When you think of terrorist attacks during the month of September, at least in the past seven years, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Penatgon are the ones that jump to mind first.

But another kind of terrorist attack happened in the month of September, and it happened 45 years ago today, on a quiet Sunday morning, when several men connected to a Ku Klux Klan group planted sticks of dynamite outside the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church, a black church in Birmingham, Alabama.  Shortly after the sermon ended, as young children were walking towards the basement for closing prayers, the dynamite exploded, killing four young girls.

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had been a rallying point in the civil rights movement, and the bombing was clearly meant to send a stern message.

A message that some, unfortunately, would still like to send today.  What does it take for some people to learn from tragedy and past mistakes?  And why does it sometimes take so long?

It’s hard to believe that it has already been seven years since that terrible morning in 2001.

I’ve blogged about how I spent that day in an edit bay, editing footage from the scene that was feeding in from Washington, New York and Pennsylvania.  I’ve talked about watching interview after interview of people dealing with unimaginable emotions, having just witnessed those terrible moments firsthand.  And I’ve talked about watching interviews of family members of those who lost their lives that day.  (Click here for some of my 9/11 posts.)

Somehow, it’s still fresh in my mind.  Not quite as if it were yesterday, but more like it was just a few months ago.

I watched some of the “as it happened” clips of 9/11 on YouTube last night.  I tried to avoid interviews there.  I’ve seen plenty of them since then.  A lot of people still can’t watch those images, and I understand that.  I guess we all deal with things in our own way, no matter how long it takes.

I hope you’ll take time today to remember the victims of 9/11, and their families whose struggle to cope will likely never end.

Olive Riley found her blog “mind-boggling,” her great grandson says. It allowed her to make friends from around the world and maintain contact with people who were fascinated by her stories of growing up in the early 1900s.

“She enjoyed the notoriety — it kept her mind fresh,” he told a news agency.

And fresh it certainly seemed to be. She recalled in clear detail life at the turn of the century — the last one, that is. Born in 1899, (can you imagine?!?) she shared her thoughts about modern life and living through two world wars and raising three children. Though her mind remained sharp, she didn’t actually type up her blog, The Life of Riley. Her vision wouldn’t allow her to do the typing, but she had help in getting her stories transcribed.

“You 21st century people live a different life than the one I lived as a youngster in the early 1900s,” she wrote in a recent post about how laundry was done by hand. Her very first post of slightly more than 70 described a visit to see relatives she hadn’t seen in 80 years, and she jokes of being the target of too much attention from well-wishing relatives went so far as to tie a bell on her walker so they would know if she got up in the middle of the night:

“We’ll, I was so sick of that bell, that one night I got th idea of stuffing a sock in it so I’d have some peace and quiet. But you know, when I got to the bathroom, I must have bumped something because that bell rang again and there they all were ‘Nana’s up! Nana’s up!’ And then it was the landing instructions. ‘Back you go now, Nana, lower yerself down, now. That’s the spot’ O Gawd.”

Another recent post encouraged her readers to sing happy songs, advice Riley herself took to heart in one of her final YouTube videos:

If we ever make it to 108, we’d be lucky to be as sharp as she is.  The same can be said if we make it even to 88!

I’m sorry I missed Olive.  I’d have loved to leave her a comment that she might have heard read to her by one of her caregivers.  I hope she’s still looking down here seeing what people who’ve just now found her have to say.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

—George Carlin

George Carlin was one of a kind. And that’s the saddest part of his sudden death on Sunday of heart failure.

When I was little, I remember seeing Carlin on HBO specials. I was too young to remember the Al Sleet (hippie dippie weatherman) routines from the Carson and Sullivan shows. And by the time he had made his way to HBO, his shows were of an unapologetically adult fashion. So I’d only get to catch a clip of him before Mom would make Dad change the channel.

But once I heard a full routine, I laughed all the way through it. My favorite routine — and picking a single favorite took a lot of time — was the bit about a safety lecture on the plane; it was an attack on the ridiculous and the misuse of language all rolled up into one. And it contained a line I borrowed here not all that long ago:

“The next sentence is just full of things that piss me off.”

Here’s a clip from that one:

I’ve stolen the part about near misses several times, and I’m always amazed at how many people have to stop and think about it. (Refer to the opening quote!)

In the coverage reporting his death, I’ve seen many words used to describe him: acerbic, witty, irreverent, frenzied, social commentator, philosopher, and icon.

