I’m not at all sure I’ll stick with the plan... er...er... not a plan exactly... yet... I’ll call it an idea I got while walking in the cold, windy Washington afternoon.  The sky is gray, gloomy, overcast and feels like the end of something.  It’s winter, after all, and that’s the way winter is supposed to be.  It’s just that where I live in San Diego, winter doesn’t feel like an ending.  

I stopped to take pictures of brilliant seed pods dangling from bare branches, and it occurred to me that the end of one season is always the beginning of another.  These shiny pods hold the seeds that will soon break open and scatter in the winter wind to begin new life next spring when the earth warms again in this part of the northern hemisphere.  Life is good.

Oh, about that idea which could perhaps become a plan... I almost got sidetracked in my thinking and writing, which happens often now that I’m well into what’s called “the senior years.”  I got word from my friend Cliff Dunn, a classmate who still lives in the town where we grew up, Wayne Sue, another member of our graduating class of 1953, Live Oak High School, had “passed away.”  Euphemisms like “senior years” and “passed away” are especially useful in the communications between people “of a certain age,” another handy euphemistic phrase when talking about old people. The plan, if it develops, will be to journal a series of BLOG writings around the general title of “Growing Old Responsibly.”  

Senator Daniel Inouye, President Pro Tempore of the United States Senate, died this week.  In many ways he has been a role model for all of us. He was born on December 17, 1924, eleven years before I was born.  I was still too young to be drafted in World War II, but young Dan Inouye enlisted in the U.S. Army as soon as it lifted the enlistment ban on Japanese Americans.  He stepped out of his premedical studies at the University of Hawaii to become part of the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the army unit was mostly made up of second-generation Japanese Americans from Hawaii and the mainland. He was promoted through the ranks to sergeant and then second lieutenant.  He was awarded the Metal of Honor for action so heroic that it seems more the stuff of fiction than factual reality.  I won’t recount here all that happened to him that led to the Metal of Honor award.  After serving valiantly in other battles in Italy, he and his platoon were working their way along a heavily fortified ridge in Tuscany when he was shot in the stomach.  Ignoring the grievous wound he moved to attack a German machine gun nest.  He rallied enough to crawl still forward toward the enemy and was shot in the arm.  There is much more to this story than I am telling here; but you can read elsewhere about how, with one arm blown almost off at the elbow, he shot and destroyed the machine gun nest with his gun in his other hand before he collapsed unconscious.   His arm was amputated at a field hospital.  

Daniel Inouye could have gone back to civilian life to move as a war hero through what was left of his youth into middle age and on to old age.  He could have been cowed by the awareness that heroism by “people of color,”  especially by someone from a territory not yet a state didn’t get as much attention as heroic action by a “white” soldier from the U.S. mainland.  But he didn’t hold back and hide himself in dependency on others.  The rest is history:  He served in the Hawaiian Territorial House and Senate,  was the first Hawaiian to serve in the United States House of Representatives after Hawaii became a state, and then finally was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1962 where he served until his death this week.  He was awarded the Medal of honor by President Clinton in 2000.  As President Pro Tempore of the senate he was third in the presidential line of succession after the Vice President and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  He was a Democrat.  His best friend in the Senate was Republican Senator Bob Dole, another genuine hero from World War II.  These two heroes demonstrated that bipartisanship is still possible in American politics.  

Closer to home my neighbor and friend Jim Fudge, a distinguished navy veteran of World War II who participated in the Normandy Invasion, is another role model and mentor for me.  Remembering J.D. Salinger’s Esme wishing Seymore could come back from the war with “all faculties intact,” I report what all his friends and family know about Jim, that he came back from the war whole.  He is alive and well and a perfect example of how one can grow old responsibly.