I can give heart attacks as well as I can take them

I have been interested to see the likely outlines of the new 8th Congressional District boundaries. They look good to me and I am familiar with all the counties having run for Congress four times before and organizing the first campaign of a female major-party-candidate back in 1982. Marnie Luce. What a doll!

So, after returning from the hospital Tuesday my grandson’s visited us and stayed with us last night. At my wife’s suggestion we engaged in a game of quadruple solitaire. I pulled out a couple of card decks I hadn’t used since buying them at the military museum in Paris adjacent to the Tomb of NapolĂ©on. Two were cards with propaganda posters from the First and Second world wars and another of wartime photographs of the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. After the boys left I looked at the Churchill pics and compared myself with him at this time of life when he was a remarkably elderly war time leader.

My current political plans are a lot more modest than leading a nation fighting off a Hitler blitzkrieg. But with my unexpected heart problems suddenly revealed and instantly abated I noticed our ages were quite close. Winston turned 70 days after he was defeated in an election after all but winning the war against Nazi Germany. This was a shock at the time to Americans. That can happen in a Parliamentary system. And, by the way, he led a united war time government with all the political parties working as one. When he the war began four years earlier he was only a year younger than I was when I visited my Grandfather’s battlefields four years ago in France on the hundredth anniversary of my grandfather’s wounding for which he was subsequently awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I’m a year older now than Winston was when he was defeated. Note: He was re-elected Prime Minister a few years later.

That’s a history I’d like to emulate.

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