A Talk To Remember

I was having a marginally work-related conversation with an older gentleman at the office the other day. He was discussing the background to a horseback riding trip in Hawaii. He casually dropped this line about his travel companions:
"They were from my first wife's family. She was from Indonesia, and she died young."
He quickly moved on to the rest of his story of riding horses up mountainsides, but I couldn't shake that sentence. It's one of the most compelling I've ever heard. He was from New England, went into the Navy and served in special forces (all history I already knew). Somehow he met a young woman from Indonesia, fell in love, was married, then lost her. Entire novels are written on thinner foundations, but he summed up perhaps 5 years of his life in a single sentence. And I will never get to hear the remainder of the story, for there is no polite way to ask.

Christmas

Do you remember when Christmas was THIS awesome? I don't just mean getting this fired up over some long-coveted gift. I mean getting this fired up over finding things like Tic-Tacs in your stocking.

Merry Christmas from our family.

Merry Christmas from the military-industrial-congressional complex