It was an emotional day yesterday, filled with ceremonies at Arlington Cemetery, the Pentagon and Ground Zero. I did not attempt to get to either the five-sided Adult Care facility, nor to the cemetery as I do most anniversaries of that awful day.

Instead, there was a birthday and wine-tasting out at the Bull Run Winery on the site of the battlefield at First Manassas. It was a delightful time, and I had a chance to interact with Macho, a dark gelding who is ridden in the guise of a war pony form the 4th Virginia Cavalry, unless his services are needed to bolster the ranks of the Blue Jackets to make the re-enactments more realistic. The 4th Virginia will be doing their next outing in October at the site of the Cedar Creek fight in the Shenandoah Valley.

Then back to Arlington for the formal and festive final closing of the pool for the season, and the usual high-kinks and merriment. And the regret that the summer fled so fast and we are on to the next big thing.

In the process of cleaning out the accumulated messages that piled up while I was gone for grape or hurling myself into the blue water, I saw that my cousin has been posting a number of documents about our common ancestors. In the process of trying to locate copies of the Civil War service records I had acquired fro the National Archives, I ran across an account of a visit to the battlefield at Raymond, Mississippi, where at least one of them fought, and possibly both.

I am attaching it as a supplement to The Daily, and it will be the core of a longer work called “Love and War: An Irish Love Story During the Insurrection in the West.”

Try it out. When you think of the lives they lived in a younger America, it is more than a little humbling. And on the day after the one we should never forget, strikingly appropriate.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com