W is for War Music---From Bugle Boys to Buffalo Springfield

 

Even before I knew about the A to Z Bloggers Challenge, I’d planned to write about the music born from wars and protests. The idea came from a Facebook Short Reel I stumbled on—filmed in Minnesota during the ‘ICE invasion.’ It sent chills down my back, not just because of what was happening there, but because the soundtrack was Buffalo Springfield singing those Vietnam‑era lyrics. Suddenly I was right back in those days, when so many of us made the painful shift from supporting the war to realizing it was a pointless conflict that cost countless innocent lives— not unlike the dog‑and‑pony show unfolding in the Middle East now.

“There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
A-telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop
Children, what's that sound?
Everybody look what's going down.”

I did what I always do: a deeper dive. Stephen Stills wrote that song in 1967, and it’s widely considered one of the most iconic protest songs of all time. While it became an anthem of the anti‑Vietnam movement, it was actually inspired by the Sunset Strip Riots of 1966. You can even download it as a ringtone. For a hot minute, I considered doing just that, but I decided that if it went off here on my continuum‑care campus, it would either send my MAGA neighbors into a pantie‑twist or make the heads‑in‑the‑sand crowd wet theirs.

I cut my teeth on war music, but it was a different breed than the Vietnam soundtracks. Mom had a large collection of WWII records that she played over and over. The Andrews Sisters singing Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy is tattooed inside my head. I can’t hear a gung‑ho WWII song without remembering the day Dad and I cleaned out the basement—decades after we’d had a working record player—and we took her vinyl collection to the dump. We had a great time sailing those 33s across the trash and garbage field like Frisbees. She hadn’t played them in years, but when she found out what we did, she didn’t speak to either of us for a week. She was the queen of giving the cold shoulder.

Her favorites were The White Cliffs of Dover, I’ll Be Seeing You, and I’ll Be Home for Christmas. If memory serves me right, I once read that the U.S. government actually commissioned some of those nostalgic songs and films designed to boost the morale for soldiers and their families. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition was one I could sing before I could tie my shoes—which isn’t saying much, come to think about it, considering my dyslexic and being left-handed battle with learning that skill from my right‑handed mother. Oops.

Vietnam‑era music was a different animal entirely—more protest, more rage, more longing to go home. Besides the Buffalo Springfield classic, there was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son, a blistering critique of the draft that favored the wealthy, and Country Joe & the Fish’s I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag, with its dark humor about the war’s purpose. Other anthems included We Gotta Get Out of This Place and Leaving on a Jet Plane.

And now it’s happening again. Songwriters are once more putting into words what so many people are thinking. Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Minneapolis and Jesse Welles’ No Kings are destine to be the new anti‑authoritarian anthems for the times we’re living through.

My theme for this A to Z Challenge is “the humans, habits, hidden joys, and heartaches that shaped my world.” Long‑time readers know I’ve followed politics my entire adult life, but I try to limit my politically driven posts to one in every thirteen. So I surprised myself that I hadn’t revealed my flaming‑liberal side earlier in this challenge. But this post isn’t one of my typical political rants—just a piece of the mosaic. A part of me I needed to include to round out the picture.

Before I leave the letter W behind, I should say this: these songs didn’t just mark the times, they helped me navigate them. War music doesn’t just soundtrack the world around us; it teaches us how to listen, how to cope and how to remember we’re not alone. ©

Trying to Find Stillness in a World Determined to Shake It

Some weeks feel like a collision between the headlines and the heart, and this was one of them. Between a new war unfolding, a conversation group that didn’t want to have the conversation, and Jean’s attempt to study Buddhism without tripping over her own attachments, she realized her thoughts were staging a full‑scale mutiny. What follows isn’t a solution or a sermon — just a clear‑eyed walk through the contradictions, fears, and questions that have been crowding her head...AI

Spoiler Alert: This One Gets Serious. I can’t help it. I feel like I need to write about the following things because writing is the best way I can bring any clarity to my thoughts, and God only knows where my head is at half the time, if you know what I mean. If you don't, it's that feeling when so many contradictory thoughts are running laps in your brain that you’re afraid they’re going to break out into a blood sport to see which one gets top billing. 

