We Interrupt This Blog…

I’m going to take a little break from my England blogging to post about a more recent excursion. Last Saturday was my 52nd birthday and Mr. Kim and The Child decided to do it up in style!

While I have been to some beautiful beaches in my life – Bermuda, Key West, California, the Bahamas, the Outer Banks – I have to abashedly admit that my favorite is still the beach I grew up going to: Ocean City, Maryland. I love the ticky-tackiness of the place. I love the boardwalk, the junk food, the souvenir shops, the carnival rides, etc. The sounds of the waves fighting with the loud music, the vying aromas of funnel cakes and French fries, the contrasting beauty of neon and endless sand. I love the variety and paradox. Being me, I also love that there are food stands that have sold only one or two items in their almost 100 year history. I love all of the hotels from the 1950’s with their Vegas-esque names. And I love staying right down in the middle of it all! As a kid, we mostly stayed farther up the strip – sometimes as far as Rehoboth, Delaware (a smaller, quieter community north of OC) as it was more family friendly in those days. Or, when I was a teenager, we had a place on Chincoteague Island and went over to OC for the day. This weekend, our hotel was at 1st and Philadelphia streets – a couple of blocks up from the beginning of the boardwalk.

As you can see, they chose well for my birthday celebration. We arrived late on Friday night and took a short walk down the boardwalk and out to the surf – just a taste as it was late even by the open-til-all-hours standards of OC.

Saturday morning, I let them sleep and slipped out early for a walk. Mr. Kim felt bad later that I’d been alone, but I told him that it was actually wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a solitary walk around there.



I finally got hungry and went and woke them up and forced them out of bed. We got a quick breakfast and hit the beach:


See how close we are to the action:


We fried in the sun for a few hours (The Child and I are practically albinos) and then grabbed some lunch. It is a truism that all food tastes good outdoors. And it is also one that foods from one’s childhood hold a special place for us. I know that I have tastebuds that just adore the not-so-great pizza I grew up eating. But there is a place in OC that even newcomers are stunned by. That would be Thrasher’s French Fries:

They have been open since 1929 and they sell French fries. No burgers, no hot dogs. And they offer two things to go with your fries: salt and vinegar. That’s it. If you want catsup with your fries, you have to go steal it from some other place. As a matter of fact the place around the corner from Thrasher’s has a funny sign up about that very thing:


Actually, I love catsup on fries. I dip and squiggle with the best of them most other places, but catsup on Thrasher’s fries is just wrong. I remember when Momma and I first met Ted and his girls (newly arrived from England), we laughed at them for putting vinegar on their fish and chips. How weird! How foreign. Didn’t they know what catsup and tartar sauce were for? Then we all went to OC together and they saw us sprinkling vinegar all over our fries. “What is THAT that you are putting on your chips?” they asked. “Um…” we replied. And never looked back – it was vinegar with fish and chips from then on out.

The best part of being a Thrasher’s aficionado is introducing new folks to them. The first time Mr. Kim and I went to OC, I insisted that we drop our bags at the hotel and RACE to Thrasher’s. He suggested that since it was after 11pm, they were probably closed. I told him to not be a fool and to shake a leg. We speedwalked the one mile down the boardwalk (I am a big girl and we big girls do NOT speedwalk), Mr. Kim pointing out all of the places that sold ‘Boardwalk Fries’ and me sneering at his naiveté. He balked again at the long LONG line. I held fast and waited. His face when he tasted his first salty-vinegary-crisp outside-tender potato-y inside Thrasher's was indescribable. Astonishment, joy, avarice and greed. I barely got enough for myself!

We actually met an adorable little guy who was obviously having his first Thrasher’s experience and not caring for it one bit! The Child was sitting next to him on a bench and we were all eating fries. She asked him if they were good and he said “NO!” He said they tasted like strawberry and vanilla. They don’t, of course, but he was probably four years old and trying to explain to her that these fries were NOT what he was accustomed to.

When I was a kid, lunch was always at Thrasher’s corner. One adult would stand in the fry line and the other would go around the corner to stand in the fried chicken and corn on the cob line at the place next door and the kids would grab a table. Thrasher’s doesn’t have tables, so if you wanted to sit, you kind of had to get chicken and corn. Everyone did it. The funny thing is, is how GOOD the chicken and corn was. It certainly didn’t have to be. We all would have gladly eaten a McDonald’s burger just to be able to sit in the shade and enjoy our fries. But the chicken was amazingly crisp and tender and juicy and the corn was fabulous. [An aside: as much as fried chicken is considered a SOUTHERN dish, the best fried chicken that I’ve ever had has been in two not very southern states – Indiana and Maryland. Odd.] The chicken place is gone, but there is a good pit beef place. Lunch:


Back to the beach to finish crisping up and then to the hotel for a dip in the pool. I love the ocean, but like to finish up with a refreshing pool swim.

