Ciao, Y'all!

The Eternala City - she is bellisimo!

Tonight was a Rome by Night tour and it was very cool. We'd seen most of it today but everything is better at night.

I will have full stories, with pictures, coming next week but I didn't want you to think I'd abandoned you.

We are having a wonderful time, and there are LOTS of stories to share, but I have limited time on the internet so I will sign off for tonight.

Ciao!

Inspiration

I wrote the other day in my other blog about being called someone's inspiration. It felt good and made me feel all warm inside.

I want to do the same today.

My cousin has her own blog, www.i-get-to.blogspot.com, and she wrote the other day about an idea that she had after talking to a soldier in the Dallas airport. Her idea was to buy some McDonald's gift cards and have them with you when you travel over the holidays and give them to soldiers. Help them save some of their traveling money and say thank you at the same time.

Awesome idea, I say!

Somehow her regional McDonald's office found out about her idea and is helping to supply her with the gift cards. Awesome again I say, on their part. And she will be teaching her children a very valuable lesson this year about truly giving.

Not that her children need that particular lesson - if you read about them you will see that they are already pretty incredible kids and give a lot of themselves very unselfishly.

So, I've been inspired and I hope you will be also. Billy and I are traveling this week and I'm going to get some cards today to take with us. I don't know if we'll see any military but I want to be prepared. Though, I suspect we will run into plenty of them when we come home through Atlanta after Thanksgiving.

I'm also thinking of taking it a step further. I have a lot of points on credit cards and hotel rewards and such. I'm going to sell those for other gift cards to help the soldiers with some Christmas shopping. I know several of the websites are set up to do it and it only takes a few clicks on my part. So what if I'm giving up a free night; they give up sleeping in a bed every night.

These men and women do so much that they deserve all this and more.

So, thank you, Darla, for your wonderful, inspired and inspiring idea. I'd love to hear from anyone else with a thought. Let's take this and run with it and see how many folks we can help.

When Heroes Fall - 2

Today we remember the true heroes, our military men and women. In light of the events this week, I don't think we can ever thank them enough for what they do, what they sacrifice, what their families give up for the rest of us.

But I will try.

To any soldier out there, past or present, or their family, that may read this: thank you, thank you, thank you.

Now, your mission, should you accept it, go hug a soldier.

Or at least say thanks.

When Heroes Fall

OK, it was bad enough when Andre Agassi admitted that he used crystal meth. I was incredibly disappointed. He was one of the reasons I started watching tennis all those many years ago. I remember the controversy with Wimbledon the first year he played in the 80s and their all-white apparel policy. It was pretty much understood that Andre didn't even own anything white, much less wear it on the tennis court. He was known at that time for playing in bright colors, denim shorts and nothing remotely conventional.

He walked out on the court that day in a long, white, bathrobe-type garment and all white underneath. I can still see him.

He conformed.

So, his image is tarnished now - you remember the Canon commercials he did, Image Is Everything - but I didn't think it could get worse.

Then I read an excerpt from his new book - the autobiography that started it all.

That hair that I loved so much, that long blond spiked mullet that I truly crushed on as a young adult was nothing but a weave.

Fake.

Devastating.

Billy and I had long suspected the Hair Club for Men. When Andre did finally shave his head (strongly resembling the Mr. Clean genie) the hairline made it obvious that his hair had been receding, but I honestly never thought that a hairpiece was involved.

I mean seriously - he was only in his late twenties/early thirties.

Why did he have to tell?

What purpose was served?

This is something I've never understood. Why people, especially those in the public eye, feel the need to open up and spill their deepest and darkest secrets.

I remember a discussion I participated in one time, although I don't remember the context, and the topic was why a person will share information that only ends up hurting someone else. Like an affair. Why tell your spouse you've been having an affair if you've truly ended it and felt remorse and so forth? The only thing that comes from a confession is that the other party ends up feeling horrible.

And they did nothing about which to feel horrible.

They say confession is good for the soul, but I think the soul is the other thing that benefits. Rarely does any good come from laying everything out on the table.

I tried to put a more positive spin on the drug use - it wasn't a performance-enhancing drug. If fact, quite the opposite. He fell to 141st in the rankings and had to start playing qualifying tournaments. He didn't use regularly or for very long, only about a year.