I was with my Liberal Ladies Conversation Group last week and I thought, finally, I'd get to compare opinions about the war with other human beings. But the twelve of us sat around the table, talking about art and music and making plans to get together to make signs for the upcoming No Kings Protest on March 28th. Mind you, this was two days after 45/47 started his war with Iran, and yet no one was bringing it up. As the waiter was dropped off our checks I couldn't stand it any longer and I said, “So we’re not going to talk about the elephant in the room?”

Silence. Then it was as if Hans Brinker pulled his thumb out of the dike. Everyone started talking at once. And there was no consensus on why he did it. The theories flew:

• To distract from the Epstein files

• To line his son‑in‑law’s pockets when it comes time to rebuild the Middle East

• To line his own pockets when the rebuilding starts

• A secret deal with Israel 

• To create a pretext to halt the midterms

• To bring about a regime change 

Not one person mentioned the party‑line explanation, that the bombs were dropped to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Which I’m not buying. If that were the goal, why tear up the 2015 agreement that allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to aggressively monitor Iran and ensure they were reducing their enriched uranium stockpile by 98% on a timeline approved by five countries? Oops, I know the answer. It's because that agreement was brokered by the Obama administration. Ding, ding, ding! Give the lady a Kewpie doll.

Now we have eleven countries involved in a destructive war that Republicans insist “isn’t really a war,” which conveniently allowed them to vote against Congressional oversight. And is it naïve to think it won’t eventually reach our shores, likely in the form of cyberattacks? Yes, it's naïve. Here's another doll, of you!

Alongside all this political garbage vying for attention in my head is my study of Buddhism. I’ve been doing daily lessons with an app called The Karma Path since the end of the Walk for Peace. Each lesson is only 20 or 30 minutes, but they make you think. This isn’t my first time studying Buddhism seriously. If the third time is a charm, as the saying goes, this time I might actually stick with it and become a practicing Buddhist for the rest of my life.

Being old helps. Letting go of attachments should, in theory, be easier. In practice, it’s still my greatest challenge. I’m far too sentimental. But if I fail at that part of the Buddhist philosophy, death will eventually pry my creature comforts and memory‑vessels out of my hands anyway. I’m certainly not wealthy enough to build a pyramid and have slaves stockpile the tomb with all the things I hold near and dear.

Of course, it’s not just material things a Buddhist learns to release. It’s people. Expectations. The belief that someone else is responsible for our happiness (which is something I thought I'd learned a long time ago but clearly I didn't, judging by the wee little hurt feelings I wrote about in my last post). I’ve just begun studying meditation and the Noble Eightfold Path (the heart of Buddhism): right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration, right vision and right intention. And I'm batting 100% on The Karma Path's periodic quiz's.

What I don’t understand about any religion (and Buddhism doesn’t claim to be one) is how so many can be so certain their way is the only way—certain enough to go to war over ideology, century after century. In the Middle East, every peace plan ever put forth eventually falls apart over who controls the holy places. You’d think letting go of sentimental attachment over such small patches of earth would be a reasonable price to pay for lasting peace, says the lady who hasn't let go of her grade‑school report cards.

And then, to make this current war even more complicated, we have a commander telling U.S. troops that Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran” and that the bombings are the beginning of Armageddon and the “imminent” return of Christ. This is according to several sources including a HuffPost article titled Military Commander Tells Troops Bombing Iran Is ‘Part Of God’s Divine Plan’. We could have seen this coming when Pete Hegseth started hosting prayer meetings at the Pentagon and bringing in Christian Nationalists to lead them.

Unfortunately, no amount of meditation, no amount of looking the other way, no amount of sticking our fingers in our ears and singing “la la la!” is going to set our country back on a path where elected officials can be trusted to do the right thing for all the people, not just their buddies with the biggest wallets or the biggest sticks. It's going to take time and effort by all of us i.e. we need to study the crap out of those running for the midterms and beyond and never, ever miss an opportunity to vote.

So there you have it. The reasons why I say I don’t know where my head is half the time. And I suspect many people across the nation are having the same meltdown, judging by the massive impact the Walk for Peace monks have made as their movement builds quietly in the background of everything happening in Washington, D.C.

Maybe that’s the real story here — not the war, not the politics, but the silent truth that millions of us are trying to hold our center while the world keeps shifting under our feet. ©

Until Next Wednesday….

