One of Those Days

Blogging pal, Debbie, over at http://www.righttruth.wordpress.com/, has nominated me for the Nice Award. She is a sweet gal and I will take any good strokes I can get today.

What a day. I was picking up the boy at school and maneuvered through the parking lot to get back to the side street. Onto the side street, stopped, in line, waiting for the stop light to change to green to get onto the main street. Some young chickadee was driving far too fast and not paying attention, evidently, and rammed into my rear bumper. She was in her daddy's SUV and I suppose it could have been worse. It did unnerve me, I must admit, as these accidents out of the blue can do to a person. Bleck.

Let me just say that the high school parking lot, alive with new drivers, scares the water out of me.

I read an interesting article written by Jodi Kantor for The New York Times the other day. Do you realize how many potential presidential candidates this time around have very young children at home? It's quite extraordinary. Proves we baby boomers refuse to grow old gracefully, I guess.

You know John Edwards has Emma Claire (I adore her Southern name, by the way) age 9 and Jack age 7. Well four others have young ones, too. Chris Dodd has Grace age 5 who suffers from some life-threatening allergies and Christina age 2. Barack Obama has the two young girls but it appears he is disrupting their lives the least. He and Michelle have made the decision to not have them on the campaign trail, as opposed, to say, the Edwards.

Sam Brownback has twin nine year olds, Mark and Jenna. And Fred Thompson, as soon to declare candidate, has two really young ones, the youngest being Samuel who is only 9 months old.

Interesting.

And then Peggy Noonan's column "To Old Times" that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week. She reminisced about a trip to Normandy in 1991. It was summer and she went hot air ballooning. The balloon had to land unexpectedly in a farmer's field. He was an old man and was so excited to host some Americans. He ran into his house and came back out, carrying a bottle of Calvados, to make a toast. His toast? "To old times." He had not seen any Americans since the Normandy Invasion. Wild. He was honored to thank the next generation of those who fought their way through France, to give France back to the French, as Noonan said.

She went on to write her thoughts of the children of Iraq. They will one day tell stories to the next generation of the American soldiers. Our soldiers are doing wonderful acts of kindness in Iraq, as well as yeoman's work, such as building hospitals, schools and distributing school supplies.

"It is not possible that the good people of Iraq are not noticing, and that in some way down the road the sum of these acts will not come to have some special meaning, some special weight of its own. The actor Gary Sinise helps run Operation Iraqi Children, which delivers school supplies with the help of U.S. forces. When he visits Baghdad grade schools, the kids yell, "Lieutenant Dan!" -- his role in "Forrest Gump," the story of another good man."

Makes a person proud.