My perfect day at the beach is this:
Breakfast
Beach
Lunch
Beach
Back to the room for a shower and a nap
Hit the boardwalk for the rest of the evening

I didn’t get the nap, but did manage a shower.

Walking down the boardwalk in OC really is a stroll down memory lane. So many of the stores and sites and food stands are the same as when I was a little girl:














One of my favorite places when I was a little girl was Trimper’s Rides at the end of the boardwalk. They have an outside area with all the regular rides:




But what is really special, magical to the little girl in me is the inside area of Trimper’s. This area is for children. The centerpiece is a beautiful carousel from 1912:


It is one of the most gorgeous carousels I’ve ever seen and the animals are positively fantastical:




















The large carousel is the one inside ride that adults and children can ride, but the rest of the rides are all for the little folk, including this beauty:

This Lilliputian carousel, sized for the tiny, was dates from the 1920’s and is utterly charming.

There is even a calliope:


The rides are all vintage and entrancing:










This, though, is possibly the most charming item in the whole place:





The lovely lady on top of the antique ticket booth presided over so many of my favorite childhood memories. Trimper’s was THE goal of all my childhood trips to OC and this lady was the siren who lured me to the shivery pleasures of scary rides, the haunted house and the mirror maze.

It was time for dinner – Thrashers again and hamburgers this time. My peeps:

Replete with fatty, carby goodness.

Off to the pier to wander with all sorts of folks. Lots of weirdos – OC is great for oddball watching. The pier in OC is loaded with all of your basic carnival rides and games, complete with an enormous assortment of hucksters, cheats, pickpockets and clean cut, polite international students working for the summer. It’s loud and fragrant and the lights are INTENSE. Wonderful place:










My girl and me:


We wandered (not too far – yay!) back to the hotel – full, sleepy and ready for bed and some AC!

Sunday was much quieter. We had breakfast – another BIG, full breakfast. It’s a funny thing - but at the beach, when I’m getting ready to spend the day in unbearable heat and scorching sun, I should be craving a light refreshing breakfast. I should want fruit and juice and maybe cold cereal or a doughnut. Not me. I’m ready for the works – bacon, eggs, creamed chipped beef on toast (especially creamed chipped beef on toast!).

We wandered around a little more and admitted to one another that we just couldn’t face riding home in the car after another hot day on the beach. So we did a little shopping, had one last box of Dolle’s caramel corn, fed all of our leftovers to the seagulls (a family tradition) and headed out.

The drive home was full of talk and singing and eating (of course). We stopped for lunch on the road at a church that was having a pit beef sandwich fund raiser. Gorgeous sandwiches, but I was really hoping for some of that Maryland men’s club BBQ chicken. Anyone who has spent any weekends in Maryland knows exactly what I’m talking about. The Kiwanis, the Moose, the Elks, etc. raise money by selling BBQ chicken. You can smell them miles away. They set up these huge screens over charcoal and baste the chicken with, as best as I can figure, liquid crack. It is literally the BEST grilled chicken I’ve ever tasted. But we didn’t get one single whiff, so, Catholic pit beef it was.

We were sad to see that a MD institution seemed to be no more. This was sitting by itself in front of an empty lot:

Named Wall’s Bakery, but called the Wigwam by one and all, it was one of the highlights of a road trip down US 301. Fabulous cookies, cream horns, Napoleons and especially the largest, most delicious éclairs ever. Happily, I did some research at home and discovered that they have moved, not closed. But seriously, Wall family – could you put up a ‘Moved to…” sign instead of giving everyone a heart attack?

We stopped for dinner at Captain Billy’s in Popes Creek. Crabs, peel and eat shrimp (we actually heard some crazy lady berating the teenage waiter for telling her that she had to peel her own shrimp!!!), fabulous oyster stew. All enjoyed at sunset beside the Potomac River:


I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday. Thank you so much to my sweet family for thinking of it and making it happen for me.

Mr. Kim drives (and Blogs): Terror In the UK

Pardon the interruption. There are aspects of this trip that cannot be described in a way that neatly fits Kim’s narrative so well, so allow me a sidebar entry. I’d like to share a word or two about driving in England.

