memorial day weekend part i: american legion

It was a busy Memorial Day weekend.

On Saturday it was the reopening of American Legion Hall 18 in Weehawken, NJ. We'd first gotten involved with the Hall several months ago. Apparently the Hall had fallen into disrepair over years of neglect. They needed volunteers to help get it ready for reopening. The Newark Platoon of The Mission Continues helped round up volunteers to get it cleaned up and painted. We made a Stack Up event out of helping.

Since then, we've stayed in touch. We had planned one event with them for the month of the military child. That fell through because they had other commitments, but we are still working with Lucy Del Gaudio, the Vice Commander of the Hall, to have an event there this summer.

At any rate, the grand reopening was an emotional day for many of the area vets, with speeches by local politicians. To our surprise and delight they honored us, calling us up to receive a certificate of appreciation for the work we did for them.

Getting called up was quite the surprise. When we were invited to this event we were told that they were planning something nice. But we had no idea. It's funny how volunteering with one group brought us to another and then another. It's truly an example of the Hebrew expression:

בדרך שהולך מוליכין אותוץ

And it makes me really proud of Ethan, since all of our involvement -- with Stack-Up, with The Mission Continues, with the American Legion Hall -- is due to him.

where the mission continues

One of the results of the family's involvement with Stack-Up has been that we've met people from other military-based charities.

  Notable among these is The Mission Continues. As near as I understand it, TMC (I don't know if that's an acceptable initialism, but WTH) is for people who, having left the military still want to serve their communities. As such, they organize members to participate in various volunteer projects. One of the things I really like about the way they do this is that they don't seem to feel the need to reinvent the wheel. By that I mean, they don't organize the volunteer opportunities. Rather, they find volunteer opportunities organized by other groups, and direct their members to those activities. By our experience, they've been great curators. To be sure, TMC also has "fun" get-togethers. In fact, one of them was a gaming time at a Dave & Buster's in New Jersey, and we got Stack-UP to partner with them on that. But I'm nervouse about doing a lot of what I call the perq activities, since I don;t want them to think of my family as a bunch of schnoorers who only show up when there's free food to be had.

At this point we (meaning some nonempty subset of my family -- it hasn't always been the same nonempty subset) have done activities four of the local platoons (what TMC calls its chapters).

Yesterday, for example, we were in Newark planting trees in a project sponsored by the New Jersey Tree Foundation. As with many activities, our participation wasn't an "official" Stack-Up activity. But that didn't stop us from wearing our Stack-Up shirts (we can't wait for the new logo shirts to become available), and talking up that organization. Interestingly, we found that a lot of the residents of the neighborhood have military connections.

The day before yesterday, while I was at work, Ethan was in the Bronx helping to prep a wall of a schoolyard for a mural that was to be painted. A couple weeks ago he spent his Saturday in Brownsville, Brooklyn helping to paint a basketball court. And in the past we've worked cleaning up parks in Manhattan, and renovating a boxing gym for inner city Newark kids, and painting an American Legion post in preparation for its reopening.

I'm actually not sure if we're officially members of TMC or any of its local chapters. But that doesn't really matter. We're enjoying the chance to help the community, and support veterans who literally signed up to die for our freedom if necessary.