.@MLB Commissioner writes to me and admits they were wrong to threaten the Giants players over Bible verses and promises never to fine or discipline these players - or any players for their religious beliefs
We are dog sitting. My MIL with dementia keeps lamenting at his pathetic begging eyes. She would feed him a constant stream of treats if we weren’t around.
Well, I didn’t expect this to be seen by many people. As follow up, my son is now 19 and my daughter is 17. Not a single regret. Parenting these two was the best gift of my life.
I didn't marry until I was 38. I gave birth to my son 8 weeks shy of my 40th birthday and my daughter 3 days after my 42nd birthday. Nothing but joy ever since. Rejoice with any woman who is pregnant. Life matters no matter how old Mom is.
Dear World Cup Guests,
Thank you for sharing your experiences with us online, we are so happy you're here, getting to see all the different parts of America and meeting new friends.
I would however on behalf of all of us normal, kind, hard working and helpful Americans, like to apologize for the few who insist on trying to rain on your joy in the comments and replies. We know they're annoying and ridiculous, just ignore them. They're miserable fun suckers and usually beyond help.
The vast majority of us are having a blast traveling around the country with you! If we can help in anyway please don't hesitate to ask!
Keep eating, drinking, singing and chanting!
Love,
All 50 of the United States 🇺🇸
Dear England, We just wanted to make you aware; We have officially adopted the Scots. They are family now. We will be in touch to negotiate your visitation rights.
Signed, The Americans.
🦅🇺🇸💪🏴🫶 #Scotland#America🇺🇸
https://t.co/facOKOMmeo
I requested a simple band of rubber from my host. She gestured to a drawer, and the very gesture told me everything I needed to know about American chaos.
One drawer. Every household. Always in the kitchen, and it holds the same things in every home in the nation: batteries of unknown charge. Rubber bands. A screwdriver too short for any screw. Birthday candles. Soy sauce packets. Three pens, one of which works. And a key.
The key is the part I cannot release. I have now surveyed eleven households. ALL have the key. NONE know what it opens.
"What does this open?" I asked Sue, holding it up.
"No idea. Been there since we moved in."
"Then why keep it?"
She looked at me as if I had proposed burning a shrine. "You can't throw away a KEY."
She is right. I felt it the moment she said it. A key answers to a lock somewhere. To discard it is to abandon a door you may never find. Eleven households, each guarding one orphaned promise, between the candles and the takeout menus.
In Japan, we made a national art of putting things in their proper place. I assumed the junk drawer was that art's absence. Wrong. The junk drawer IS the proper place — for things whose place has not yet been revealed. Not disorder. Faith, with a handle.
I confess my crime. I once organized Dale's junk drawer while waiting for him. Small bins. Categories. He opened it, stood silent, and said, "Where's the thing?" He could not name the thing. He knew only that it could no longer be found. I had alphabetized a treasure map. We do not speak of it.
The drawer does not need order. It needs to be opened with hope, and closed with acceptance.
I keep a junk drawer of my own now. This week it accepted a battery, a twist tie, and a key I found in the yard. I do not know what the key opens.
Into the drawer it goes. Someday, the door will announce itself.
MIL with dementia came out of her room asking when food was going to be delivered. I said no food had been ordered. She was convinced she ordered food yesterday. That is impossible - she doesn't use the phone or a computer. She's sitting over here drinking her coffee and laughing at her brain. We are blessed - she laughs where others lash out.
For those of us who questioned everything COVID during that time, it's gratifying to know we were right to question and infuriating to know we were vilified for it. And I'm still furious that I was coerced into the jab to keep my job but I was able to choose J&J over Pfizer.
The revelations six years later are pouring out so quickly that it is impossible to keep up much less mentally process all this:
* The Director of National Intelligence has documented 120 US-funded/owned biolabs in 30 countries many of which are manufacturing and manipulating infectious diseases.
* Senator Rand Paul's committee has released the receipts concerning US funding/backing of the manufactured SARS-CoV-2 virus/vaccine as part of this program.
* Senator Johnson has produced definitive evidence that US public health agencies knew of the grave dangers of the shot to everyone but said nothing.
* Many officials are privately admitting/proving that the whole point of lockdowns was to preserve population immunity for the shot and block other avenues toward wellness.
* Hardly any of this makes the national news and one wonders if the public mind has any awareness at all.
As someone who’s been singing the National Anthem at rodeo events for over 20 years, I’ll just say….
There’s a way it was intended to be sung, without your own spin. This was 💯the way! Bravo!
The most important American document you were never taught in school was adopted on June 12, 1776.
Three weeks before the Declaration of Independence, Virginia adopted the Declaration of Rights, written by a man most people can't name: George Mason.
Read the opening line: "All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights."
Sound familiar? Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia at that exact moment, and he borrowed heavily from it.
Then it happened again. When James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights in 1789, he used Mason's document as his blueprint. Freedom of the press, religious liberty, no cruel and unusual punishment, jury trials. Mason had all of it first.
The document even crossed the ocean. Lafayette leaned on it when drafting France's Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789.
And here's the kicker: Mason later refused to sign the Constitution. Why? It had no bill of rights and didn't end the slave trade. He died politically isolated for it. Then the country added the Bill of Rights, proving him right.
One Virginia farmer wrote the rough draft of American freedom, influenced two revolutions, and got almost zero credit.
250 years ago today. Raise a glass to George Mason.
USA. A breakfast counter. The waitress recommended the biscuits and gravy, and when the plate arrived, I thought something had gone wrong in the kitchen.
I say this with shame. The dish looked like a construction site after rain. Pale mounds. Gray ladle-fall. Speckles I could not identify.
In my land, the eye eats first. A meal is arranged like a garden. This meal was arranged like weather.
"Is it… finished?" I asked, carefully.
"Honey, that's what it looks like."
The man beside me was already eating his. He did not look up. "Just try it."
I am a man who has charged hillsides at dawn. I raised the fork. I tried it.
I must now formally apologize to the biscuits, the gravy, the waitress, the kitchen, and the entire breakfast tradition of the American South.
It was magnificent. Warm. Peppered. The biscuit drank the gravy the way a field drinks rain — THAT is why it is shaped like that, you fool — and every mound I had insulted was a soft fold of comfort that my homeland, in eight hundred years, never once thought to invent.
"Well?" the waitress asked.
"I judged it," I confessed. "By its appearance. I am ashamed."
"Everybody does, hon."
Everybody does. A national dish that forgives you for doubting it. It expects the doubt. It waits for you on the other side of it.
Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating.
I order it every Saturday now. I no longer see the construction site. I see only the garden.
It was a garden the whole time. The eye must be trained.