Okay, yes, it is a perfectly lovely way of doing things to drive on the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of the car. Sigh. But several aspects of the experience were more…. “lovely”…. than others.

First, there are these terrifying thrill rides called “roundabouts.” I’ll say this for the British, they have found the solution to sitting in traffic at red lights. We stopped very few times the entire trip – just yield, roll, and go. This sounds great to every American I have told the tale to. Then I tell them what Paul Harvey used to call “The Rest of the Story.” Roundabouts…… multilaned circles from hell with two to five streets feeding into them at random angles and exits with signs written in 12 point font. The traffic already in the circle is limited by law to the drive no faster than the speed of light. Traffic trying to get INTO the circle has just one basic rule – “if you can get into the circle without having an accident you must have had the right of way.” Ah, but the alternative of waiting until it is safe to enter is nearly as perilous as just diving in, as the Brits behind you are not expecting you to stop and display all too Yankee an attitude if you dare to tap your brakes in the process. The only times I ever got beeped at in all of England were for stopping or slowing down where I was expected to just kamikaze my way into the flow.

Once you are into the circle, you realize you still have half the battle ahead of you. As I said these are multilaned creatures. Unless you are taking the first available exit, you are required to jump into one of the center lanes, as the outermost is only for exiting and the outer lane frequently just disappears into the exit, with a new inner lane apparently spawning to replace it. But when it is your time to exit from this circle, you must somehow make a move that would make a quantum physicist proud, instantaneously disappearing from the center lane and passing through all the cars in the three lanes ringing you to reassemble in the outermost lane, in time to jerk the wheel and veer into the outflowing street. I never had time to notice if we changed polarity in the process.

After a few of these (and we probably ended up driving a thousand of them, large and small, over the course of the trip) I began to get the hang of it. Then it became a matter of figuring out the most effective way the scare the bejesus out of Kim at each roundabout situation, just for fun. Sometimes it was a matter of not slowing down at all and blindly dodging into my lane. Other times it required multiple lane shifts for no apparent reason. The most terrifying and therefore most entertaining turned out to be just a rapid glance to the side accompanied by a quiet gasp. Quite a game. Keeps the marriage fresh. At any rate, I never hit anyone so I assume I passed the road test.

Next issue: Signage and road markings. We saw very few, if any, stop signs. You are expected to keep your eyes on the pavement for stripes that are no more noticeable than the ones we are used to seeing at red lights to tell you how far you can creep into the intersection. Lines, no signs. Miss it and you risk…. Whatever the British do about such things. You are just assumed to have superhuman powers of observation. This is more importantly required at the rarely seen but sacrosanct pedestrian crossings. Again, no warning they are upcoming. Just more lines on the road, but at least for crosswalks you can see on the sidewalk yellow globes positioned on street light poles. If, that is, you are watching the sidewalk for them rather than staring at the pavement looking for a stop sign line. Craig pointed one of these out to us on our first day as pedestrians in London, warning us that cars MUST STOP HERE but anywhere else pedestrians were fair game. When the shoe was on the other foot and I was the anxious driver rather than the London pedestrian, I found myself slamming the breaks and retrieving my teeth from the dashboard rather than violate the Law of the Yellow Globe.
There are streets with arrows painted on the roads, pointing back the way you came in your lane, for no apparent reason. More than once we thought were going the wrong way. Turns out it means Yield. Again, no sign, just a squiggle on the pavement. Likewise, No Parking zones are completely mystifying. Some streets are bordered with one solid line, some two, some yellow, some white, some unmarked by anything at all. Cars park at will on all of them. Or don’t. And they park facing either direction on either side, which is hell when you are trying to figure out whether you are one a one way street. On one particular day I did feel very lucky to find a spot to park very near the restaurant in Cirencester where we ate our last breakfast in the Cotswolds. I parked along the left side, right behind four other vehicles. They must have all gotten a memo about the time of day when this privilege expired, as they were long gone when I retrieved my $70 parking ticket. Again no signage. I did spend a half hour that evening reviewing the official driving manual for England as issued by their DMV. Nowhere did they provide a Rosetta Stone to decipher these strange stripe glyphs. Ah well, I seriously just shrugged and figured if this was the worst thing that happened while driving in England I was ahead of the game.

