Third Time's the Charm

Thought for the day:  Why fix it if it ain't broke?

Grandson Aaron is a rather, um,  exuberant eater at times.

Rather than come up with a new post for Thanksgiving week, I'm gonna do a re-run of last year's rerun. (If it ain't broke...) After all, the year may be different, but the sentiment hasn't changed a bit.

Since our grandson is two years older than he was when that picture was taken, his table manners have improved considerably. But he's still cute as a button. (ALL the grandchildren are, of course.) I wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving, and I'll be back with y'all next Monday. (I plan to spend the weekend doing some very serious... digesting.)

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Thought for the day:  An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving day.  [Irv Kupcine]

I'm optimistic, but I'm not stupid, so I won't even pretend to count calories on Thanksgiving. At best, maybe I'll exercise a little discretion and only eat one piece of pie. And skip the whipped cream. (I know. Such phenomenal control.)

Some years ago, when one of our kids was in middle school, I wrote a silly poem for one of the bulletin boards I'd been asked to design for the school's hallway. The senior Bush was president at that time, but with a quick presto change-o to that part of the poem, I'm gonna go with it here for an easy lazy extremely thoughtful post for your enjoyment.

And so, without further ado, I give you ...




                                                                Turkey Blues


                                                There once was a turkey named Jake,
                                                Said, "How much must we poor turkeys take?
                                                When Thanksgiving rolls round,
                                                We must go underground;
                                                Why can't all those people eat STEAK?"

                                                   Now, turkeys may not be so pretty,

                                                   Can't fly, and aren't very witty,

                                                   But with a leader like Jake, 

                                                   A chance they might take,

                                                   So a bunch of them left for the city.

                                                   Jake led a big march on D.C.

                                                  (The IN place for protests, you see)

                                                  "We don't want any fights.

                                                  But we, too, should have rights,

                                                  For this is the land of the free!"

                                                  Obama came out on the green

                                                  With the most turkeys I've ever seen,

                                                   Said, "The issue is not at all murky ...

                                                   Rights are for MAN and not TURKEY;

                                                   That's the way that it always has been."

                                                  Thanksgiving is special in the U.S. of A.

                                                  And turkeys are heroes, I'd like to say.

                                                  So thank the next turkey you meet on the street

                                                  For being so terribly tasty to eat

                                                  And have a great Thanksgiving Day!

                                                             ***************

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.      Erma Bombeck

                                   

Hmmm, this is one smart bird. Crabs would be even better than steak...

One final thought: I'd like to wish all my Jewish friends out there a very Happy Hanukkah. As a Christian, I'm certainly no authority on the subject, but I do know that Hanukkah commemorates a miracle, when a single day's supply of oil kept a lantern burning brightly through eight dark nights. So it is an 8-day festival of light that celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, of purity over adulteration, and spirituality over materialism. Seems to me, whatever your religion or non-religion may be, these are all things worth celebrating. So, Happy Hanukkah, everybody. May the light always conquer the darkness in our lives.


Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.

Half a Century

Thought for the day: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.  [John F. Kennedy]

When this family picture was taken in Hyannis Port in August of 1962, no one realized how little future our American president had left. And it's hard to fathom that this day, November 22, 2013, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the day he was assassinated.

Fifty years. Half a century. Yet, those of us who are old enough to remember that day remember exactly what we were doing when we heard the news. Images of that day and the days that followed are indelibly etched into our minds. Jackie's chic pink suit, splattered with blood... young John-John saluting his father's coffin... the subsequent on-camera shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald... and so much more. But fifty years? Has it really been that long since the end of Camelot?

I wasn't planning to write about this today, but the fiftieth anniversary is hard to ignore. Especially when so many newspapers and television networks are commemorating it by highlighting every detail of those days. The images already residing in our minds and psyches are being shown on TV stations all over the world today, reinforcing them and threatening to break our hearts all over again.

But I don't want to relive that horrible day. Once was enough. Personally, I'd rather think about his life.

In the 1943 picture above, that's JFK on the far right, when he was serving as commander of  PT-109. After a Japanese vessel cut the PT in half, his actions to keep his crew alive were nothing short of amazing... the stuff of legends. Things like swimming three miles to shore... while towing an injured crew member by a strap, which he held in his teeth. A star-struck young boy asked him what it was like to be a war hero, and JFK responded, "It wasn't voluntary. They sunk my boat."

                                                     Anybody remember this song? [1962]

I think one of the things we found so intriguing about this good-looking president with the broad Boston accent and silver tongue was his role as a family man. It was endearing to see his young children scampering around the White House... to see pictures of him working at his desk in the Oval Office, with John-John playing beneath it... to see him walking beside his daughter Caroline while she sat on her pony Macaroni. Even though most of us couldn't identify with his wealthy background, when we saw pictures of him playing touch football with his brothers, or saw him walking and playing with his children, he seemed like one of us. And he seemed to care... about equal rights, about the poor, about the disenfranchised.

And, man, could he ever deliver a speech. Most of us remember his words, Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," but a whole book could be written about some of his other lesser-known utterances, too.

Like these:

*  Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

* Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

* Do not pray for easier lives. Pray to be stronger men.

*As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

* When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.

* If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

*  Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the the discomfort of thought.

* The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

Then there was the famous speech he delivered in Berlin. He took quite a media hit over that one. Here's what I wrote about it in a 2011 post:

Do you remember (or have you heard about) the speech President Kennedy made in West Germany on June 26, 1963? That was just twenty-two months after the Berlin wall went up, and he attempted to express his solidarity with the people of West Germany that day. His exact words were: Ich bin ein Berliner.

