Clouds allowed

Since two of my favorite things are clouds and rain, it's hard for me to think of my son Andrew being in a place that hardly ever sees any of either.

It's nothing but sun, sand, and blistering hot wind, in a relentless cycle.

In fact, he'd been in Qatar for weeks before seeing -- in the distance as he flew -- a buildup of clouds over the mountains of northern Afghanistan.

And he's up in the air nearly every day.

But last week, at last -- cloud cover.

And on the wing of the KC-135 Stratotanker, cruising high above those clouds over Iraq, was a McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle.

I don't know what's prettier: the clouds, the fighter jet, or the distinctive wing of the plane carrying my boy.

You decide.

God Bless America.

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Happy Thursday

Our happy place

Yesterday was the annual Cow Appreciation Day at Chick-fil-A.

That's the day when, if you make even a passing stab at impersonating a bovine unit, you get free food.

Thus, we had our dinner there.

(No; yours truly did not dress like a heifer so save yourself the effort of scrolling down quickly to see it. I eat cow and chicken, but not carbs -- so all I ingested was a supersized frosty-cold diet lemonade.)

Stephanie and the kids were in for a few days of swimming so we were a large, hungry, push-some-tables-together kind of group.

But we were only nine amongst hundreds of moovers and shakers thronging the CFA in West Columbia.

TG had bought the kids white t-shirts. Stephanie cut out black blobs from construction paper and attached them with masking tape circles.

It worked like a charm. Everybody had plenty and we even brought home leftovers.

The employees -- as always at Chick-fil-A -- were courteous, kind, patient, conscientious, attentive, cheerful, and efficient. And that was near the tail-end of what had to have been an exhausting day.

Booyah. Eat more chikin.

God bless America, especially the all-American traditional-values purveyors of fine fast food like Chick-fil-A.

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Happy Wednesday

Dagny :: A baker's dozen

Dagny turned one year old a whole month ago and I've yet to tell you about the extent to which we celebrated.

That's because a lot has happened in our fair state since then.

But now that Dagny is thirteen months old, I thought it high time to make amends.

Before reading further, you should know that we don't do over-the-top Pinterest-inspired birthday parties in our family. The most likely reason is that we're too lazy.

Even so, we weren't without a theme.

For her baby's party, Audrey wanted vibrant colors, flowers and butterflies. Happy things.

We found everything we needed -- except the cake, and Dagny's actual presents -- at the dollar store.

Audrey stylishly and cleverly mixed stripes with petals and polka-dots. The effect was innocent but bursting with life, just like Dagny.

She found bright flower cutouts strung on invisible line that we hung from the ceiling behind where the birthday girl would sit, to form a backdrop.

There were mylar balloons. A little kid cannot have a birthday party without mylar balloons.

Audrey skewered marshmallows onto bright-pink straws and dredged them through chocolate, then sprinkles.

I made pulled-pork barbecue and we had the usual sides.

Aunt Stephanie and the cousins came from North Carolina. My parents came from Greenville. Uncle Andrew, having deployed to Qatar a week earlier, texted his greetings.

It was hot. Mucho caliente.

Did I mention it was hot? All emotional events are made worse by ambient heat. Remember that.

The party got underway at around two in the afternoon with our meal, followed by presents, then cake and coffee.

Dagny received books and toys and beautiful outfits, accompanied by cards both homemade and store-bought.

Aunt "Fashionista" Erica gave her a pink hat, a sartorial expression of which Dagny appeared both duly enamored and faintly wary.

The ooohs and aaaahhhs went on for what seemed like hours. I was so hot.

Dagny truly didn't know what to make of all the fuss, although she seemed early on to have made peace with the attention she was getting.

Audrey had bought the baby an elaborate cupcake but Dag was clueless about that too. I guess she's never heard of a smash cake.

Allissa and Audrey, one on each side, took turns feeding fingerfuls of eye-wateringly sweet frosting to the Birthday Small-Fry until she was in a quasi-stupor.

As it should be.

Before all the celebrating got genuinely underway, I took some shots of Audrey and Dagny together. I call it pirate posterity.

The next day -- June fourteenth, Daggy's actual first birthday -- she wore her Birthday Girl badge to church.

That afternoon -- it remained awfully hot out, I am just saying -- Audrey and I managed a mini-shoot with the still-buoyant balloons and Dagny decked out in a pale-pink ballerina-decorated dress, a gift from me and TG.

