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I've been to South Africa several times. I love those accents, but not when they're talking about an inspirational sports icon killing his girlfriend. There's been a lot of fog around exactly what happened, but what we do know is that South Africa's Olympic hero admittedly shot his girlfriend four times. Now, he says accidentally and the police say on purpose.
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We kept two special remembrances of our wedding. One was a piece of wedding cake that we froze; the other was a recording of the ceremony. The recording was a much better idea than the cake. We ate the cake on our first wedding anniversary. You've heard of chocolate cake; this was more like chalk cake. Uh-huh, bad idea. But oh, the recording, now that was a great idea. In fact, often on our wedding anniversary we have replayed it. We relive that wonderful day that our marriage began. I know some couples go beyond that. They actually dust off the old wedding dress and reconvene what's left of the wedding party, and do it again on some milestone anniversary. Hey, it's good for a couple to remember that wedding day. It's good to remember where it all began isn't it? In any important relationship a trip back to the beginning can rekindle the spark.
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You gotta feel bad for the youngest child. I mean, there's a thousand pictures of the firstborn, "Hey, we've never had one of these before!" Maybe 300 or 400 of the second born. And then, if they're lucky, possibly 30 of the final arrival. Oh, we loved him just as much. We just didn't have as many pictures of him. Probably because his brother and sister wore us out.
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It might actually be an unwritten rule of flying commercially. The person who has the window seat in a row always seems to get there last. It's just got to be a rule; seems to always happen. It happened one day to me. I was lucky enough to be in the center seat. There was someone to my left sitting on the aisle seat, and we were all buckled in because they were about to close the door and begin the flight. I said, "All right! I'm going to get an empty seat next to me." No!
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My wife, my son and I were walking across a parking lot talking. All of a sudden the people who were walking in front of us whirled around and the lady said, "I know that voice!" Well, I'm always afraid when somebody says that to me; I wonder if it's like somebody I like, you know, I owe money to. But this does happen every once in a while, and sometimes it's someone I do owe money to, but more often than not it's someone who somehow has come into contact with this particular voice over the radio, and usually on a lot of occasions.
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So an angry girl named Sandy came storming up the Eastern Seaboard - the largest Atlantic hurricane ever up to that point. It was sort of like a Halloween snowstorm that happened the previous year that dumped a crazy two feet of snow onto Connecticut, where I just happened to be. And Sandy, then, did what "Snowy" had done the year before; made a whole lot of folks change their plans.
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Two and a half feet of snow had just left a million people without power, and we were there! Wouldn't you know, I had picked my time to be up there in New England when that happened. Well, we checked into the motel before the storm, but now as I stood at the front desk, that phone was ringing incessantly. I kind of felt bad, because the lady gave the same answer every time, "Sorry, no room." Hey, those are tough words to hear.
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There are lots of people digging into their family tree these days. In fact, we've done some of our own. A lot of digging around to find out where your roots are. You know, where my grandfather came from and my great grandfather, and which king or famous person I'm descended from. Of course I would be descended from someone famous, right?
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There's nothing quite so precious as a little child screaming on an airplane. You're a captive group; what are you going to do? A couple of people might have a suggestion for what to do with the child, but you're stuck. It happened to me on a plane not long ago. Actually we hadn't taken off yet; I guess we could have left. But here's this little five-year-old and his mother's trying to get him to sit down.
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Well, for several years in a row our town was pretty lucky. We had a winning football team every year in high school. And every year the parents had a dinner in the team's honor, and everybody came. I mean, even people who had nothing to do with the football season suddenly showed up: the politicians, the board members, a variety of seemingly unconnected dignitaries. Oh, I'm sure they were there to honor the players.
