I suspect Google's decision to celebrate Cesar Chavez's birthday (instead of noting Easter) is not going to sit well with certain factions of the population.
Edit 1: 7:25pm
Two of my in-laws complained about the doodle at dinner. Not surprised.
Edit 2: 9:12pm
The outrage has hit the series of tubes. A roundup of comments from twitter and other online media at Salon.
Edit 3: 10:00pm (Child Alien is having trouble sleeping. I'm hanging upstairs to run interference so J can get some work done. Thus, I have nothing better to do than troll a series of tubes, seeking out hurt feelings).
My paternal grandfather died last Saturday, March 23, 2013.
He was 92 years old. For the past several years of his life he had a slow
moving blood cancer, the kind that grinds you down but doesn’t kill you outright.
I don’t think the cancer was the cause of his death, but I am unsure.
He didn’t want a memorial service or funeral, so there will
not be one. He didn’t want an obituary, so none was published. He donated his
body to science, so his last act as a human is to be dissected by others. His
wife of 72 years, my grandmother, will follow the same path when she passes
away.
I am surprised at how I am affected by this. Not by his
passing or the choices he made on how he wanted his death handled. My grandfather
was religious enough to believe that death was not a reason for mourning; it
was the passage to the next part of a soul’s journey. When my dad, resorting to
a bit of dark humor, told me about the medical donation, he finished with the
comment “There wasn’t much left of him to donate”. I replied that [my
grandfather] would have enjoyed having the last laugh on the subject.
I mourn the opportunities I missed to know him better. Up
until high school I saw them every 1-2 years. My paternal grandmother (his
wife) was incredibly critical of my mother, to the point that she blamed my mother
for my father’s problems, which lead to a breach between the two of them that
lasted almost 20 years.
My grandfather tried to mediate between his wife and my
mother, but was unsuccessful. They became such a contentious subject that for
several years after the final fight between my grandmother and my mother, I did
not talk about them in my mother’s presence and I saw them only twice more
between high school and last Saturday.
So I missed out. I missed out on knowing sooner that my
grandfather was not the teetotaler of my childhood memories, but the type of
man who enjoyed a glass of champagne on a Sunday afternoon. I missed out on
knowing sooner that he had been stationed in France during World War II and
part of his work, as an Army Private, was to transport the officer’s liquor
rations from Paris to the camp. That he loved Paris. I will never know of his
love of champagne is connected to the time he spent in France.
I will never know many things about him now. And
that makes me sadder then anything.
