Dearest insel.,
You sweet thing, thank you for sharing so much with us--and please, keep it up, for as long as you want to, smoke descriptions and all. We can turn our televisions off and obtain some relief--you cannot, and if telling us here helps you any at all, Dear Heart, you just keep right on typing, until your fingers can't type any more.
That was bizarre, that you were so scorned for singing the national anthem. I don't understand that, at all. Perhaps
it was just me, perhaps it was my region, but---I don't recall there being a movement of criticism about the anthem, let alone that it's a "war song"--that is utterly ridiculous. I found a lovely site that describes how it came to be written. I'd love to put it all here, but it's just too long. The story of how the flag that Francis Scott Key saw came into being is neat. I, for one, get choked up just about every time I hear our national anthem, no matter the setting.
http://www.usflag.org/francis.scott.key.html
