5 Things: Hearing Screening at the Beech, Pickett's Charge

1. The Beech Street Center's bi-monthly hearing screening is today from 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Receive a free hearing test and see if your hearing aid batteries needs to be replaced. Mass Audiology offers this service free of charge to our Center participants. Make your appointment this morning by calling 617-993-2970 or just stop by the front desk.

2. Drop-in Crafts for Children will be held from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. in the Assembly Room of the Belmont Public Library. The library provides the supplies, you'll have all the fun!

3. Fees for the coming school year may now be made online.  For fee due dates and payment instructions, go to:www.belmont.k12.ma.us and select “View Fees and Pay”. If you are unable to locate a student ID number, please send an e-mail to: feeforms@belmont.k12.ma.us. OnLine Payment is open for following programs:
• Elementary School Instrumental Music Program: due date October 15th
• Saturday Morning Music School: due date October 15th
• All-Town Chorus: due date October 15th
• BHS Fine and Performing Arts: due date August 15/November 15
• BHS Athletics (Fall Sport): due date August 15
• BHS Activities: due date October 1
• Chenery Club Activities/Fine Arts/Athletics: due date October 1
• Bus Transportation: due date August 1/Feb. 1
• Full Day Kindergarten Tuition: due date varies.

4. Get free tickets/passes to area museums and cultural sites from the Belmont Public Library today; don't wait and be shut out over the long holiday weekend.

5. One-hundred and fifty years ago today, after a two-hour cannon battle, 13,000 Confederate troops under the command of Virginian George Pickett exited the woods outside of Gettysburg at 3 p.m. ready to march a mile-and-a-half in 87 degree heat and humidity into the heart of the Union center on the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Pickett's Charge has gone down in history as both a military failure – the Confederates lost more than half of its soldiers – and a cultural touchstone for Americans especially those from the South; of gallantry, sacrifice and belief in a hopeless principle, a Lost Cause. If you are from the South or have lived there for sometime, the passage by William Faulkner rings true:

"For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863 ... we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago." 

Growing up in Tampa, Fla., I can remember the old man who ran what would now be called a convenance store but was the "Market" putting out Confederate bunting on July 3 and recall the tales of his father standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his cousins on that hot day more than a hundred years before and not wondering "what if," but of the courage it took to take part in the "great charge" so long, long ago.