flag, Astronauts on the Moon

The large garage door lifted and I walked under it and out like a king except onto an alley facing a parking lot and right off caught glimpse of little brown bunny tucking under a parked vehicle woefully displaced in this urban parking lot. At nine thirty looked up to a blue sky and saw the moon up there like a tiny round cloud just waiting to be noticed by somebody. A woman walking in front of me noticed. "Hey, look at the moon." 

So I did. 

Visitors to the U.S. remark, "Boy, they sure do like their flag. And we do. But not any more than the person saying that. It's just they haven't noticed the same thing in their own country. And if that were uniquely true about Americans as they suppose then these balconies would be covered with flags, and you see only one. Right in the middle. 

My sky. I feel so ensconced. 

I decided to read a book about when America was great. Won't take long, it's a pop-up book.

When was America ever great? A provocative unhappy person asked that on Twitter. 

We could say, maybe back in 1979 when this book was published. When the country was united in a single project. Except for the people against the project, the people who protested spending all that money on space, mostly Democrats,  and insisted better use can be made of it right here and who considered the entire program one gigantic corporate welfare project on an industrial scale. Back when civil rights was a wrenching national issue. When feminism really took hold. Back when free sex opened the door to AIDS. Back then when both parents working and latchkey kids became the norm, during that period of lynchings and riots and anti-war unrest. The golden years when America was great. A nostalgia developed for those less trying times.  

A time when even pop-up books were simple. V-mechanism, V-mechanism, V-mechanism. Except for the pod. We could make this whole book easily in our first class. I'm not knocking it, I'm describing it and encouraging your own abilities.

I saw Obama posters in the windows one time but never any American flags. The business across the street will have a whole block with a line of American flags in a row, but not on the people's balconies.