Who is your touchstone, fellow blogmates? The bravest man I personally know is 82. He just got out of the hospital on the 4th of July. He set his goal and he made it home. I have loved him for 33 years.  It is an unusual relationship, he is more than a dad, really. Wherever he happens to be, that is where I always feel fully at home. It's a long story, but he's my family. I don't know the world without him.

He was a medic in World War II, and then went on to serve in medicine for five decades. He's a painter, an athlete, a musician -- and a total trip to be around.  These days, I change his urostomy bag sometimes. He calls it a treat. I put clean sheets on his bed, he calls it a bit of heaven. Over the years, he's taught me more by example than by precept. Whatever lessons people seem to gather from his life, they somehow realize that he came by them honestly. He's got so much try in him. (Man, what's my excuse?)

At times like this, I think we need to be intensely competent, and deeply tender toward each other. We need to never give up on ourselves, or on each other.  It is an ongoing process, experienced profoundly at times of adversity,  I suppose, a process of becoming fully ourselves.  At times like this, we re-define what it is to be -- and to become -- a complete human being.  For each American generation to whom the baton of individual freedom has been passed, with luck, with the help of providence, with gifted human strategies for coordinated adaptation, life again backs our act.

Americans who have gone before us, that great cloud of witnesses like my favorite 82 year old, fought hard to live, and to be home to celebrate Independence Days.  They say to us, again and now: Help where you can, receive help when you must. Be that as it may, on whatever terms we may be given to live, they whisper silently: Live, my loves.

Let us pause to think about our touchstones today, and to remember the big try they planted way down deep.