News from the Plains. All this Red can make you Blue
Your Afternoon Nooner
by Barry Friedman
(Ed. Note. I should really stop doing this. I might get stuck and never be able to write like anyone else--including myself)
But Noonan wrote today; so must I.
"I often wonder, though, how Ron--Gosh, I still can't say it without getting all a quiver--would have handled those first moments after 9/11. What would he have been reading to those children in Florida? One suspects America's storyteller, Louis L'Amour, and he would have watched the way the eyes of those children, small eyes then, sparkled at dusty tales of cowboys and heroes and noble savages and brutality and bloody scalps. Ahh, America. And perhaps he would have teared up, too, as I am doing now. He was a man who projected security, projected safety, projected projection. Our president now, the one who--how do I say this?--knows America but not Americans and looks, sadly, as if he's never been on a horse. Our presidents should know how to ride. RIDE! How we could use R's steady hand, his steady handling of us now. How I miss that handling. How I miss it! It makes me weep, as so many things have since."--P. Noonan