Dan Gray Today Story

“What’s your name?”

“Farmer One. What’s your name?”

“Pig One.”

These simple sentences are the zenith of the third graders’ English at the school where I teach in Dresden. Today we are acting out the three little pigs: I say a line, the students repeat it, and then I tell them what it means so they can act it out. There’s a beautiful delay between when the kids say, “I have some bricks!” and when they pretend to hold bricks by sagging their arms and buckling their knees.

As I teach, I think about Aidan, who I angered by calling his essay about Emily Dickinson pompous. He’s my only friend, so I was happy when he sent me a bouquet of Dickinson’s poems that reference flowers, like ancient lilacs and a window filled with a permanent rainbow. Aidan thinks Dickinson is afraid of dying and losing the beauty of the world; I think that the transient radiance of a hyacinth rainbow is a perfect metaphor for the way that we, dying, live: defiantly displaying our beauty and never quite believing that we could be anything but eternal.

I think about how Nora, my niece, doesn’t yet have the words to describe the fleeting, chaotic beauty of experience, and how Neil, when a butterfly landed next to him, said that “it just seemed to delight in opening and closing its wings and just actually being beautiful for that period of time.” I look at the tissue paper roses that I have in a waterless vase on my window: they won’t live and they won’t die.

Lily’s text says “Maurice Sendak.” I know that he’s gone and I imagine a boat sailing in and out of weeks and through a day. I think back to the last time I heard him, when he said, “I cry a lot because people die and I can’t stop them. It’s like a dream life, but, you know, there’s something I am finding out as I’m aging: that I am in love with the world.”

And I sit on the banks of the Elbe and the water is always rushing away but the river never leaves me, and I am calm.

Unexplainable, Inexcusable

No one has been able to explain to me why young men... and women serve in the U.S. Military for 20 years, risking their lives protecting freedom, and only get 50% of their pay. While Politicians hold their political positions in the safe confines of the capital, protected by these same men and women, and receive full pay retirement after serving one term. It just does not make any sense.

On Fox news they learned that the staffers of Congress family members are exempt from having to pay back student loans. This will get national attention if other news networks will broadcast it. When you add this to the below, just where will all of it stop?

35 States file lawsuit against the Federal Government

Governors of 35 states have filed suit against the Federal Government for imposing unlawful burdens upon them. It only takes 38 (of the 50) States to convene a Constitutional Convention.

This will take less than thirty seconds to read. If you agree, please pass it on.

This is an idea that we should address.

For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens had no idea that members of Congress could retire with the same pay after only one term, that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws. The latest is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform... in all of its forms. Somehow, that doesn't seem logical. We do not have an elite that is above the law. I truly don't care if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever. The self-serving must stop.

If each person that receives this will post it on their wall, in three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message.. This is one proposal that really should be passed around.

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution: "Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States .."

Now, what are you going to do about it? Read and delete, or work for reform? Share on the wall of EVERY congressman, representative, governor, the white house!!!!! Pass it around!!! Make calls, send fax's and email's...............

— with Veterans Freedom, Desertstorm Veterans, Steven Sonich, Bob Veteran and Veterans.See More
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