But he lied when caught. I wish that he would have "manned up" and taken his suspension at the time and then put it behind him. Yes, he lied to the officials but he did actually take the right steps, stopped using, and made his way back up to a champion.

But it still hurts.

Of course, this isn't the first time that one of my heroes has disappointed me. Some of the people that I've loved and cared about the most in my life have let me down.

Not being perfect, I know that I've disappointed a lot of people myself. And I'm far from being anyone's "hero".

I do try, though, to go back and remember what it was that I first admired. It takes time, but I try. Andre has done wonderful charity work in Las Vegas with children and he honestly loved all the fans and tried his utmost out on the court - even though in the book he says he hates tennis. You never knew it to watch him play. He made tennis come to life for me and I loved, loved, loved watching him play.

I guess that is the hardest thing to do. To see past the disappointment. To not let the hurt overshadow the good that you've known for so long. That is particularly hard with those we love the most. We sometimes hold our loved ones up so high, on a pedestal taller than the tallest building, that when they fall in our eyes, they fall long and hard. I'm still trying to work past a few.

Which circles me back to my earlier question. If given the opportunity to confess to something we've done, should we? Is it fair to unburden our soul only to place that burden of knowledge on another's shoulders? What purpose is served? Wouldn't we be better people if we somehow dealt with our demons privately?

I guess there just seems to be so much out there right now - David Letterman and his affairs with his staff workers, Makenzie Phillips and the unspeakable things that happened with her father, and so on. Not that either of those two are heroes to me, but still.....

Some things are just better left unsaid.

I mean, I could have died happy some day not ever knowing about the hair.

The Times, They Are A'Changing

We had one trick-or-treater last night.

1

O-n-e.

And I left the light on until 7:30. (The Chief of Police said he thought everyone should be finished by 8).

Our mayor had designated from 5 to 6:30 last night for children to trick-or-treat at the downtown businesses (odd for a Saturday when most were closed, I know) so I thought, living a few blocks from the main downtown streets, that we would have a few.

But we had one. An adorable Spiderman who was probably between 3 and 4 years old. His daddy stood next to him as he peered into my candy bowl. I picked up a bag of Whopppers and asked "Would you also like a Snickers?"

His head bobbed up and down so fast! "Uhhh uhhhh!"

His daddy told him to say Yes ma'am so he did and then turned around to go down the steps to his mom, waving the candy in his hand.

His daddy reminded him to say thank you, and he did.

I came back in the house and was telling Billy about our little visitor and how I remembered my dad keeping a little notebook with tally marks each year to see how many children came by. I guess that was his way of gauging the age of the neighborhood.

(I also remember a lot of funny stories involving a particularly hideous rubber mask that we got at Disney World but that's another post! Daddy got more use out of that mask. It was a man's face with warts and a big nose and it was just awful. I will tell you the funniest thing, though. When we got those masks (I got a Frankenstein, for the record) Mom and Dad put this one on my sister - who was still young enough to be in the stroller - say maybe 3 years old - and people would stop to see the child and do a double-take when this awful face, with two blond ponytails, was staring back at them. They just were expecting to see a sweet child's face and not this "thing". It really was funny. I know I'm not doing it justice.)

Anyway, Billy made the comment that he couldn't believe there still was trick-or-treating with the people have been acting.

And he's right.

After having the wonderfully positive story of Jaycee Duggard being returned to her family 19 years after being kidnapped, we had two more beautiful young girls in a matter of weeks that weren't so lucky.

(And to the person who threw that precious 7 year old girl from Florida in the trash so she'd end up in a landfill......that action was so far beyond reprehensible that I can't find an adjective strong enough. Being a lady precludes me from typing here what I wish would happen to that person.)

It made me stop and think.

We all rolled our clocks back an hour last night. What if we could roll back time about 50 years instead? To a time when families stayed together, you knew your neighbors and they helped you look after your children, church was a common part of everyone's lives, neighborhoods and communities truly existed. To a time when you could spank your child for misbehaving and a "time out" was only in sports. Maybe even back to when you could sleep at night with your doors unlocked. My house is locked up now 24/7 - especially when I'm in it.

I remember when Adam Walsh was taken from the Sears store in Florida - late 70s I think. It was big news because it was a rare occurrence. You really can't say that anymore.

Which is sad.

Like a lot of things, I wonder how we got here.

I'm thinking if we could "fall back" about 50 years then maybe when we "spring forward" we could just skip the 60s this time.