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 Napoléon. 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.
