@Jimeverett Agreed and maybe it's just because I'm a female fan but the older style uniforms made the men look super masculine. I get that things are more streamlined but seriously the bike shorts??? Change helmets and go straight to Le Tour de France. ๐๐ดโฌ ๏ธ๐
At a family restaurant in Texas, the lights dropped, and eleven staff members marched out of the kitchen banging a spoon on a pot, and I rose to my feet, because I believed we were under attack.
We were not under attack.
A woman three tables away was turning sixty. She was a stranger to the staff. They did not know her. They had known her for the length of one dinner.
And still they came for her with fire.
They set a sizzling dessert in front of her. They sang a song that is legally distinct from the birthday song, for reasons I have chosen not to investigate. They made her wear a hat. They made the whole room clap, and the whole room did, and I clapped hardest of all, because I did not wish to be the one man in Texas who would not celebrate a grandmother.
She cried a little. She waved her hand at them, embarrassed, delighted, sixty years old and surrounded by strangers who had decided, on no notice, to love her for four minutes.
In my land, we do not do this. A birthday is a quiet and private thing. To make a stranger the center of a loud room would be a cruelty.
I had it backwards.
It is not a cruelty. It is the opposite. It is a room full of people who have never met you agreeing, all at once, that the day you were born was a good day and worth a song.
When the check came, I quietly asked the waitress to bring the grandmother a slice of pie, and not to say from whom.
She smiled and said, "That's real sweet, hon."
Then she leaned in and told me it was the third birthday they had done that day, and there was one more coming at eight, and did I want to stay for it.
I stayed for it.
Of course I stayed for it.
I have a birthday in the spring.
In my land I was never once sung to. A birthday was a fact, noted and let pass, like the weather. My father marked mine with a single nod across the room. It was enough, I told myself, for forty years, because I did not know there was more to want.
I have already told the staff. They wrote it in a book by the register, next to the specials, as though a stranger's birthday were a thing worth keeping.
They did not have to.
When spring comes, eleven people who do not know me will march out of that kitchen with fire, and a terrible hat, and a song that is legally not the song, and they will decide, for four minutes, that the day I was born was a good day.
I am going to let them.
I am going to sit up straight, the way my father sat, and I am going to weep in a Texas family restaurant in front of God and the salad bar.
They will ask my name for the little paper hat.
I will give it the full weight it has carried for eight hundred years.
They will spell it wrong.
And it will be perfect.
Two weeks out from camp, @NFL players are taking their final deep breath (last laps, last sets, last vacation, & last mental reset.) Theyโre at base camp, staring up at a six-month Everest grind. The climb starts soon. ๐๏ธ
TOMODACHI.
TOMODACHI.
TOMODACHI!!!
Not "Operation Relief."
Not "Operation Support."
Not some cold military code name.
America looked at a drowning nation
and chose ONE word. OUR word.
FRIEND.
Do you understand what that did to us?!
That word rebuilt our hearts before our houses.
That's why Tokyo lit the sky for YOU last night. ๐
HAPPY 250th, AMERICA!! ๐ฏ๐ต๐บ๐ธ
Freedom has never been free.
Thank you to every warrior, patriot, hunter, rancher, worker, law enforcement officer, first responder, and veteran who keeps the American Spirit alive.
Happy 250th birthday to the greatest country on Earth.
God Bless America. ๐บ๐ธ
HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!! ๐บ๐ธ๐ค๐ฏ๐ต
250 years of freedom deserves art this EPIC!!
Japan's greatest wave meets America's greatest birthday!! ๐๐
Hokusai's masterpiece is now made of stars and stripes, a samurai is riding it, and Mt. Fuji dressed up for the party!!
Happy birthday America! I am very proud, No, I am extremely proud to be a Christian American! Born and raised in this beautiful land, which I love! Yes, I love America! #USA
Japanese fireworks masters built ONE shell just for America's 250th birthday.
Its only job: write "250" across the whole Tokyo Bay sky.
IT WORKED ON THE FIRST TRY!! ๐๐๐
A samurai lit the fuse. The sky answered. The crowd LOST IT!!
Happy Birthday America!! Japan does NOT miss birthdays!! ๐บ๐ธ๐ค๐ฏ๐ต
Happy 250th Anniversary to the greatest country in the world. Lest we forget, without Americaโs Veterans, America simply wouldnโt exist. All gave some. Some, gave all. God Bless America.
๐จRapper Flo Rida just praised Jesus Christ from the stage of President Trump's Great American State Fair in front of a MASSIVE crowd.
The Left tried to cancel Flo Rida for not backing out. They failed.
Hallelujah! God bless @Official_Flo