But it was Jack Burns, his former comedy partner from the early days who said it best:  “He was a genius and I’ll miss him dearly.”

So will a lot of us.

Two things generally happen when a well-known person dies.

He is mourned, his accomplishments noted, his humanity honored by some. He is insulted, his accomplishments slighted, his humanity devalued in favor of getting partisan or personal grievances at the top of the page by others. The former is appropriate, and the latter is not…at least right away.

It doesn’t take long to find a lot of sadness and a lot of accolades for Tim Russert, NBC Washington Bureau Chief, moderator of Meet the Press, and the man responsible for orchestrating NBC’s government and political news coverage.

There’s also the less-common snippet of slights, pointing out this occasion or that occasion when he didn’t ask enough questions, or didn’t needle one person as much as he seemed to needle someone else, or didn’t sufficiently “skewer” someone the commenter didn’t like.

I had a great deal of respect for Russert.  I don’t watch many political shows, because most of them aren’t news programs so much as opinionated crap or pointless yelling back and forth that reminds me of having a meal with my father’s side of the family:  the arguing turns my stomach.  But I watched Meet the Press.  I was always impressed with Russert’s ability to pull quotes and video clips of his interview subjects, pointing out where they had previously told a different story or made a different promise.

The man did his homework.  Far more homework than some interviewers ever bother to do.

No reporter can ever ask “enough” questions.  Interviews would never end.

No reporter can ever be prepared for every lie, every distortion, and every little white lie.

And contrary to what some politicos might think, it isn’t a reporter’s job to “rake someone over the coals.”  They’re supposed to ask the questions, let the public hear the answers, and ultimately let people judge for themselves who’s right and who’s wrong.  When it’s clear that someone is wrong, and a reporter can prove it beyond a doubt, he should.  Otherwise, there comes a point where the public has to spend a little bit of time actually thinking about what’s going on, rather than being spoon-fed what they should or shouldn’t believe.

If you’re looking for someone to think for you, tune in to mindless commentary like Rush Limbaugh.  No thinking person can truly believe everything people like him say.

For the rest of us, there’s a big void in the world of journalism tonight.  We’ll miss a tough interviewer who did ask tough questions and tougher follow-ups.  And Sundays just won’t be the same.

One year ago today, it was “100 Years Ago Today,” a post I wrote about my maternal grandmother, who would have celebrated her 100th birthday.

I had arranged to take flowers to her grave in Barnwell County, South Carolina.  It was the first time I had been to her grave since she was buried their twenty-five years earlier.  I don’t know — I didn’t know then and still don’t know today — why I felt such a need to go there.  The one hundredth birthday is a milestone, but these days every birthday is something of a milestone.  And if we live the way we should, we should treat every single day, every single moment, as a milestone at which something extraordinary can occur.

Sorry, guess I’m dreaming a little too much today.

Of all of my grandparents and step-grandparents, she was the one to whom I was closest.  Her death in 1982 was the first major loss I experienced among people close to me.

Often, far more often than I would have expected after the passage of this much time, I think about her and wonder if she’s up there looking down at me.  I wonder if she is proud of what she sees.

And yes, I have very serious doubts.

She was a mother and a grandmother.  She did things for people who needed help until she was no longer able to do for herself.  She was always generous.  And those people she loved were fully loved.  I still miss that.

I have tried to imagine things she might have said over the course of the past 12 months.  I’ve wondered what she would have thought about my accomplishments, largely unimportant as they are, and what advice she would have given me.

But somehow, it has never quite been the same.

“It takes a certain type of person to be a television star. I didn’t have whatever that is. I come across as kind of snobbish and maybe a little too bright. … Give me something bizarre to play or put me in a dress and I’m fine.”

—Harvey Korman

One of the main reasons I loved watching the TV classic The Carol Burnett Show was the pairing of Tim Conway and Harvey Korman. Whenever those two shared a scene, you knew it was going to be funny…not only because of the performance itself, but because of Korman’s usually-failed attempts to keep a straight face as Conway did his schtick.

Korman has died at age 81.

From voicing the Great Gazoo on The Flintstones to his portrayal of the egomaniacal Hedley Lamar in Blazing Saddles, he has left a legacy of decades of good humor for kids of all ages.

Years ago, Korman explained his inability to refrain from laughing at Conway by pointing out that a fellow performer never knew what Conway was going to do next. He would do things one way in rehearsal and apparently a completely different way at the actual show taping.

Somehow, the audience never seemed to mind Korman’s breakups. In fact, it made already-funny material all the more enjoyable.

