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In 2006 I had the privilege of celebrating Memorial Day at the place where it all started, Gettysburg, Pa.
I put together a flash video of that day — a slideshow with audio — and would like to share it with you now. It was a great day, and a touching ceremony with the opportunity to see some of the most important places in our nation’s history.
Since it autoplays I’ll just link to it here. Please turn on the speakers and share 2:20 of your time with me.
We went for a ride yesterday. Well, I went for a ride. The Yankee is in training and so she did something called a brick. This involves swimming and riding and I’ve no idea at all how bricks have entered into this.
So she swam in the neighborhood pool. The Olympic pool was closed, on account of their being no Olympians there that day. (There usually are. We live in a place where she gets to be drowned in the wake of people showing off Olympic ring tattoos. Not a bad perk to the locale.)
We counted out the laps, measuring and doing math. The neighborhood pool is small; she did a lot of laps. And then she hopped on her bike and I hopped on mine and I chased her through the countryside.
She was moving on well. I had great legs, owing to taking a day or two off, perhaps. But I was also going on the longest ride I’ve been on in a while, so I wanted to pace myself.
I caught her on a hill after about eight miles. I’m a little bit stronger on hills and this was a series of three respectable climbs. She caught me again later, I let her play out in front and then chased her down just before home. She took the direct route and I meandered through the neighborhood. It was a 20.75 mile ride. Felt great.
I’d intended to take a few wide pictures to celebrate the day, but there was too much huffing.
Did take this somewhere along the way though:
Pretty as a roadside wildflower can be, it was the three buds on this one that intrigued me.
And now for something beautiful:
That is the Lyrid meteor shower, from space. Did you catch Florida as it moved by?
Astronaut Don Pettit on the ISS took the shots last month and they were converted into the inspiring quasi-video. The Lyrid meteors, dust trails from the comet Thatcher, have been observed from Earth for thousands of years. I learned all of this from a Huntsville reporter.
Finally: the grading is done. Now on to other things.
And now, a story from Saturday.
As mentioned here previously we met a very nice guy at his barbecue joint for lunch. The owner, who was busy cooking in the back, came out to talk to everyone to check on our meals. Somehow we got on the subject of being from out of town. These folks are from Birmingham. He’s from Savannah. We’re from Auburn. There’s a wedding, and so on.
Somehow we got on the subject of The Yankee being from Connecticut.
I think he even called her a Yankee.
He then reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a .45. She jumped. We laughed. It was a great joke.
She was genuinely afraid, but he was just making a joke, of course. She tried to hide behind me. Someone pointed out she’d need to get more cover than that.
Sometime later he went back out to his truck and brought back his AR-15.
Not to worry. He cleared it. Someone else at the table cleared it. I cleared it. And then we gave it to her.
Several years ago someone let her hold a 9 mm and she felt nauseated. Two years ago she shot her first gun, a .22 rifle. Look at her now. (You should see the picture where she shows off her war face.)
The best part: Talking about it later she was recounting how truly scared she was when Big Will pulled out his pistol. The rest of us, all four from the South, agreed that there was nothing to this at all. He was, of course, wearing overalls.
But, yes, he was a very nice guy, with plenty of ammunition.
I don’t often have the Mondays. I have a secret and proprietary strategy for warding them off and it works.
Mostly.
But today was one of the Mondays that people complain about. The dragon coaster, and the craftmanship involved in it were one of the better parts of the day. Soon after this I found myself behind two wrecks.
On the other hand, had I not allowed myself the opportunity to be passed by this truck and his tools of the fairground, I would have been much closer to those wrecks.
So there’s that.
Last week of classes, so there’s that, too.
Also, this didn’t happen:
Maybe today wasn’t such a bad Monday after all.
Last field trip of the semester today. I took my class to meet the nice people at Hoffman Media, who runs an always-growing office not too far from campus. They just bought a new magazine last week, Louisiana Cooking. I believe that’s nine special interest magazines under their banner these days.
The students learned about layout, scheduling, food photography, menu prep, circulation strategies AND got a tour of some of their six test kitchens.
No wonder the students always think that’s one of the better trips of the year. You should see the food stored in those pantries. They test every recipe, and re-test it, before it goes in the magazines. They say the only downside is when their cooking fish, or Mexican first thing in the morning.
The journalism and mass communication department’s awards picnic was this evening. Some two dozen awards and honors were given to people I’ve had in class or worked with in the student media.
Some of them I had in their freshman classes, and now they’re getting set to graduate. They grow so fast …
Last night I watched a bit of Apollo 13 for the 478th time. Love that movie, even the parts where it diverges from history, it does so a bit apologetically. I can take that. It is one of the better film adaptations of a book — in this case the book — that I can recall seeing.
Up the dial a bit Forrest Gump was also on. It allowed me to tell the movie theater story, where a woman in an Apollo 13 screening was frightened for the crew’s safety. Her son said something like “Don’t worry mom, Forrest Gump will get them home.”
I mention all of this because that little tale is cute, but mostly because I wanted to post this video, which is one of the most deliberately underplayed, intense lines ever.
Turns out that’s Ron Howard’s mother playing the part. Jean Speegle Howard was still working until shortly before she died in 2000.
That quote isn’t from the Jim Lovell/Jeffrey Kluger book, but the real Blanch Lovell is in there, scroll down just a bit:
I bet she would have delivered that line with even greater elan.