Unfortunately, a Berliner happens to be a type of jelly donut made in Berlin, and following that speech, President Kennedy got a merciless ribbing in the media for allegedly making a linguistic faux pas by declaring to the German people: I am a jelly donut.  He took the worst ribbing from America's so-called liberal press, but he also made the news in other parts of the world, as well, and for years,  teachers all over America referenced this speech when instructing their German classes about the proper and improper use of the word ein. Check out what appeared as recently as 1988 in the New York Times:

It's worth recalling, again, President John F. Kennedy's use of a German phrase while standing before the Berlin Wall. It would be great, his wordsmiths thought, for him to declare himself a symbolic citizen of Berlin. Hence, Ich bin ein Berliner. What they did not know, but could easily have found out, was that such citizens never refer to themselves as 'Berliners.' They reserve that term for a favorite confection often munched at breakfast. So, while they understood and appreciated the sentiments behind the President's impassioned declaration, the residents tittered among themselves when he exclaimed, literally, "I am a jelly-filled doughnut."

— William J. Miller, I Am a Jelly-Filled Doughnut, The New York Times April 30, 1988[10]

So why bring it up now? Because I just discovered that, in fact, President Kennedy's words were absolutely correct, even if they were delivered with a Boston accent. If he had said, "Ich bin Berliner," as his critics insisted he should have, he would have sounded foolish. Obviously, with the way he mangled the German language, he was most certainly not a native of Berlin. According to multiple evaluations of the speech by Germans, the way he said it actually indicated, "I am one with the people of Berlin," which is exactly what he wanted to say. And which is exactly how the Germans received it. None of the ridicule leveled at him ever came from the Germans.

***

Yes, JFK died fifty years ago today. But I'd rather remember the smiling faces as his open-topped car crept past a cheering Dallas crowd. I don't want to remember what happened to wipe the smile off our collective face. I don't want to remember the end of our collective idealism. I don't want to remember the end of Camelot.

With thousands of other people, I was in Washington the day of the funeral procession. It was a cold clear day, and the crowd was enormous. What stands out in my mind, even after all these years, is that in spite of the crowd... made up of people of all ages... there was no idle chatter when the casket rolled past. No coughs. No sneezes. The only sound I remember was the slow clop-clop of horses' hooves.


 Ah, Johnny, we barely knew ye... 

Although his light was extinguished far too soon, the memorial flame at Arlington Cemetery for John Fitzpatrick Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the United States... will burn forever. 

                                        Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.

What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.  [Robert Kennedy]

Now, What Was I Saying?

Thought for the day:  Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before.  [Steven Wright]

It's been said many times that elephants never forget. Big whooping deal! I mean, what do they have to remember, anyhow? They don't have to remember where they parked the car. Don't have to remember where they left their keys or suitcase, either. Because... wait for it... (Ba-da boom!) their trunks are always with them. (Sorry.)

Okay, so actually elephants do have an excellent memory. According to a Scientific American article from January of 2009, elephants don't have very good eyesight, but they never forget a face. Bully for them. I, on the other hand, have been known to run into someone I sang with in the church choir for twenty plus years without being able to pull his name out of my brain. Not to be too tough on myself, I did recognize his face... it was just that pesky name that eluded me, and elephants, of course, don't have to remember names, now, do they? All they have to do is remember more trivial stuff, you know, things that their survival may or may not depend upon. Like where to find water... who poses a threat to the herd, that kinda stuff. They don't forget enemies... and they don't forget friends. Even after more than twenty years. [This video is just over seven minutes long, so if you don't want to take the time to watch it, no biggie. But if you do watch it, you might want to grab a tissue first. ]

At any rate, that's neither here nor there. I didn't intend to make myself feel completely irrelephant by comparing my crappy memory to that of a pachyderm, but my train of thought got temporarily derailed for a minute.

Now then. I wanted to talk about the irritating creep of forgetfulness, but I... forgot. Yeah, a lot of that going around these days.

 Ever waste fifteen minutes looking for your eyeglasses, only to find them perched atop your head? Or searched frantically for a pencil that's safely resting on your ear? Right where you put it.

Ever stash something important for safe-keeping, somewhere you know you'll remember... and then forget where ya put it?

One of the joys of hanging out with long-time friends is creating memories together... even if you don't always remember them.

How many times have you gone into a room to do a task, and ended up doing fifteen other things, and leaving without doing what you went in there to do in the first place?

Okay, so forgetting to put on clothes may indicate a more serious problem, but a certain amount of forgetfulness, while certainly annoying, is par for the course, and nothing to worry about. Best we can do is stimulate our brains by reading, doing puzzles, learning new things, and engaging in stimulating conversations. (preferably with other people)


Mark Twain said, If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. 

And the truth is... this video is a hoot. Not only does Pam Peterson have a lovely voice, she's got a lovely sense of humor, too. Can't do anything about your slippery memory? Might as well laugh about it.

                      One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory. [Rita Mae Brown]

                                              Maybe that's why I'm so happy?

                            Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.

Oh, wait, WAIT! Before I (ahem) forget, remember that Hot Flashes and Cold Lemonade Goodreads giveaway I told y'all about last time? Well, the window's open a lot wider now. Not just to the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia... but to every single country listed by Goodreads.