 Three Things to Release in Life
Shen Yu, Buddhist Monk 

Stop chasing other people, What is meant for you will stay without force.
Stop trying to return to the past. It exists only to teach, not to live in.
Let go of regret. It holds the mind in places you can no longer change.

 

The Lingering Legacy of Vietnam: The War That Changed Us

This post explores the lingering impact of the Vietnam War through personal memory, cultural reflection, and historical context. From Bruce Springsteen’s protest anthem to Ron Kovic’s memoir and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Jean revisits the emotional terrain of a generation shaped by conflict. With fresh reflections sparked by recent books and films, she connects past and present—reminding us that war doesn’t end when the fighting stops. AI...

“Records are often auditory Rorschach tests,” Bruce Springsteen wrote in his memoir. “We hear what we want to hear.” His song Born in the U.S.A.—often mistaken for a patriotic anthem—was actually written as a Vietnam protest song. Springsteen’s interest in veterans affairs and this song were inspired by Ron Kovic’s memoir Born on the Fourth of July, the story of a paralyzed veteran turned anti-war activist. That autobiography was published in 1976 and it became a best-seller. Fate brought these two men together shortly after and they became life long friends.

The 1989 film adaptation of the book, starring Tom Cruise, took some creative liberties—adding a high school girlfriend, placing Kovic at a protest he only watched on TV, and dramatizing a visit to the family of a fellow soldier he accidentally killed (in real life, he wrote them a letter). But overall, the movie stayed true to the spirit of Kovic’s account.

According to Wikipedia, Ron wrote the book in three weeks and two days. He described the process like this:

“I wrote all night long, seven days a week, single space, no paragraphs, front and back of the pages, pounding the keys so hard the tips of my fingers would hurt. I couldn't stop writing, and I remember feeling more alive than I had ever felt. Convinced that I was destined to die young, I struggled to leave something of meaning behind, to rise above the darkness and despair. I wanted people to understand. I wanted to share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to be in a war — to be shot and wounded, to be fighting for my life on the intensive care ward — not the myth we had grown up believing. I wanted people to know about the hospitals and the enema room, about why I had become opposed to the war, why I had grown more and more committed to peace and nonviolence.”

Netflix was showing Born on the Fourth of July recently, and knowing it was a classic Vietnam film, I decided to watch. I couldn’t remember seeing it before, but I had read the book. Back in the late ’70s I read around twenty books about the war—memoirs and fiction by recent veterans like Ron. I was obsessed, trying to understand how we, as a nation—and I, personally—could go from naive supporter of the “conflict” to understanding why so many of us turned against it.

I thought I’d long ago made peace with that terrible chapter of American history. But seeing that movie on the heels of reading Kristin Hannah’s book The Women (about the U.S. Army Nurse Corp during the Vietnam War) a bunch of memories surfaced. Like the night Don and I tried to talk a friend of his nephew out of running off to Canada because his draft number was close to being called. Right or wrong, we didn’t succeed and he became a draft dodger. No matter what choice those teen boys made it was life altering. It wasn’t until 1977 when drafter dodgers were pardoned by Jimmy Carter, in an attempt to heal the nation, that those who fled could come back to The States.

We visited the Vietnam Wall Memorial twice—once in Washington, D.C., shortly after it was built in 1982 and again a decade later when its traveling replica came to town. Our local newspaper called the replica ‘The Wall That Heals.’ It was 250 foot long, ½ scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall on the National Mall and its 24 panels contain more than 58,000 names of those who didn’t make it home. When we saw the actual Wall in Washington D.C. it was an emotional experience for me. I had penpal relationships with over fifty servicemen over in ‘Nam spread out over four-five years and I planned to look them all up in the index book by the Wall, but after finding a few listed I just couldn’t continue.

When we saw the traveling replica it was my husband who was left haunted by the experience. As I pushed Don’s wheelchair past the 24th panel there was a homemade sign on a stake that contained the name of a work friend of Don's. It said he’d died of Agent Orange. This was in the ‘90s, just after our government finally got around to acknowledging the connection between Agent Orange and all the medical problems the guys who were exposed to those chemicals suffered. My husband’s friend had taken his own life just weeks before his wife placed that hand-painted sign at the replica Wall. The war hadn’t ended for him. It just changed shape. 

