You wonder what things people take from their young adult years, what stories they carry into their hopefully long and prosperous lives. Someone will tell a few of these stories for a good long while, for sure. These celebrations are in the cafeteria:
Nice job @samford_sports, @SamfordTrack, @SamfordWTennis, letting everyone know about SoCon champs. @MartinNewton1 pic.twitter.com/KoVVv6KKmd
— kenny smith (@kennysmith) April 28, 2015
Pretty cool, huh? One of the tennis players has been in two of my classes. One of the track athletes has been in my class and he’ll be getting his second conference championship ring. One of his teammates is our sports editor this spring and he’s getting his first ring, as a freshman. All of that is nice, but I just thought it was a nice touch how the folks in the athletic department took steps to point out their team’s success.
Paper tonight, and a run today and a lot of time in the office working on class things. Sometimes it feels as if the grading will never stop.
You might have heard of the weekend storm in the Gulf. One sailor died in the squall, and the search is on for others still missing. Sad story:
“I’ve now sailed thousands and thousands of miles and I’ve never seen a situation come up so fast,” he said.
And yet it was on land that Creekmore got the most terrible news.
“He’s a wonderful, very brilliant, very bright young man,” Creekmore said of Beall, who owned Kris Beall Construction in Alexandria, La., and was from nearby Pineville.
Creekmore described Beall as “very passionate about sailing.”
I was downtown tonight, for pizza, and so this was a good night to also see this story, which has probably never happened here before:
As cities around the country look for ways to go green, a recent report shows Birmingham to be leading the way in terms of air quality.
Ozone and fine particulate concentrations in the Birmingham area are at their lowest-ever recorded levels, according to the Jefferson County Department of Public Health.
You don’t have to go terribly far back in time to see the city in an entirely different, cloudy light.
The air has been getting progressively better over the years. You can even see the skyline for miles. I remember days as a kid when you couldn’t say that.
This gentleman is believed to be the last surviving member of Merrill’s Marauders in Alabama:
“My biggest concern and the gravest concern of all of us was — we were surrounded there — can they keep us with enough ammunition?” the 94-year-old Kinney, who grew up in Cullman County and now lives in Calera, said about the battle.
“We had been sitting there for 13 days and the Japanese had us surrounded. We had no food and no water for five days,” he said.
Kinney, who had suffered two hits from shrapnel and a bullet across his helmet during the fighting, recalled the Nhpum Ga battle came to a halt on Easter Sunday morning in 1944 with a victory over Japanese soldiers. It was the latest of several hard-fought battles for the Marauders, named after their commander, Gen. Frank D. Merrill, but it wasn’t their last.
“When we were disbanded, there was less than 200 that were still fighting,” said Kinney.
Nothing little about that.
I tell students that obituaries aren’t about the way people died, but about how they lived. And, occasionally, that makes for a story worth telling grandly. Here’s the story of a woman who was abandoned at a train depot as a baby, who then lived for a century:
Ione’s 65-year-old daughter, Margaret Pacifici, a nurse, said, “She wanted perfection.”
Son Joe, 68, an organic chemist, said, “If you had done your best and it was not good enough, mother would tell you to do better.”
Joseph, her husband, died in 1984. After that, Ione traveled. She read. She drove a Buick until she was 92.
She drove a Buick. Whoever writes mine, a long, long time from now, I hope they remember to get in a lot of small details like that. In any kind of stories, I think, those small details are the one that make the imagery sing.
The little details make the big picture.
