with an aerial projectile of some sort. He was left on the field for dead along with many others from both sides of the conflict. He was finally picked up a few days later by the dead wagon driven by an acquaintance of his from his own hometown. He was sent to a battlefield hospital, later transferred to a Paris hospital, then to a U.S. hospital and finally sent home arriving in Decatur, Alabama on Armistice Day the day the war was declared over. The head injury was sizable and caused partial paralysis. I've seen pictures of the depressed area after it healed but before it was decided the resulting "hole in his head" might be fixable. (Some say Imight have also inherited that). A large marble could have been put in the resulting dip and he could have walked around without the marble falling out.The doctors considered making him a silver plate to replace the missing partof his skull but decided the amount of silver required would get so hot and/or cold due to the weather and would contract or swell so much that he would always have problems with it. Therefore, he was sent off to a northern hospital that was specializing in such war wounds where the doctors actually took portions of Daddy Bob's own ribs, crossed them and patched his skull with them. He got well, of course, as neither my father nor I would have come into being if he hadn't made it.So what's the big coincidence? When I called home tonight to tell my parents we had just dropped anchor at a tiny little village on the ocean at the very southern tip of New Jersey, after finishing a 110 mile, 15 hour run up the rest of the Chesapeake Bay, including a 14 mile cut through Delaware by way ofthe Chesapeake-Delaware Canal and the trip down the Delaware River to its mouth into the state of New Jersey, Daddy said, "Did you remember that today would have been Daddy Bob's 118th birthday and that it was at Cape May, New Jersey, where the surgeons put a part of his ribs in his head? "I had not remembered, but the tiny little village in which we happened to end our day is Cape May, New Jersey. And it is in fact July 6, the anniversary not only of Daddy Bob's birth but the day my family celebrates my Daddy's Daddy spending a birthday of his youth trying to survive on a battlefield in France rather than having to remain forever in a cemetery in France.