There’s something special about the month of June

The hummingbirds are buzzing, the bees are humming, and I could doze off in reverie any minute now. I can’t help but visualize June as when a young man finds himself strolling on a mossy path in a wooded glade, hands clasped in back, reflecting on something from Robert Burns, like “O, my love’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June…”

But wait, my phone just pinged, invading my reverie with a new superfluous something-or-other. Dangit and dagnabbit.

I would venture to guess that those love poems have nary a place in today’s high-tech world. Frankly, with what’s in vogue with today’s youth, I can’t imagine a hip-hopper getting all mushy and sentimental like that, and that’s not to say some rapper couldn’t look up a zillion words to go with June and Moon in their rhyming dictionary.

Besides all that mushy stuff, keep in mind that June is Iced Tea Month, Steak Month, Dairy Month, Country Cooking Month and Sorghum Month.

Most importantly, today, June 6, marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion to liberate Europe from the Germans who had been walking around France like they owned the place since 1940.

Those of us who are Baby Boomers have heard from our parents about what they went through in the first half of the 1940s, but that war seems to fascinate every age group, even the Z-Generation.

Anyway, I guess it’s no mystery how the youth of today know so much about Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship, what with the myriad movies and historical documentaries out there, but what’s hard for them to comprehend is the how and why that fascist maniac started it all.

I’m not aware of anyone in Socorro or Magdalena who played a part in D-Day, but I have learned of a few who went on to become famous. For instance, there’s civil rights activist Medgar Evers, baseball great Yogi Berra, and the actor who played Scotty in Star Trek, James Doohan, whose finger was shot off. Alec Guinness of Obi-wan Kenobi fame was there, as well as writer J.D. Salinger, who was carrying the first six chapters of Catcher in the Rye in his knapsack when he hit Utah Beach.

In my own way of remembering, June 6 finds me putting in the DVD of the 1962 movie The Longest Day, the epic retelling of the first day of the Normandy invasion. I know, I know, it’s in black and white, but don’t let that deter you. The Americans, the English, the Canadians, the French Underground, and German defenders are all represented, giving a pretty good overview of the entire day from different perspectives, and in just under three hours it moves along briskly.

As a lover of black-and-white movies and since one thing leads to another, I watched an old Shirley Temple movie the other day. It was called Miss Annie Rooney, about a teenage girl who falls for a rich boy, whose parents don’t approve of her. But things work out and there is dancing and a happy ending.

Not an overall memorable film, but the one thing that struck me was when she used the word “groovy.” Now, this was made in 1942, but here I am, thinking groovy was a word coined in the sixties, not aware it was being used 20 years before Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders sang Groovy Kind of Love.

From what I can discern, groovy was a reference to the grooves in the “hep to the jive” records from the likes of Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, which got all the teenagers acting crazy with jitterbugging and lindy-hopping.

Wait, before you ask, this was way before I was born, but I learned it from watching the likes of Miss Annie Rooney and any one of those Andy Hardy movies you can find streaming someplace or another nowadays. That was the era of “it” girls, hoochie-coochers and jive cats in zoot suits goin’ hi-de-ho.

Before the Millennials and Gen-Zs among us start snickering about the customs of the 1930s, they should wait and hear what their grandkids will say about backward baseball caps, hoodies, and 24/7 PJs. Still and all, if someone from those olden days was plopped down into the 2020s of today, they’d have completely different interpretations for words like RAM, software, motherboard, tweeting, or Bluetooth.

But I digress.

Of all the ceremonies observing D-Day, the big one today is in France, where thousands descend on Normandy to pay homage to the soldiers, sailors and airmen who took part in Operation Overlord and the Battle of Normandy; in Gen. Eisenhower’s words, “…to bring about the destruction of the German war machine, elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”