Back in January of this year, he was operated on for a brain tumor. The operation was successful, but just days after returning home, he suffered the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm and was given just hours to live. He proved his doctors wrong, but after several major operations, he was just too weak. His daughter, Kate, said he fought until the very end. “He didn’t want to die. He fought for months and months,” she said in an AP article.

Carol Burnett is said to be devastated by Korman’s passing. Understandable. The world has lost part of its sense of humor.

I’ll wrap up this sad news with a clip of one of Korman and Conway’s most famous moments: Conway is playing a novice dentist who is a little too careless with a needle full of Novocaine.

Thanks for the many, many laughs, Harvey.

Here is an excerpt from one of Andy Rooney’s essays.  The topic, appropriately enough, is Memorial Day.  This was from a segment first broadcast on May 29, 2005:

“Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day we have set aside to honor by remembering all the Americans who have died fighting for the thing we like the most about our America: the freedom we have to live as we please.

No official day to remember is adequate for something like that. It’s too formal. It gets to be just another day on the calendar. No one would know from Memorial Day that Richie M., who was shot through the forehead coming onto Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, wore different color socks on each foot because he thought it brought him good luck.

No one would remember on Memorial Day that Eddie G. had promised to marry Julie W. the day after he got home from the war, but didn’t marry Julie because he never came home from the war. Eddie was shot dead on an un-American desert island, Iwo Jima.

For too many Americans, Memorial Day has become just another day off. There’s only so much time any of us can spend remembering those we loved who have died, but the men, boys really, who died in our wars deserve at least a few moments of reflection during which we consider what they did for us.

They died.

We use the phrase “gave their lives,” but they didn’t give their lives. Their lives were taken from them.

There is more bravery at war than in peace, and it seems wrong that we have so often saved this virtue to use for our least noble activity - war. The goal of war is to cause death to other people.

Because I was in the Army during World War II, I have more to remember on Memorial Day than most of you. I had good friends who were killed.

Charley Wood wrote poetry in high school. He was killed when his Piper Cub was shot down while he was flying as a spotter for the artillery.

Bob O’Connor went down in flames in his B-17.

Obie Slingerland and I were best friends and co-captains of our high school football team. Obie was killed on the deck of the Saratoga when a bomb that hadn’t dropped exploded as he landed.

I won’t think of them anymore tomorrow, Memorial Day, than I think of them any other day of my life.

Remembering doesn’t do the remembered any good, of course. It’s for ourselves, the living. I wish we could dedicate Memorial Day, not to the memory of those who have died at war, but to the idea of saving the lives of the young people who are going to die in the future if we don’t find some new way - some new religion maybe - that takes war out of our lives.

That would be a Memorial Day worth celebrating.”

I don’t know that a new religion is the answer.  I suspect that if more religious people actually behaved as if they were, that in itself would be a good place to start.

“Age is catching up with us and time is running out.”

—William Paynter, 91
World War II Veteran

A front-page story in Sunday’s Post and Courier covers several groups’ efforts to preserve the personal stories of veterans before they are lost forever.

Once there were 16 million U.S. World War II veterans. That number has shrunk to about 2.5 million. Some estimates predict that by 2020, there will be no more WWII veterans still alive.

There are only 12 verified World War I veterans* still alive, and just two of them live in the United States. Both are 107 years old. The oldest of the dozen lives in the UK and is 111. He is also the oldest verified man in Europe.

These men have had a lifetime to relive the horrors of war that they witnessed long before there was a condition known as “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

They have spent a lifetime trying to suppress the painful memories of watching their comrades, their friends, die in service of the country.

I suspect even the passage of decades doesn’t make that a great deal easier when those memories come rushing to the surface.

There’s no practical way to tabulate the human story of each and every loss this country has suffered in every war ever fought. Reciting a bunch of numbers seems almost inhuman.

Because it isn’t about numbers; it’s about people.

Do you think you can spare a few minutes today to think about those fallen soldiers yourself? It isn’t the least you can do, but it’s pretty close.

* This is information according to Wikipedia, so it may or may not be completely accurate. Take it as you will.

My best friend, Chip, called me with sad news last night.  One of his college professors passed away earlier this week.

Chip was particularly close to this professor, who had early on taken a genuine interest in his success over the years and managed to keep in touch with him after he graduated.  I got to know her through Chip, and though I had never taken classes from her and took only a few classes from her particular department at all, she always greeted me by name and asked me about my career whenever she saw me.  She included me on holiday emails and treated me like I was one of her students.

