Today would have been my father's 73rd birthday. I went down to the city for Church, and after teaching my high school sunday school class, went on to Arlington Cemetery, where he is buried together with his mother and father. Through a quirk of fate, Arlington is his family's graveyard. His father, my grandfather, died at age 48 when Arlington was just one of a number of government cemeteries and not yet our national shrine. My grandmother, left a widow with a son to support, found out that her husband's brief service at the end of the first world war qualified him for a funeral beyond what she could otherwise afford and provided a grave site only a few miles away from her home. Thirty two years later she was buried in the plot she had reserved next to him. At my father's death, his own time in military service allowed him to be buried together with his father. It is a beautiful spot with the finest company imaginable. I believe he would be pleased.