Checking Out the Free Stuff

Tim still has a turntable and a lot of our old record collection, so he was interested in the receiver we took out of our television console. The box in  front of John is just a box. It contained a new soundbar which Jim thought was necessary. The old one is on the table in front of Tim along with a couple of speakers which still have fire ash on top of them since they were in the highest reaches of the library shelves. We're still finding corners that even the 'deep cleaners' failed to reach.

Tim also talked me through me a moment of dismay when I thought I had lost all the music on my playlists. It turns out that it had been so long since I listened to it that it had all retreated to the cloud. Once we got the little Bose speaker going and synched everything up, I was back in business. I guess we just didn't feel like listening to music during lockdown....

Tim also took one look at the big plastic container of 'wort' in our bathroom which have been bubbling by now and wasn't and said it was because the lid wasn't fully sealed. Now it is bubbling happily happily away.* He also brought several bottles of his own home brew batch#2.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the day the planes flew into the World Trade Center in new York, The Pentagon in Washington D.C. and a field in Pennsylvania (thanks to the heroics of a group of passengers who took control of the plane and prevented it from crashing into the nation's capitol.)

I'm  realizing that our children are raising a whole generation that has no memory of that day. Nobody in my generation will ever forget it, and it was our children who called us and said, 'turn on your television'. My hope for the memory of that day is not the fact that it was a terrorist attack that would change our lives forever, but the way in which the nation came together in shock and grief as well as in heroism and determination. Some people flew American flags and we looked at them with pride as well as with tears in our eyes for our lost innocence.

It didn't last. In fact we are so deeply divided now as to be almost dysfunctional, but I really hope that the memory we have of that time is the way we joined together and not the way we have fallen apart.