This satirical essay was recently published in The Morning News, and it begins like this:

I've always written high-quality sentences, prepared with the finest grammatical ingredients. In the coming year, I'm raising the bar even higher: I'll be offering only artisanal words, locally grown, hand-picked, minimally processed, organically prepared, and sustainably packaged.

The piece has an interesting origin. After reading some foodie news about artisanal this or that, I posted a Facebook status update announcing that I was only going to be writing artisanal words. A lot of friends responded to the note, and as I plotted new comments to add to the thread, I realized there was something there. As crowdsourced ventures go, it was small -- but fast and delightful, which I really liked. When the essay came out, I posted it on Facebook again, where people spread it around. Ten years ago things you wrote would disappear into some chasm.

Now you can see them wend their way around the web, climb the media food chain, get into people's heads. I like this new environment a lot.

Saturday March 27th was the 40th anniversary of my father's return from the Viet Nam War. Two images which are now family lore, because when he shares stories about his return, he always tells them.

My grandfather was in charge of informing my mother of when Dad's commercial flight was due in to Detroit, but he didn't give her enough time, given that she had two little kids to get ready, plus getting herself dolled up. So when Dad gets off the plane, his parents and siblings are there to greet him, but not his wife. Then he sees a bustle down the concourse. At first he only sees a woman, running, pushing a wheeled thing. Then it resolves: it's his wife pushing a baby stroller, and strapped into the baby stroller is my sister, and sitting on the tray is me. And both of the children's faces are pushed back by the tremendous g-forces of the approach. When my father tells the story, it's obligatory for him to stretch his face back.

The other image is a counterpoint to the joyous return to the family's arms. Once he was released from the processing center in Seattle, he was told he couldn't get civilian clothes but had to fly in uniform, from Seattle to Minneapolis. The passenger assigned to the seat next to him told the stewardess that she couldn't sit next to him, so the stewardess moved her. At first I didn't realize what was going on, my father said. He'd been gone for more than a year, had no idea what the political climate was. Another passenger came by, saw the military guy, asked to be moved too. So the stewardess said to my father, come with me, and she put him in first class. That's when it dawned on him how polarizing things had become.

There's a lot to say about this time in all of our lives, but on the 40th anniversary of his return, I'll just say, we're fortunate, I'm fortunate, that he came back alive and physically whole. Many families aren't so lucky. As of this writing, 4386 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq; 1031 have been killed in Afghanistan. Many thousands more have experienced serious physical and psychological injuries. These wars and the Viet Nam War are different, and how the military works, and where it gets its soldiers, differ between then and now. But the impact of soldiering is woven into families and endures for generations. We just celebrated 40 years of my dad's return, and 40 years of its impact on all of us.