Musings & Thoughts for Tuesday, June 6, 2023, or: Action This Day…& D-Day Plus 79 Years

Hi, there. It’s late morning here in Lithia, Florida, on Tuesday, June 6, 2023. It’s a cool (71°F/22°C) but rapidly warming morning in the Tampa Bay area, and the forecast for the rest of the day calls for sunny skies and a high of 90°F/32°C) – a reminder that yes, meteorological summer began less than a week ago, and it’s going to be a hot, mean, stormy season.

I don’t know how I am going to function today. For the second day in a row, I woke up a little while after 4 AM, well before sunrise (according to my Weather app, which was at 6:32 AM EDT). As usual, the reason I woke up so damn early was the need to use the bathroom – I hate being roused by the sensation of a full bladder in the predawn hours…but I hate the consequences of not answering nature’s call even more. So, grudgingly, and blearily, I went to the “throne room,” did my business, washed my hands – that probably didn’t help matters much, but it’s necessary – then made my way to my room to try and go back to sleep.

Unfortunately, I was not able to fall asleep again, so I’ve been awake and at my desk since well before 5 AM. And, of course, now I’m tired, foggy-brained, and trying to figure out how to get the following things on my agenda accomplished:

• Reply to the email from the Permissions and Licenses department at Concord Music and let the folks there know that I will not be using the lyrics from “Somewhere” after all
• Work on the manuscript. I have not finished revising some of the earlier chapters in Reunion: Coda, nor have I completed Chapter Nine. (I’ve written three scenes but based on what I know from my novella Reunion, I know I have at least one more scene to write before I can say the chapter is finished.) I think that I should tackle the revisions first, so as soon as I feel a bit more awake, I will do that

D-Day Plus 79 Years

It’s hard to believe that today, June 6, 2023, is the 79^th Anniversary of the Allied landings on the northern coast of France – code named Operation Overlord, with other code names assigned to specific elements of the invasion, such as Operation Neptune for the naval phase, Operation Boston for one of the American airborne drops on the Cotentin Peninsula, etc. By a quirk of the calendar, this year the anniversary falls not only on the date, but also on the day of the week on which the landings on Normandy took place in 1944: Tuesday, June 6.

I have been a military history buff since I was six years old, and the story of D-Day and the 77-day campaign in Normandy is the one that caught my attention back in 1969. There’s something powerful and majestic about the Allied effort to liberate Western Europe from Nazi tyranny, especially because most of the American, British, Canadian, and other Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen who were there on that day in 1944 were not career soldiers but rather citizen soldiers doing their duty in one of history’s darkest periods. Many of them were draftees fresh out of high school who had never seen combat or fired a shot in anger. They didn’t seek glory, medals, or believe that they were on a “great crusade.” They just wanted to do their jobs, get the war finished as quickly as possible, then go back to their lives as best they could – in one piece, if possible.

In my “Miami life,” which to me seems so long ago that I swear dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, I used to have a tradition of watching either The Longest Day (1962) or Saving Private Ryan (1998) on June 6. I stopped doing that sometime after my mom became incapacitated in 2010 and despite a few attempts to revive the “tradition,” I don’t do it anymore.

Still, every June 6, no matter what my circumstances might be, I take some time out of my day to remember all the men and women – on the home front and on the battlefield – who made D-Day possible, especially those who never made it back home.