Thoughts about tragedies ~ but also about fun

Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941.  I was a one-and-a-half-year-old toddler.  My daddy was eventually drafted and shipped to the Pacific; I remember standing on the sofa to wave out the window as he left.

The JFK assassination occurred on November 22, 1963, when I was the mother of three small children.  My youngest was born earlier that year.

The Twin Towers came down on September 11, 2001 (that's 9-11), a few months before I retired.  Each of these was "a date which will live in infamy..." as FDR said in 1941.  And all of these happened in my lifetime.

Greg Freeman: A Gentleman, A Gentle Man ~ by Greg Freeman, 2003, newspaper columns, 191 pages

Why am I thinking about these dates?  I had just read Greg Freeman's column (p. 138) that was published on September 12th, when our whole country was still focused on the two planes hitting the world's tallest buildings:  "Tragedies like this stay with us the rest of our lives.  For one generation, that tragedy was Pearl Harbor.  For another generation, it was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  For this generation, Sept. 11, 2001, is a date that will live in infamy."

Tuesday was Galentine's Day, a day that is now also called Palentine's Day.  Some of my friends met in the Circle@Crown Café.  People drifted in and out, so I don't have an exact number of attendees to report.  But we sat around tables, talking and laughing.  Several women from the office joined us.

Amy Poehler’s Parks and Recreation character, Leslie Knope, invented the holiday in 2010 to celebrate sisterhood one day before Valentine’s Day every February — and fans are still toasting their gal pals annually.  Read about it HERE, and there's also a video on that site so you can see the best Galentine’s Day moments in that show.