During my caregiving years (2000–2012), war played in our living room every night in the form of VHS tapes of M*A*S*H. When the series originally aired (1972–1983), Don was working nights and never saw it. But he had the entire series on tape and watched the episodes repeatedly. The whoop-whoop of helicopter blades and Alan Alda’s voice gave him the comfort of ritual while I was in the kitchen becoming a blogger.

I don’t entirely understand why we humans find comfort in watching the same shows over and over again, but I do it now with Sex and the City. Watching an episode after a movie each night acts like a palate cleanser for my brain. I’ve probably seen the entire series a dozen times.

And now I need that palate cleanser after watching the nightly news. With two wars raging and a president I don’t trust holding the reins, I’m angry again—angry that humanity remains so divided that we risk blowing up the whole kit and caboodle. Did Vietnam not teach us anything? I know what 45/47 wants out of one of those wars. He wants to develop the Gaza Strip into a high-rollers resort. And with Netanyahu’s latest plan to take over the area and relocate its people, it sounds suspiciously like an off-the-books deal is brewing. If so, it better not involve our tax dollars! If we can’t fund USAID to support the poorest people in the world then we sure as hell can’t fund billionaires on vacation!

My mother used to say, “Don’t borrow trouble from the future.” How she could say that so often—when she was the longest-range planner I’ve ever known—is beyond me. Maybe that’s the answer. She didn’t borrow trouble. She saw its potential and planned contingencies.

Anyone want to help me dig an underground fallout shelter? ©

Until Next Wednesday. 

Mishap Month, the Milky Water Mystery and War

 

April 5^th I had an appointment card in my hand, written by a receptionist at my internist’s office that said my appointment was for 1:00 on Tuesday April 5^th. It was 12:30 and I was trying to register on their stupid, self-serve check-in computer which wouldn’t let me past the screen asking if I was a walk-in or if I had an appointment. Finally, the girl whose job it is to check on the five of us trying to register, to see if she can speed things along came over to help. She says the system doesn’t show I have an appointment. Duh, I knew that much already and she asked me to step over to another computer where she verified that I’m not on the books until the next week, the 12^th at 3:15.

“I didn’t make that appointment,” I said, “I haven’t made an appointment for anything after 2:00 in over 20 years. “Do you want to cancel it?” “No, I need my yearly physical in April!” Changing it would have delayed it several months to get on the books again. She offered no apology or explanation for how my appointment got screwed up. Even showing her my appointment card didn’t lay a little guilt trip at her door. I was the victim of multi-tasking, I’m sure, but she acted like I was just another old person who showed up on the wrong day. If she cared that I’d have to psych myself back up again to get half naked in front of my doctor, she didn’t show it. And that twig of a girl wouldn’t care if that late afternoon appointment adds extra bloat pounds to stand next to me on the scales. I can only hope that late time slot doesn’t also shave a few IQ points off my brain because this is the hour long physical that includes the infamous set of Medicare questions.

Meanwhile on the home front I woke up one morning, turned on the faucet in the bathroom and got completely drenched down the front of me. It wasn’t long after when I discovered that the water coming out of the tap looked like 2% milk. The rest of the day I worn my Nancy Drew Mystery Solver hat and investigated the situation. Milky water was only coming out my master bath faucets and five of my close neighbors weren’t have any issues with being reminded of Bessie the Guernsey when attempting to brush their teeth or wash their faces.

The following morning I filed a Maintenance Request and asked if they could take care of it sooner rather than later because I’ll be using bottle water in the bathroom until the water runs clear again. Two days later I got an email saying that it was "coming from the city municipal and the power booster" (that the complex added over a month ago to a building I don't live in) and the anonymous person answering the request closed it! I don’t get mad often but that dismissal ticked me off. I knew from a google search that it was probably from air or a broken aerator in the line and was safe to use and far less likely it was c-zone disinfectant the city uses but either way I shouldn’t have been blown off like that. So I marched myself down to the CEO’s office and asked him who I see about a response to a Maintenance Request that I’m not happy with. “You can tell me,” he replied. So I told him my sob story from the start to finish and he promised to call their city contact and their plumber and get back to me. 

The next morning the maintenance man I love stopped by to see my milky water, take a photo of my faucets and to try a simple fix that the plumber suggested. But it didn't work, so a new service request got written up and bumped up the ladder for the plumber to get involved. The saga continues...

