Saturday....sigh...I used to love Saturdays and this weekend reminded me why.
After going on a sudden (for me) trip to the airport to pick up a cousin (not mine)and slightly messed up timing, my friends Sarah and Salimah came in from Baltimore!!!

There is just something about meeting certain friends that refreshes my soul. Maybe it is because they are different then many of the friends i have here. But I know that it is the same kindred spirit that dwells in us that is the real connection - a connection that while peaceful, is vibrant with life and anticipation. The storm clouds that have been hanging over my head for some time seemed to dissipate in the afterglow. Meditating on the words exchanged and the unspoken woke something that had been tragically narcoleptic. Hope.

This evening I went to the WWII and Roosevelt Memorials. The WWII memorial was incredible. I was already in a reflective mood, but it was increasingly threatened by the cousin K and I picked up earlier. I will call him A. A's mouth runs too much and most of it ridiculous boasting. blah, blah, blah. Anyway I was at the WWII memorial and it was so beautiful and so somber at the same time. I thought of all the old footage I used to watch on the History channel and how so many gave their lives to give us freedom. And how many, upon coming to DC, promptly use their freedom to bash the very people and institutions that gave them that freedom in the first place. How ironic.

I remembered my friend who was a Vietnam veteran and how he took me to the (Vietnam) Wall and showed me a time period of one year. This period stretched for yards and yards down the wall. Then he gently pointed to name after name: "________ was in my battalion" and "so and so saved my life only to be killed two minutes later by a mortar." I still have the necklace from that day. It has a M-16 stuck into the ground with a helmet on top. My friend told me this is how they marked the dead. They put the person's gun into the ground and hung their helmet and dog tags on it.

I cried. And the babbler kept babbling.