VIEW FROM MY WINDOW (HAPPY DAY-AFTER EDITION)

Good work, beautiful strangers. So many big and true and better things will be said by others about what happened yesterday. But I want to write something, if only just to feel I'm marking the moment in my tiny way. This week I got a nice email from an old lost friend of mine from Page Ave, Louisville KY days which got me thinking about the things we did as kids. Sometime around the bicentennial, my existence became very focused around the stickers that said "Spirit of '76". Maybe they came in Cheerios boxes. I remember the stickers arriving suddenly from everywhere and being suddenly everywhere, stuck on bikes, on all surfaces in my room. Patriotism wasn't a concept I really could wrap my six-year-old brain around. I was just intoxicated by the Spirit of '76, like some kindergarten Kerouac jazzed up on the idea of that giant abstract adult thing America stretching out beyond Page Ave and celebrating an unimaginably big birthday. I guess Star Wars would come and distract us all a year later, but for a while it felt like being an American alive right then was the coolest, luckiest thing ever. And that's sort of how it feels today.