'Heaven is in your mind'

By Ed Piper

I was thinking Civil War and all the romantic things that that conjures for me the last couple of days. The Civil War, as I was telling my good friend Art Miley--who encouraged me to start my blog on La Jolla High sports (thepipeline35.blogspot.com) years ago--is long before my time, and it wasn't mechanized and "modern" to the extent that the World Wars were.

But also, for some reason, the humanness of the Civil War clicked with me those short moments when Dianna and I were on a walk in Nashville years ago, and I read the words of a historical marker next to a stone wall (no play on words here): "Behind this wall Union soldiers fought to repel Confederates", or something like that.

It was concerning, of course, the Battle of Nashville. I think that followed the Battle of Franklin, though I could be wrong, because on our visit at that time to Dianna's cousin's, Cara, we also traveled the short distance south to the city of Franklin and had pizza and talked with Jenny and Patrick. (Jenny is Cara's sister.) (I need to check the war chronology for accuracy.)

Franklin had a marker concerning the Civil War battle fought there.

"Heaven is in your mind", this entry's title, refers to the Three Dog Night song in which this sentence is sung. I thought of it in reference to my enjoyment of Civil War things. I don't have much knowledge or understanding of military strategy, as I told Art yesterday. I focus more on the personalities of the leaders, and the human experience of literally battling through the war, of being on the home front, or wherever the human struggle was going on during that long-ago time.

An image that really appealed to me this week was the one of President Abraham Lincoln, who was a great man, in my view, meeting with General Ulysses Grant, who I also think was a great man, though that is not universally shared, on the River Queen, a steamboat. These meetings would take place at City Point, Virginia, a spot Dianna and I visited in 2010. The area is now incorporated in the city of Hopewell. We walked up to the building that was on the site, a grass lawn around it. Just beyond is the neck in the river that Lincoln would travel up to meet Grant, I suppose the James River.

There is a painting, and you can see the image online, of one man's conception of Lincoln and Grant conferring. Maybe I can capture the image to print out some time.

Babs Miley, Art's wife, a student of history, though that doesn't do her justice, recalled the quote attributed to Lincoln when someone wrote the general off as a drunk. "Whatever he's drinking, I want to send him more of," Lincoln supposedly said. Or "Whatever he's drinking, I wish all my generals were drinking."