And then there are…. Pedestrian malls. Wouldn’t you think that an area that looks like a road and flows directly from a road but that is for people and not for cars would have some sort of Do Not Enter sign? Yes, I would think so too. That’s how I ended up driving on one. Okay two. The good folken walking along the boulevards did not seem to mind me being there – no New Jersey-esque pounding on my hood – but neither did they deign to get out of my way to let me pass. They just strolled, glancing back at me only once per person, content to shop and chat and enjoy the day. And I just eased through, 1 mile per hour at a time, hoping that I did not come to the top of some flight of steps.

Have I mentioned the cameras? There are apparently only three police officers in all of England guarding the highways. They do not need more, as every mile or so you enter a camera zone. Radar guns are mounted alongside cameras taking NASA-precision shots of your face, license plate, and dental work. They just mail the ticket to you. Even in a rental, you are not safe. The rental companies have already got a deposit on file in case of offense and a credit card to back it up. Speed traps occur with regularity, dropping the flow by as much as 30 MPH on no notice. Fortunately for us, this never affected our travels as I was never in danger of approaching the posted speeds. Terror sometimes has its advantages.

Finally, the British are just !@#$ nuts when it comes to speed limits. Okay, I can buy the idea of 70 MPH on the M roads, the equivalent of our interstates. I do not allow that this speed is proper when entering one of the aforesaid roundabouts, although I did eventually master this maneuver. But every other non-inner city road was at least 40 MPH, and most were 60. This would include roads that were wide enough for 1.25 cars, with stone walls instead of shoulders, two way traffic, blind curves – and 60 MPH postings. This occurred EVERYWHERE. Rural, town, no matter. Just bust on along or get pushed from behind sometimes. If you meet an oncoming vehicle, pray he is also a terrified American tourist doing 30 in a 60 and then back up to a driveway to let him pass.

All in all, I think I got it all pretty well down. Not even any near misses to speak of. Yep, I am a master of driving like a Brit. Just in time to return to the US and what had by then become the wrong side of the street. At least I was used to ignoring all the stop signs.

Day Four – England/Paris Trip – The Magic Begins

Tuesday, May 17th

Mr. Kim’s comments in italics.

While I got the last minute things done at Craig’s flat, Mr. Kim went out to get breakfast. This is what he brought back:

There it is – the quintessential English breakfast. Sunnyside up eggs, toast, bacon, sausage and baked BEANS! Be still my heart. I’ve been eating beans on toast for breakfast since Momma and I met Ted (my English stepdad), but I am an avowed food and England-obsessed ninny and I cannot describe how thrilled I was to be eating a full English in ENGLAND. The only things that it was missing were mushrooms and the fried tomato (no loss for me). As much as I love all things English, I have to confess that that does not include English sausage. I do not want fillers in my sausage and every English sausage (even the good stuff) that I’ve ever had seems to be full of bread/wheat/rusk, etc. When we were in Bermuda 20-some years ago, the cheeky waiters at our hotel turned it into a daily joke, bringing my breakfast on a silver platter and assuring me repeatedly that the sausage hadn’t been near my plate. So these sausages were exactly what I expected. And isn’t it a LOVELY way to make them? Mr. Kim was not enamored of the beans. Stop mincing words, I thought they were bloody awful. He thought they were dull and tasteless (he is used to pork and beans and would not listen to my explanations of how English beans differed from American ones – he did not partake of beans for the rest of the trip). But he was happy to get some more of that amazing bacon. It was a lovely start to our first day touring England and we left for the train station full and happy.

We took the train to Heathrow to pick up our car. Here is Mr. Kim sitting in our rental car:

Doesn’t he look competent and confident?

Hi, Mr. Kim!!

A word here about two forms of technology that I believe have improved travel immeasurably and that I will never again travel without – digital cameras and GPS. When I think of all of the canisters of film that we would have had to bring and to buy (since we would have had NO idea how many pictures we ended up taking) and all the BAD shots that we would have paid to develop and then throw away, I could kiss my camera. I am similarly in love with our GPS system. Between the GPS and me (Mr. Kim was the designated driver and I was the designated navigator) we got everywhere we wanted to go. More importantly, we got BACK to everywhere we wanted to be. Once we discovered the basic infallibility of the GPS, we would often deliberately get lost and after driving for miles through fields, on narrow lanes, passing only sheep. When we were ready to ‘find’ ourselves, we’d turn on the GPS and say “Home, Jeeves” and in seconds he would have us on our way. We didn’t care much for the snooty English lady in the GPS and her sneering “recalculating” (a word we heard rather often), so we switched to an English gentleman, who we promptly christened ‘Jeeves’. Daddy calls his ‘Betty’ after his mother and our first was named ‘Pauline’ after my other grandmother, ‘Bomo’ – considering that the GPS lady always thinks herself right and gets miffed if you don’t follow her advice, it is a particularly apt sobriquet. Jeeves was a success from the outset – smart, calm, supportive, suave. And since we are madly addicted to “Jeeves & Wooster” and can’t wait for Netflix to send us the next DVD, it seemed the only proper name.

