It’s happened in schools, in churches, in malls, in supermarkets, in nightclubs, in movie theaters and, yes parades. It happened again yesterday. A million people turned out for the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl Parade. It was a chance to show community pride. Get a closer look at your sports heroes. The Super Bowl is national day of anticipation and coming together. Sharing food and rooting for a team even if your team isn’t playing. But if your team is playing, it can be a very emotional experience. If your team wins, it becomes a life long memory of a great day. A couple of days later, people skip work, some schools even close and you welcome your team back to town as they show off the Lombardi Trophy and share their joy. Everyone should go home happy. That didn’t happen yesterday.

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We’ve done it for a few years. We take a trip to Florida to get out of the cold, damp, and mostly miserable weather in the northeast for a few weeks in January and February. The hope is we’ll enjoy warm, sunny weather to sit on the beach or by the pool, or play golf. But there are no guarantees when it comes to weather. There is really no other reason to go to Florida. Besides the beach and the ocean, there is no other interesting landscape or geographic feature. It is flat, with one strip mall after another. The multi laned streets seem more congested than not and red lights are too long. There are a lot an old people. So the obvious question is why do we go? Again, back to our original intent. A warm break from the cold weather. But the weather doesn’t always cooperate.

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He looked about three years old. He wore a green life vest and matching green plastic goggles held in place with an elastic band. It was a beautiful, breezy beach day in mid-January in West Palm Beach. It was only the second beach day we had enjoyed since we arrived here over a week ago. He caught my eye as soon as I walked to the ocean’s edge. He ran in short, choppy steps as all little boys do running on the sand. Little girls always seem more graceful. He was charging in and out the water. Jumping the waves. He would get knocked down and jump up for more. He had a big smile on his face. He would lift his goggles up to look out at the ocean as if to say this is real and it’s all mine.  He had no fear. He was like millions of little kids who meet this force of nature greater than themselves. He had what I assume was an older brother, maybe about six years old, who was jumping around a little farther out in the water. Their mother was watching from her chair on the beach. There was also a little girl who was running in and out of the water and an older teenage boy buried in the sand. He got up to walk their small dog.

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The new year may bring us one of the most dangerous years in history. The racist and anti-Semitic language of two of the people who want to be the next president should snap us to attention. Donald Trump has done little to hide his racist beliefs. I could recite a long list. But his most recent remarks are so shocking and ignorant it shows us the depths to which our political discourse has descended. In a recent speech, Trump took aim again at immigrants and why we should keep them out. He said, “They are poisoning the blood of our country.” That should make us stop in our tracks. He did get some criticism, but his devoted followers continue to cheer him. He than got the chance to explain himself.

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I know you’ve been waiting for a follow-up to my blog two weeks ago about the stolen van loaded with ten-thousand Krispy Kreme donuts in Australia. The story gained world wide interest. A woman was seen on surveillance video at a gas station in Carlingford outside of Sydney jumping into an unmarked white van at 3:30am while the driver was inside paying his bill. We still don’t know when the woman discovered the van was full of donuts.

This just in, police found the van abandoned at a car park a week after it was stolen. They describe the donuts as “destroyed”. Not sure if that means spoiled or something too terrible to describe. A twenty-eight year old woman was arrested at St. Mary’s Railway station. She’s charged with vehicle theft and driving while disqualified. She has been refused bail and is sitting in jail.

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It was 3:30am this past Wednesday at a gas station in Carlingford, Australia northwest of Sydney. A woman was seen hanging around the gas pumps near a white unmarked van. The driver was inside paying for his gas. Surveillance video shows the woman jumping in the van and taking off. We don’t know when she realized the van contained ten-thousand Krispy Kreme donuts. At four dollars a donut, that’s $10,000 worth of Classic and Christmas donuts. We don’t know how the driver explained this to his boss when he called in to report the incident. We don’t know if the thief realized what her cargo was before she stole the van, or if the sweet smell of fresh donuts made her turn around and see she was in a hole lot more trouble.

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Lee Harvey Oswald began working at the Texas School Book Depository about six weeks before he became the most infamous man in the world. He was an “order filler”. He worked on the first and sixth floors. He would gather books from an order sheet and deliver them to the first floor shipping room. It could be described as simple, repetitive work. Oswald lived in a rooming house in Dallas. His wife and two young daughters, the youngest only a month old at the time, rented rooms in a house in Irving, Texas about fifteen miles from the Depository. Oswald didn’t own a car and would get a ride every Friday out to see his family and get a ride back to work Monday morning from co-worker Buell Frazier. Frazier lived with his sister a half a block from where Oswald’s family lived. The routine changed on November 21, 1963. Oswald asked Frazier for a ride out to Irving on Thursday night. Frazier was surprised and asked why. Oswald said, “I’m going home to get some curtain rods to put in an apartment.” That was a lie.

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Eighteen year of Jillian Ludwig a freshman at Belmont University in Nashville was walking on a track in a park in the middle of the afternoon this week. The bullet hit her in the head. She was found almost an hour later taken to a hospital where she died two days later. Ludwig had only been at Belmont for less than three months. She was from Wall Township, New Jersey. She played the bass guitar and was studying music business. She posted videos of herself playing the bass and the piano. She performed at events around Wall. She was well liked with her whole life ahead of her. The person who fired the shot should never have had a gun. But instead of the law preventing him from having it, it allowed him to have it.

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We have one week before everything changes. We had the last late gasp of summer over the weekend when the temperature hit 80 degrees. The leaves were at their peak of red, orange and yellow. But they will be joining the dry, brown, dying leaves that have been crunching under foot for weeks. This last week before we give up Daylight Saving Time and go back to Standard Time feels like a curtain is coming down on the warmth of summer and cool sunshine of autumn. The kids all hope it will stay warm one last day so they don’t have to wear layers under their Halloween costumes. It will be dark by five o’clock and by December 21st, it will closer to four-thirty. The world will feel smaller and  darker.

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“In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans, who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president, is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.”

These are the words of Senator John McCain conceding the 2008 election to Barack Obama. They seem to come from another time. McCain was showing grace and eloquence on the most disappointing night of his political career. He realized the historic significance was more important than his own feelings.

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