All I really want to do is have a moment of silence.
This year, I like this post from
scrollgirl.InstaPundit linked to this piece by Jonah Goldberg from last year. What sticks to me is his penultimate line: "It quickly became a cliché that 9/11 changed everything, but when it comes to the basic divisions of the last 20 years, 9/11 didn't change nearly enough so much as accentuate everything we knew before."
***
Today,
callunav posted about the Christine Lavin song "Katy Says Today Is The Best Day Of My Whole Entire Life." In describing the second half of the song, she writes:her [the singer's] reflection on her own life, and how up until then she could have identified unhesitatingly the best day of her life, ten years before, and never thought about what that meant about her perceptions of the present, but today she's thinking differently because today a three year old has danced to a Tom Paxton album with her and told her that today is the best day of her whole entire life.For a long time, whenever I thought of this song I only thought of the first half -- the babysitting story and the punchline to that. Partly there's less of a clear narrative in the second half, so it's easy to just let the sound wash over you and not really hear the words.
I haven't personally lived the experience the singer describes in the second half of the song -- though I think it's one of the songs I considered putting on my "but then again i noticed i wasn't the only one (holding on)" mix. [I would totally upload a copy, but my computer's not recognizing my external hard drive.]
But the way Calluna articulated it really spoke to me -- "how up until then she could have identified unhesitatingly the best day of her life, ten years before, and never thought about what that meant about her perceptions of the present" (emphasis added).