All things are relative and my problems are minuscule compared what the people in Ukraine are dealing with. I haven’t written about what is going on over there because, like everyone else, I’m frustrated and angry that something like this is even happening right before our eyes. I don’t even want to call it a war because it’s actually an invasion with the occupied country forced to fight back and its going to rival the Holocaust if something isn’t done soon to stop Putin. 

But what can any of us do personally while sitting in our well-cocooned and privileged lives other than what I’ve done already which is to wring my hands and make donations to humanitarian groups working over there: The International Red Cross, The International Humane Society, The World Kitchen and Doctors Without Borders? 

I see the worry here at the CCC whenever the topic comes up which isn't often because someone always shuts it down as being too "depressing." "Can't even watch the news!" is a common refrain. Ya, I get that. I'm good at avoidance too. Then the avoidance makes me feel guilty wondering if this is the way those who sat by watching the Holocaust unfold felt at the beginning. At times like that I ask myself again and again, when is empathy not enough before we invite WWIII to our own doorsteps? Do we only care about the inhumanity and atrocities others commit when they come for us? 

On the other hand, is it more humane to sacrifice Ukraine like a virgin thrown into the eye of a volcano to save the world from Putin starting a Nuclear Winter that will kill the entire planet? He's already sent unprotected Russian soldiers into the radioactive dust in Chernobyl's Red Forest only to get sick and track it farther outside of the hot zone. Why? Why do any of the old men with power want more of it when they could retire and live happily after on a tropical island? He doesn't care about his own people, he's unpredictable and has no soul. I would hate to be one of the world leaders right now as they debate and struggle to weigh all the difficult responses to Putin.  ©

Bombers, Dr. Zhivago and Icy Roads

I sign up for all the Life Enrichment lectures at the senior hall. This month’s lecture was given by a local woman, Sandra Warren, who wrote a book about her high school’s junior and senior classmates who bought a B-17 Bomber during WWII by selling $375,000 worth of War Bonds and they won the right to name and christen the airplane. It even flew into town for the ceremony and when “The Spirit of South High” flew off, it was never heard from again. Fast forward seven decades later when the alumni from the high school decided to research what happened to the bomber and the research lead them to another project: getting a marker placed in a field near the Meadows of Dan, Virginia, where the bomber crashed on a foggy night during a training exercise---two years after it was built. The bomber never made it to the war.

And I never made it to the lecture. I got up that morning, eager to go because it had been too long since I’d talked to another human being and I promised myself this winter I wouldn’t let the weather wimp me out from going places. I took a shower and told the dog to be a good boy as I walked out the door. I got two minutes from home on a trip that should have only taken another seven to get to the senior hall if I hadn’t been behind seven drivers going 20 in a 55 mile an hour zone. It was 23 degrees and everything was covered by a thin layer of ice. I had visions of someone getting impatient, and spinning out trying to pass, causing a chain reaction accident. Finding a safe place to turn off and head back home, I did just that. The icy landscape came with flash-backs to the days when I used to help my husband salt parking lots and we'd pass by lots of cars in ditches on black ice nights. Small cars like I drive now.

Long nights of plowing snow would often have me thinking about Doctor Zhivago. I had a cassette tape of the sound track from the movie that I played in the truck. Wikipedia says this about the storyline: “It is set in Russia between the years prior to World War I and the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922, and is based on the 1957 Boris Pasternak novel by the same name.” It stared Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and I was in love with that movie back in the ‘60s. There are many snowy scenes in the three hour film but there is one in particular showing the interior of a house covered in white, icy snow. I had romanticized that scene to be the most beautiful winter-scape I’d ever seen. 

I had a chance to see Dr. Zhivago on television last week and was reminded of why I don’t like watching old movies. The interior scene I loved for so many years was not the sparkling crystal, romantic wonderland my mind’s eye had built it up to be. And Julie Christie’s acting was almost laughable, the director seemingly depending on close-ups of her pretty face to carry the story forward. And the Russian revolt, the fighting, the way people starved and fought to get enough fuel to heat their rooms in the unforgiving Russian winters was depressing and strangely seemed like a forecast of what could be coming to us if we don’t start doing a better job of protecting the earth's Breadbaskets from bio-terrorists and climate change deniers. I couldn’t believe the 1965 edition of myself could have loved that movie so much. I know I was naive back then when all I knew about the Russian Civil War came from Dr. Zhivago. Could I have believed that war and all the hardships that come with it would be worth it if only the “right side” wins? Or maybe I just had the hots for Omar Sharif. 