I think it’s rare when a teacher makes the kind of connection with a student she made with Chip.  That she’d show support of me when I had never even been one of her students speaks volumes about the kind of person she was.

After her retirement, there was speculation that there might have been a health problem, but she was apparently of the old school that produced people who didn’t talk about such things.  The last time I saw her in person, she looked healthy and happy, just how you’d expect someone enjoying retirement to be.  And yes, she made it a point to ask me about where I was working and how much I was enjoying what I was doing.  She never hinted that anything was wrong or that anything ever had been.

Dr. W was a very special person, and she’ll definitely be missed.

It seems like only a week ago — then again, it was just a week ago…to the day, in fact — that I wrote a piece about the needless death of a young celebrity.

I expressed in that piece the frustration of seeing the demise of someone who should have had at least seventy more years of life left in him. At least that much.

The news reports that actor Heath Ledger, 28, was found dead next to a collection of pills elicited the same reaction, with perhaps slightly more anger because it happened once again and so soon, and because I didn’t really need to know that he was found naked at the foot of his bed. The detail about the pills was plenty of information.

In any case, you can go back and read it here. I think everything there pretty much still applies.

Actor Brad Renfro was found dead at his Los Angeles home today.

At age 25.

The cause of death, so far, hasn’t been released, although reports are mentioning his apparent long history of drug problems.

Renfro wasn’t the greatest actor in the world, although I thought he did a respectable job in Stephen King’s thriller, Apt Pupil. That’s probably not the role he is most known for, but I am the first to admit that I haven’t followed his career with any particular interest.

So why does his death bother me? Maybe because earlier this evening, I dropped by a visitation at a funeral home for a man who lived a full life, accomplished many things he wanted to do and had the respect of friends and family. He lived a long time, although no length of time is long enough.

Maybe because earlier this evening, that all-too-common thought many of us have from time to time popped into my brain: that nagging question about why we have such a relatively short amount of time here. Sure, I’m a Christian, so I believe without any doubt that there’s a life after this one. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t wonder why this particular one has to be so short, filled for many with trying to amass so much fame and riches that they’ll never be able to take with them, anyway.

Or maybe it’s just the annoyance with what I’m sure will be many blog posts about how much pressure young stars face, as if that somehow justifies a 25-year-old pushing his body to life-shortening extremes on illegal substances.

There are lots of young people who suffer much worse fates than becoming a celebrity. There are, I am reliably informed, worse things in the world.

And they never try drugs. Not even once.

I know, I know, some of you — likely the Renfro fans in particular — will jump on me about my presumptions. And you’re right…I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know why he ever had a problem with drugs to begin with. I don’t know what it’s like to have that kind of pressure.

But like the rest of you, I know what it’s like to have my kind of pressure…and lots of it. I know what it’s like not to be happy, to wish for more of some things and less of others, to yearn for things that will never be more than a dream. That makes me sad. It makes me angry. And it makes me look at a story like this with utter disgust.

Twenty-five is just too damn young to die.

A sad update to an earlier post here at Patrick’s Place:

Local radio and television personality and published author Red Evans lost his battle with cancer this morning.

Red was diagnosed with terminal cancer earlier this year, the same year that he published his first novel, On Ice, at age 75, proving that it is never too late to see a dream through.

I spoke to Red’s son earlier this evening, who says that what’s important now is that Red is out of pain and in a better place.  In an email to members of the writing group Red spoke to just last month, his son said that his father “entered the Pearly Gates conjuring up thoughts for his first heavenly novel.”

Local author Dave Moulton recently wrote a piece about Red’s visit with the group.  You can view that post here.

Red will be greatly missed.

It’s the time of year when we traditionally wrap ourselves in a blanket of nostalgia and ponder those who passed away over the last twelve months.

In keeping with that tradition, I offer this page of notable deaths as compiled by the Associated Press.

And there’s something striking about the list:  the fact that the majority of those who died were well into their seventies and eighties.  The youngest person, a rapper, was 33.  Anna Nicole Smith was the second-youngest at 39.

The third-youngest on the AP’s list were Boston’s lead singer Brad Delp, who died on March 9th and pro football’s Darryl Stingley, who died on April 5th.  Both were 55.

The oldest, Brooke Astor, was 105.   A second centenarian on the list, Oliver Hill, a lawyer who argued the Brown v. Board of Education case, was 100.

I guess we really are living longer.  And I’m all for that.