God, country and the fourth of July - Susan Kaiser Greenland

I cannot tell you how much my father WAS NOT interested in mindfulness practice. He always wanted me to be a lawyer and that I became, only to switch careers in my late forties to become a children’s mindfulness teacher.

Nor was Dad into introspection or talking with us about our feelings. My dad was a doer and he showed us what was important to him through deeds not words. He was a master at those nonverbal priority messages that I’ve written about before, the most Norman Rockwellesque of which happened every year on the Fourth of July.

God & Country is a boy scout award that was very important to my dad. When my older brother was a boy scout, not too many kids worked toward that award; but my father made sure that Bill did and that he achieved it. Twenty-eight years later he did the same for my nephew Jake and about thirty-two years later for my nephew Nick. It was one of the many things they accomplished that made Dad proud. I am sorry we didn’t live closer because I know he would have liked to have done the same for my son Gabe.

It made sense that the boy scout’s God & Country award was so important to Dad, since God and Country were two of the three principles he lived by. The third was family. God, Country and Family. Those three words sum up everything that was important to him.

Dad was able to roll all three into one massive celebration on the Fourth of July. About 50 years ago he was extremely frustrated with the Village of Paw Paw (the small town in Michigan where we lived) because they never organized a 4th of July parade. There were a lot of village parades when I was growing up. Dad marched in every one of them, and my brother, sister and I marched in them too. My sister Catey, brother Bill and I were all in the band, Bill and Catey in the scouts, and Dad in the Legion color guard. The only parades all four of us did not march in were the homecoming parades, since Catey was usually riding in a float as one of the queens! But whether riding or marching, we all participated.

With all of these other parades going on why was the lack of one on the Fourth of July so important to him? Because it was the largest and most public way he could honor a country that had given him and his family so much. When Dad learned there was no parade in Paw Paw, he decided to take matters into his own hands and organize one himself. The first was around our house on Kalamazoo Street. It was small, just us, our cousins and the neighbors. We waved flags, decorated our bikes with red, white and blue streamers, and after the parade ate Eskimo pies, drank Cokes in glass bottles, and waved sparklers once it got dark. We all remember the penny toss, where Dad took rolls of pennies, threw them in the air, with us scrambling around on the ground, laughing and picking them up.

Gradually, Dad’s parades got bigger. Soon they were around the block, then through the neighborhood, until finally, one year, Dad took out a parade permit and organized a big old-fashioned parade up and down main street. That parade had pretty much everything - a marching band, a clown, and a convertible where my mom rode in the back with the top down, waving like Queen Elizabeth. None of us will ever forget that day.

While I’m pretty sure he didn’t think of it this way, it was through things like those parades that Dad taught us what was important to him. His actions taught us the principles by which he lived his life. There weren’t that many and they were pretty simple: Trust yourself and follow your intuition. If something is wrong, don’t belly ache about it, just fix it, through hard work & discipline, with the support of family & friends, and with faith that there’s something greater than you out there.

He believed that we are all put on this earth for a purpose, and not for one moment did he question what it was.

Dad didn’t have any patience for sitting around and talking about what was wrong in the world. Given the era in which he was raised, he didn’t have any interest in exploring his or anyone else’s feeling about injustice either. Nor did he care much about why things were the way they were. For better or worse, Dad was not a talker, he was a doer, and by his example we learned how to get things done. He made it look simple; but never for one moment did anyone who knew Dad think that it was easy.