The baby hammed it up with her balloons. She's always been a good sport when it comes to posing to have her picture made. Here's hoping that trend continues.

All events taken together were a curious mix of joyous and exhausting. When it was over, poor tender-hearted Audrey practically had to take to her bed. The emotional expenditure was nearly too much.

Ah, babies. To quote Melanie Wilkes: The happiest days are when babies come.

The second-happiest days have to be when we give our hearts, minds, and energies to marking -- with food, fun, and flourishes, with gifts and with our time -- another whole year in which we've had those babies to love.

In eleven months we'll do it all again. Until then, Happy Every Day to you, precious baby Dagny.

And that is all for now.

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Happy Monday ~ Happy Week

SkyWatch Friday :: Symbolism over substance

The Confederate battle flag as it appeared last evening on its final night beside the Confederate Soldier's Monument on the grounds of the South Carolina State House.

This beloved banner has proudly waved there for the last fifteen years, since it was brought down from the capitol dome on July 1, 2000.

This morning it was denied even this small space, forever.

But removing a flag for the sake of political correctness, stubbornly and blindly ignoring historical facts, won't make it true that racism -- a street that goes both ways all day long, my friends -- has been instantly eradicated from the hearts and minds of men.

Any more than the flag's presence on the South Carolina State House grounds stood for and promoted racism in the first place.

The politically-motivated decision to remove the flag is a textbook example of placing symbolism over substance -- a sorry basis for any action, even in the worst of circumstances and with the best of intentions.

God Bless America. Protect and preserve her from all enemies, foreign and domestic -- especially domestic.

Because trust me: Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but the next target of liberal progressives who have commandeered our government is the Star Spangled Banner -- symbol, according to many of them, of all oppression and imperialism that has existed globally since 1776.

May God continue to bless the Sovereign State of South Carolina and those of her people who seek His face.

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Happy Friday

Here be dragons

In recent days there has been talk (I don't know how serious and I'm too lazy and/or disinterested to find out) of banning the movie Gone With the Wind.

You know. Because racist.

Fiddle dee dee. I've got nearly every frame memorized. Racy it may be but racist it ain't.

Funny but it's the Hollyweird crowd -- the ones responsible for the movie being made in the first place -- who are the most demented liberals of all. Many if not most of these overpaid narcissists would likely be on board with ridding society of the film that many if not most culturally literate people consider the greatest motion picture ever made.

Given their marching orders by the Democrat Party, they'd clasp arms and sway in a circle singing Kumbaya -- provided they were sober enough to stand -- while every last copy of Gone With the Wind (the movie) in every known media format was thrown on the fascist-fueled fire along with D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.

Then they'd snort a few lines and start tossing inconvenient reading materials onto the pyre, maybe starting with The Hiding Place by the late Holocaust survivor (and Christian) Corrie Ten Boom -- a book which, along with others like it, was banned late last year from at least one school in -- wait for it -- California.

I own a collectors' copy of GWTW (the book), with the coveted First Edition dust jacket. I read Margaret Mitchell's only novel cover-to-cover when I was a teenager.

A few years back, I and my daughters paid our respects at Margaret Mitchell's grave. If you're ever in downtown Atlanta, you can visit her too. She's in Historic Oakland Cemetery.

In addition, I've read the definitive biography of the author: Southern Daughter. If you want to understand the fascinating "smart set" of the interwar South -- as the book's cover observes, a class of people also gone with the wind -- this is the tome for you.

Thumbing through the book today just for kicks, I came across a Margaret Mitchell quote that made me laugh out loud.

On this Independence Day as so much of the only America I've ever known hangs in the balance, I wanted to share with you what the brilliant "Peggy" Mitchell thought of the motion picture industry, a smart set that she was convinced would have no interest in making her book into a film:

My innocent chickadees, do not lull yourseles into any sense of false security or think that you will emerge from any slight contact with the movies with all your sanity still with you ... as you know, I was in the trenches for four years, from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, fighting them off every day. They are very fine and charming people, but it is my belief that they originated on the planet Mars where atmospheric conditions are different and customs strange to us. They are attractive and incredible, and with no trouble at all, can drive normal people to frenzies.

As for the rest of the problems that beset us not just in the American South, but in its North, West, and East as well, and to quote Scarlett O'Hara herself:

I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.

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Happy Saturday ~ Happy Fourth of July ~ God Bless America