Today I drove down to Temple, Texas, from Wichita Falls to visit my father's grave.  He passed away last October from cancer.  Naturally, I miss him like crazy.

On the way home, as I was driving through Waco, I thought of Cindy Sheehan and decided to take a 20-minute detour to see if I could find her.  What I found was other people who had come to Crawford out of whatever loss or sympathy they were feeling.  From the Crawford Peace House, I caught a ride out to the protest site with a woman who had driven down from Maryland.  Riding along were a minister from the SCLC and a Vietnam vet from Waco.  At the site, the first person to approach me was a one-armed man in a Veterans For Peace T-shirt.  He asked why I had come.  I said I had just visited the grave of my Air Force vet father and felt that I needed to be there.  He offered his condolences.  A woman from Fort Worth asked me to sign a guest book and then pointed me toward Cindy.

Cindy had just finished an interview with a print journalist and was making her way to an interview with an area TV reporter.  I smiled at her, and she stopped.  I said, "Hi, my name is Tom, and I just wanted to say hello."  And then she hugged me.  And we stood there on the side of that narrow road in an embrace that lasted almost a minute.  I told her I was sorry for her loss.  She said that there was so much more good than bad in the world that the good just had to win, didn't it?  I said I sure hoped that was true.  No tears, no sobs.  Just two people missing two other people who were with us once but now were gone.

I caught a ride back to my car with a guy who had come down from Philadelphia.  I must have heard a half-dozen people say that they weren't sure why they were there; they just had to come.

The dozens of people I saw in my thirty-minute visit were sincere, thoughtful, even somber.  The President may not be listening to them, but for a little while on a hot farm road in central Texas, it seemed that just finding kindred spirits drawn to this isolated corner of the earth was an accomplishment.  There was a lot of good there.  And I hope Cindy is right about it being strong enough to overcome the bad.