Getting on the M25 (big, major road – like our interstates), you fairly quickly get out of the more crowded areas and begin to see countryside. The title of this post is ‘The Magic Begins’ and, for me, that is exactly how it felt. As much as I loved London and its history and sophistication, it was the countryside that touched me. It is the memories of our time in the Cotswolds and the little seaside towns and villages that catches in my throat and brings little prickers to my eyes. Looking at our pictures (which I do to some extent almost every day), the pictures of these places find me smiling foolishly. I feel inexpressibly grateful for being able to finally SEE them, to have spent time wandering the impossibly lovely lanes, to have seen the flowers and cottages. To have lived that dream.

Our first destination was Oxford. We found a place to park, decoded our first parking meter (not as straightforward as it sounds), watched a crocodile of cute little preschoolers go by all togged up for ‘graduation’, and found the meeting place for our tour. Confident we could make our way back here on time, it was on to lunch. I’d chosen the Turf Tavern, a 13th century ale house hidden away down narrow streets and crooked alleys:



Mike had an excellent cheeseburger made with Shropshire bleu cheese and I had a divine beef and ale pie with the puffiest, highest crown of puff pastry I’ve ever seen and lashings of thick, savory gravy. This was an excellent meal and EXACTLY the kind of food and place that I’d hoped to find.

We did a two hour tour of Oxford – centered on the colleges, of course. Our tour guide was wonderful, talking about the ancient founders and characters as if she were gossiping about old pals. She made the Oxford system very understandable and showed us places that we would not have otherwise been able to see. The most beautiful college that we saw was Corpus Christi. Founded in 1517, it’s one of the oldest of the thirty-odd colleges in Oxford.





Keble College is gorgeous, too, if you like big piles of Victorian brick:

Which I, being an architectural philistine and adoring anything positively twee, do! English not being our first language, we understood our guide to say that Keble’s dining hall was the actual location in which they shot all of the Harry Potter dining hall shots. We dutifully snapped pics, as it certainly looked the part to us:

Turns out that something got lost in translation – the scenes were shot at nearby Christ Church College. Since I have no pictures of that one, I like our version of the facts better.Everywhere we looked in Oxford there was something lovely or ancient or just charming and so photo-worthy:





Who wouldn’t want to go through here?





I added some shots for the ‘garden gallery’:




I so love ancient things, that this nondescript wall impressed me even more than the colleges in Oxford. It is part of the original wall that was used to define and defend Oxford when it WAS a town placed at the point where the OXen FORDed the river. I am sure it has been rebuilt many times over the years, but this was “The Spot.” If your eyes are glazing over at this point, just wait until we start talking about the Cotswolds.


Oxford was a place that we just didn’t have enough time in (the theme of our trip, alas – I’ll be saying this a LOT!). We didn’t spend any time by the rivers and I’d hoped to see the canal and do a lot more wandering. But we did see a lot and didn’t want to arrive at the cottage after dark.

The drive from Oxford into the Cotswolds, where we were staying was just simply enchanting. This was the point in our trip that Mr. Kim started saying, “how does anyone ever talk themselves into leaving this place”. As we got closer to Cirencester (‘the capital of the Cotswolds” – a fairly good sized town), I kept thinking, “THIS is England, THIS is England”. The first real village that we passed through was Bibury. There cannot be a more perfect introduction to a Cotswold village:

(Internet picture)

We swung around Cirencester on the main road – with 5, count ‘em FIVE roundabouts (as Rachel would say, moire non regarding THOSE carousels of hell) and then tootled on through gasp-aloud gorgeous countryside until we found ourselves that the bottom of a steep, narrow High Street. Both Jeeves and our hostess’ directions indicated that we had to actually get to the top of it somehow. Daunting, to say the least. There is a video here that I took of the drive, if you’d like to see it.

