Headed to Georgia

One of the best things about Portland is the annual Waterfront Blues Festival, a multi-day bash on the Willamette River that also serves as the Oregon Food Bank's largest fundraiser of the year. It's always a great mix of music, food and weather, with ponytailed, tie-dyed hippies dancing deliriously alongside folks half their age on the grassy knoll south of the Hawthorne Bridge.

I was really looking forward to this year's line-up: Etta James, Robben Ford, Johnny Winter, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, and many more. (Turns out Keb' Mo' will fill in as headliner for Etta James, who's canceling because of illness.) Alas, I'm going to miss them all...but for the best of reasons.

We fly out Wednesday morning to see Jordan graduate from basic training at the Army's infantry school in Fort Benning, Georgia. Hard to say who's looking forward to it more: him, us or his girlfriend, Jamie (pictured above with our favorite lucha libre wrestler).

We haven't seen him since March 19. We've talked to him a few times, as his schedule has permitted, and visualized the transformation of an eager but innocent young recruit to a confident and capable young man. There were times when, hearing his voice, we sympathized for what he was going through. We could detect weariness and loneliness at times, but always a resoluteness to push through.

The last couple of times we spoke, it was a series of rattling coughs. He'd been diagnosed with pneumonia. Fortunately, the antibiotics kicked in and he sounded much better yesterday. He and his buddies were attending an alcohol-free Fourth of July picnic on the base -- some deserved down time from their daily routine in the Georgia heat. (He says as he steps out of the air-conditioned barracks at 5:45 each morning, the humidity smacks him in the face and he starts sweating. It was 102 degrees the other day.)

So...we fly into Atlanta and spend one night there. We rise early Thursday to drive to Columbus, about 2 hours away on the Alabama border, for some orientation activities on the base and then watch the graduation ceremony on Friday. Assuming Jordan is given a medical OK, he'll begin his leave and can join us in traveling back to Atlanta on Saturday before we all fly home on Sunday.

The one thing I want to do for sure off-base is visit the
Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. I've seen it once before, along with the Ebenezer Baptist Church, below, where Dr. King regularly preached, and it remains one of the most moving experiences of my life.

Seems entirely appropriate to begin the visit honoring Jordan and his fellow soldiers, who've committed to doing a job that entails great risk in the name of freedom, and end it by honoring Dr. King and thousands of ordinary heroes, who also took on great risk for the cause of civil rights.