I’ve had Dr. Zhivago loaded on my Kindle for a couple of years, unread. It’s 700 pages long and after seeing the movie again, I doubt I’ll ever read it. The We Bought a Bomber book is 157 pages and I don’t have an interest in reading that either. From the reviews on Amazon, the bomber book sounds like it romanticizes the war effort on the home front which I suppose is to be expected---it was a uniquely all-in, all-for-one period of American history. It’s to be expected because it’s true what they say about the spoils of war going to the winners and that includes the winners get to tell the stories of glory and courage, of shared sacrifices and pride. ©

Sex, Bullets and Baby Bliss

 

Sometimes I have the strangest dreams then spend too much time in the morning trying to figure out where they came from and what they mean. Today I had an opportunity to sleep in for the first time all week but at 7:00 a dream pushed me awake. It involved a young woman in a skirt so short you could see her pubic hair and bare bottom as she flitted around with a bound to her steps that made her pleaded miniskirt flair up in front of Don and myself. (No Brazilian wax job for that girl. Apparently I dream in the grooming styles of decades gone by when the only one who would see your pubic area was your future husband.) I tried to will myself back to sleep so I could figure out what the little trollop was up to, but I couldn’t.

Just before going to bed last night I was watching a rerun of Saturday Night Live with Lady GaGa singing, “Do what you want, what you want with my body.” She was covered with a silver jumpsuit and blouse--- nothing sexy about it---but as she sang she was feeling herself up and by the time the repetitive and boring lyrics quit coming out of her mouth her backup dancer was also feeling her up. Then she laid down on the floor and they simulated sex as she sang the final line---you guessed it, another, “Do what you want with my body.”

I fell asleep trying to figure out when (and if) I’ve become a prude over the years and if I have why has society come to accept violence in movies and the nightly news but sex in the media is still trying to push the shock value envelope. The pundits on cable news talk so freely about how we should bomb this place, and challenge that country’s leader and “kill them before they kill us.” They talk and we listen as if what they're talking about all happens in a movie where the blood isn’t real and the bullets don’t hurt. Guess they've never read General William T. Sherman words: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it…War is Hell.” Now, war is on little and big screens everywhere---fact, fiction and in games---and we don’t seem to care. Yet we see a singer not only pushing the sex-in-music envelope but trying to set it on fire and we get all indigent and worry about the future of the world.  

Where are the mother’s marches against war? Wouldn’t that be a better cause than trying to keep sex education out of the schools? Maybe what we need is more (not less) sex in the media, in video games and on the nightly news---less time to prompt aggression. Brad and Angelina had sex on the balcony of their New Orleans home last night. It was too dark to get a video but here's the audio. I worry that we’ve programed a whole generation of people who have no empathy for the suffering of others. I must add a disclaimer here: I do know that a Society can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can simultaneously care about baby seals, violence and sex in the media and whether or not the lids on our canning jars have sealed properly. Heck, we can even worry about that stuff in our sleep in the form of girls without panties trying to tempt our husbands.

Sex and violence in the world are such heavy things to cover on a Sunday morning. You would never guess that yesterday I spent the afternoon getting to know and hold the newest member of my family…a great-great nephew born a week ago. His great-grandmother and great aunt were present, too, and the concept of from the cradle to the grave was flitting through my head. What will the future be like for that little boy in the world we're making up as we go? But on that idyllic afternoon all I saw was a young mother completely relaxed and surrounded by a family totally emerged in baby bliss mode. I saw a little boy who already knows love. I saw him get introduced to his four-legged sister who is full grown but smaller than him. I laughed as his newly minted grandmother, assisted by his great aunt (my two nieces), learned how to change a diaper for the first time in decades. It was a matriarchal gathering that probably hasn't changed much since time began.

I can’t control my nighttime dreams but I can control my day-dreams. And yesterday was a special day that deserves a Sunday day-dream of a world with cotton candy rainbows, Snoopy-dog happy dances, and family love that will continue growing in size and depth. Day-dream along with me.... what do you wish for? I'm going to sound like Sandra Bullock in Miss. Congeniality when I say: "I really do want world peace." ©