1 Boring Old Man

This morning, I drove to Atlanta [60+ miles] to get ready for a presentation at a medical meeting, something I rarely do anymore. After I got home, I had that glorious luxury of retirement – a nap. No one was around and awake [my dogs sleep through the afternoon]. I sat down at the computer to look at the news and the blogs as I’ve done for three or four years [several times a day]. I watched a jubilant video of Hillary’s welcome to the State Department. Then I read about the various things Obama signed today – things about torture and Gitmo. And I saw a blurb about Malia Obama entitled "a new photographer at the White House." And then I was crying.

So the jihadists might bomb us, and Obama may undershoot the stimulus package, and it might stop raining short of filling up our Lake Lanier so I can go sailing again this Fall. But it’s not going to be like it has been for eight years – maybe for the rest of my life. I sometimes think privately what it must’ve felt like for my grandparents and their herd of children to get off of that boat at Ellis Island and ride a train to a town in Ohio to work in the coal mines. They spent the rest of their days in a country whose language they never learned – through World War I and the Depression and World War II. I wonder if they cried and felt what I feel today when they got off of that boat. Who knows what’s coming? Who knows how it’s going to be down this road? Did they look at the pictures and the landscape and see brighter colors than were there last week? What would they have thought about that picture with two black men, two white men, and a lady with a very red dress?