Nothing To Write Home About

Here's another excerpt from Second Day Reported. Thanks for reading!

During our middle school years, my best friend Melissa and I watched Hogan's Heroes every day after school. We set ourselves up on Melissa's waterbed with Cokes from Dairy Queen and shortbread cookies, little delights filled with chocolate called Magic Middles. Surrounded by her stuffed animals, we'd relax, done with the horrors of classes, relieved to be by ourselves. On her huge bedroom television, we were transported to a German POW camp. It didn't seem that much different than Mineral Wells and it didn't seem strange that it was a comedy. Some of the most awful situations lent themselves to a certain gallows humor. I often wondered what the actors did off the camera. Even as a child I viewed life as a series of compartments, some more secret than others. I could identify with Colonel Klink -- I know nothing, I see nothing. So much of my life was nothing and already I grew adept at the characterization, telling people that there was nothing left to say and nothing to write home about.

Melissa and I would look at each other during the course of the show, clink our Dairy Queen cups together, a celebration of survival. "I think people lose their eyesight as they get older so that they'll look the same to their spouses as they did when they were young," she'd say. A nice theory, I thought, but I didn't buy it. People seemed to age way too fast. Even the characters on the show. Had I any idea of what their real lives were like, I would have understood. Some of the actors on the show were Jewish, a few had been in concentration camps. One of them said, "Who better to play a Nazi than a Jew?" Life could be recast, this much I was beginning to know.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cocktail Hour
Drinking hangover suggestion: Okay, the Red Wings lost last night to the wicked, wicked Penguins in the third overtime. As one of my friends pointed out, the whole town has a hangover today from the sheer exhaustion. Solution: one Bloody Mary, one two hour nap. Here's hoping for a victory tomorrow!

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Tuesday! And much love going out to Flip Saunders who got fired today from his position as the coach of the Detroit Pistons. I always liked Flip who really cared about the team, stressing so much that he aged as much as a president during his tenure. He even got shot at in Detroit while out with a "lady friend." (That's the newspaper term, not mine.) If that doesn't mean you should be here for good, I don't know what does. Flip, you will be missed!