Random Thoughts

"Blue skies smiling at me, nothing but blue skies do I see. Blue days, all of them gone, nothing but blue skies from now on. " Irving Berlin I wasn't going to write about 9/11 today. Partly because between the "media" and the blogosphere I doubt there is anything else that can be said, and partly because even though I am a go-with-the-flow kind of person, I do have a stubborn streak in me (handed down on a silver platter by both my mother and father) that kind of likes to step on the brakes and turn in a completely different direction from the flow. For instance, if I were a salmon, I truly believe that as important it might be for me to join my other salmon school mates swimming upstream to salmon nirvana, I think it would be a whole lot easier to let the natural current take me to places my buddies might never see. But in her blog this morning my friend Amy said it would almost be disrespectful to write about anything else besides 9/11. I get that. And while ...

"Today, we gather to be reassured that God hears the lamenting and bitter weeping of Mother America because so many of her children are no more. Let us now seek that assurance in prayer for the healing of our grief stricken hearts, for the souls and sacred memory of those who have been lost. Let us also pray for divine wisdom as our leaders consider the necessary actions for national security, wisdom of the grace of God that as we act, we not become the evil we deplore.”* I was in Mrs. Carden's 6th grade classroom when the news that John Kennedy had been shot was announced over the loudspeaker. A collective gasp escaped the mouths of children too young, too naive to understand what had just happened. I tried to hide my tears on the bus ride home. Neighborhood boys made wise cracks and pointed fingers at nerds like me who cried for something they couldn't comprehend. I wept as the boys postured. I watched in horror as Walter Cronkite reported first Martin Luther King's ...