When you see pets — or people, for that matter — only occasionally you see them in a different light than if you had daily interactions.
People’s personality traits are more endearing or obnoxious. Things you thought you liked, you might rethink. Things that you thought you disliked might not seem so bad after all.
With animals it is a little bit different — personalities and interactions being what they are. But I look at this pup and I think there’s something worth learning.
Ya know, she’s got the right idea.
I didn’t even run that far today. It was one of those days where I ran precisely enough to get in a 5K. And then I stopped, right away. But tired? That’s me.
Perhaps the biggest disappoint of visiting Brussels — aside from not meeting Jean Claude Van Damme — was that you couldn’t find a waffle magnet. We do the complete tourist thing with the magnets, yes, and our fridge is awesome.
I’d just want a waffle magnet that looks like this:
Of course I’d probably walk by it every day and do that, so maybe it is a good thing.
You see those words all over the parts of Berlin we tromped around in, and it is sobering.
You get the sense in that great old city that this has been a psychologically hard place to live. I know from books and film footage how bad things were in the city during the war. I’ve read about the divided city and remember the Wall falling. I’ve been to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and seen historical footage.
It isn’t history or grainy footage or an abstraction when you’re there.
“The past intrudes into our society,” said Wolfgang Thierse, president of the Bundestag.
Now I’ve seen the bullet holes in the buildings. I toured the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, documenting the East Germans who conceived incredible ways to get across to West Berlin. I read there about the frustrations of oppressed East Germans who didn’t get the support from the West they’d hoped for during the uprising in 1953. We met people in Berlin who grew up in East Germany, of course. One guy told us about how his mother, who was an East German tour guide, was disciplined for once calling it the Wall. (East Germans said “the anti-fascist protection barrier” was for keeping out spies.)
The city is living with a lot. Pick any emotion. That burden must be heavy.
And then you see these:
Those are stolpersteine, “stumbling blocks.” The monuments, created Gunter Demnig, commemorate a victim of Nazi oppression. They remember individuals – those who died, survived or emigrated – who were condemned to prisons, euthanasia facilities, sterilization clinics, concentration camps and extermination camps.
Jews, Christians, gypsies, homosexuals, blacks, communists, the disabled, they’re all represented by stolpersteine. More than 48,000 have been laid in 18 countries. You see them all over Berlin. (And in some cities they are still, apparently, somewhat contentious.)
Hier wohnte means here lived. Ermordet means murdered.
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:
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.
“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.
