{"id":573887944,"date":"2015-04-28T23:26:53","date_gmt":"2015-04-29T04:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573887944"},"modified":"2015-05-05T01:45:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T06:45:03","slug":"the-little-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2015\/04\/28\/the-little-things\/","title":{"rendered":"The little things"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Nice job <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/samford_sports\">@samford_sports<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/SamfordTrack\">@SamfordTrack<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/SamfordWTennis\">@SamfordWTennis<\/a>, letting everyone know about SoCon champs. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MartinNewton1\">@MartinNewton1<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/KoVVv6KKmd\">pic.twitter.com\/KoVVv6KKmd<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; kenny smith (@kennysmith) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/kennysmith\/status\/593094258439135233\">April 28, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ll be getting his second conference championship ring. One of his teammates is our sports editor this spring and he&#8217;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&#8217;s success. <\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p><strong>You might have heard<\/strong> of the weekend storm in the Gulf. One sailor died in the squall, and the search is on for others still missing. <a TARGET=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.al.com\/news\/mobile\/index.ssf\/2015\/04\/drowned_sailors_desperate_fina.html#incart_most-read_entertainment_article\">Sad story<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve now sailed thousands and thousands of miles and I&#8217;ve never seen a situation come up so fast,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>And yet it was on land that Creekmore got the most terrible news.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s a wonderful, very brilliant, very bright young man,&#8221; Creekmore said of Beall, who owned Kris Beall Construction in Alexandria, La., and was from nearby Pineville.<\/p>\n<p>Creekmore described Beall as &#8220;very passionate about sailing.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You don&#8217;t have to go terribly far back in time to see the city in an entirely different, cloudy light.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/45-mokULbX0?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t say that. <\/p>\n<p>This gentleman is believed to be the last surviving member of <a TARGET=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.al.com\/news\/birmingham\/index.ssf\/2015\/04\/alabamas_last_living_merrills.html#incart_recommended?hootPostID=1aa70ad7dc580a385423d2d8ca320800\">Merrill&#8217;s Marauders in Alabama<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;My biggest concern and the gravest concern of all of us was &#8212; we were surrounded there &#8212; can they keep us with enough ammunition?&#8221; the 94-year-old Kinney, who grew up in Cullman County and now lives in Calera, said about the battle.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We had been sitting there for 13 days and the Japanese had us surrounded. We had no food and no water for five days,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t their last.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When we were disbanded, there was less than 200 that were still fighting,&#8221; said Kinney.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Nothing little about that. <\/p>\n<p>I tell students that obituaries aren&#8217;t about the way people died, but about how they lived. And, occasionally, that makes for a story worth telling grandly. Here&#8217;s the story of a woman who was abandoned at a train depot as a baby, <a TARGET=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.macon.com\/2015\/03\/14\/3639694_woman-abandoned-as-baby-in-macon.html\">who then lived for a century<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Ione\u2019s 65-year-old daughter, Margaret Pacifici, a nurse, said, \u201cShe wanted perfection.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Son Joe, 68, an organic chemist, said, \u201cIf you had done your best and it was not good enough, mother would tell you to do better.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Joseph, her husband, died in 1984. After that, Ione traveled. She read. She drove a Buick until she was 92.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>The little details make the big picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,25,7,8,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573887944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-links","category-samford","category-tuesday","category-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573887944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573887944"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573887944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573887946,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573887944\/revisions\/573887946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573887944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573887944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573887944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}