‘Onrushpam’ at eGullet has my undying gratitude. When I posted my first, tentative ‘help’ at eGullet, she responded by suggesting that I consider renting through Vacation Rentals by Owner (VRBO.com) if we were staying anywhere for a few nights. We’d already decided to spend three nights in the Cotswolds. Because the area is so small in size but so dense in things we wanted to see, we thought that we’d spend all three in the same place – driving around each day. Through VRBO.com we found Anna Simson and her gorgeous home Green Court in Chalford. The cottage that we stayed in for 3 nights was the annex to their house. It is a 400 year old Grade II listed building (similar to National Historic Register), updated – but with all of the charm left intact. Here’s Mr. Kim at the entrance:


Some inside views:



You KNOW I loved this.





The inside was charming and comfortable and we could happily have lived there. But the real draw was the garden and view:

This is the view out of one of the bedroom windows.





We were too tired to try to ferret out somewhere to eat, so we just went to the nearest place that we could find on a map. It was called The Ragged Cot and was just beautiful:

Originally a 17th century coach house, it is now a gorgeous upscale inn and restaurant with gardens and lovely outdoor seating, a snug and a sign proclaims that it welcomes dogs and wellies. The people were friendly and welcoming. So why were we so underwhelmed? I’m not sure that it wasn’t my own fault. The food was upscale and I just don’t think that that was what I really wanted for my first meal in the Cotswolds. We should have probably just gone to the pub down the High Street from Green Court.

The first couple of days, we thought that the High Street was all there was to Chalford. The write-up in one brochure or another indicated that the High Street used to have numerous businesses and several pubs on it. I just assumed this was a dying town with not much beyond the few remaining home owners. Silly us. We discovered that there is a whole other section of it (with MUCH more manageable streets to navigate) and had we just explored a little, I’m sure that we could have found a place more suitable to our mood. But we were tired – and I had that ‘tourist’ feeling that I get sometimes: shy and new and out of place. Mr. Kim was lucky that I didn’t just open the Nabs and make a pot of tea. Mmmmm, tea. Anna had stocked the pantry with several teas, all of which I sampled over the few days we were there. What a real treat at the end of the day.

As we left the Ragged Cot we both felt the cold building in – the temperature really drops in this part of the country at night. The distant sounds of animals in fields or barns or woods just added to the feeling the deepening mist was building in us – this part of the world does not belong to mere humans at night. Especially since darkness does not truly fall here until well after 10 PM. So as not to offend the fairies and sprites who were ready for is to retire so they could take over their shift, we made our way ‘home’, tucked ourselves under our warm and plouffy duvet and dropped off to sleep in our 400 year old Cotswold cottage.

Patriotism

There are folks out there that I call the flagwavers. They show every sign of being very patriotic. They have American flags on their cars, they fly the flag at home (and didn’t just start after September 11th), the men wear little flags on their lapels. When you listen to them talk about our country they can sound a little belligerent.

I am not really much of a flagwaver. I am proud of my country in many ways. Of all the flawed systems of government out there, I think that ours is the best. And I am amazed at the social progress that we have made in a short 200+ years. I mean when you look at the ancient civilizations out there that still curtail civil liberties to certain groups of people, it makes our problems pale by comparison. And every four to eight years, I am full of admiration for the people of the US – administrations come and go without riots, without military assistance – there may be some grumbling (or an occasional appeal to the Supreme Court), but our change of government happens peacefully. It would be unthinkable for it to be otherwise. I find much to be discouraged by in our government, politics, social discourse and debate. But I also find much to be encouraged by.

But back to the flagwavers. My question to them would be: I know that you love our country. But HOW do you love it. Do you love it like you love your favorite football team or like you love your child. Loving a football team means cheering it on – wanting it to win at all costs. If that means a little cheating, being a little more cutthroat and brutal than the rules really allow, hiring a thug because he’s a fabulous quarterback – then that’s ok with you, because winning is all. And, after all, it’s just a game and doesn’t really matter much in the grand scheme of things.

Loving a child is, of course, different. You adore you child and would die for her. But you have an obligation to a child. To make sure that she is responsible, moral and good in her actions. If she cheats on a test, you don’t look the other way – you make her face up to the consequences. If she bites another child because she wants what that child has, you correct her. If you see that she is going down the wrong moral path, you do everything in your power to steer her away from that path. If you don’t, you aren’t a good parent. Being a parent is being a caretaker of a soul. It is the greatest responsibility in life. Being a citizen is, perhaps, the second greatest.

So, which is it? A football team – “my country – right or wrong”. Or a child, a sacred responsibility – “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” Both express love, but only one recognizes the obligations that it imposes.