The Daily Line of Sight

The news isn't all depressing. After all, Charles H. Ramsey, Washington, D.C.'s police chief, had his unmarked police-issue car stolen over the weekend.

If that's not enough, it was recently indicated that in a soon-to-be released GQ article, Saddam Hussein is an OCD clean freak who loves Cheetos but loves Doritos even more.

Michael Schiavo and his former in-laws, Bob & Mary Schindler, have not finished their long-standing feud. And it doesn't appear that said feud will abate anytime soon. Yesterday, in a brief (and nearly unannounced) ceremony in Clearwater, Florida, Ms. Schiavo's cremated remains were buried. With that, her parents complained that they were not given prior notice that the ceremony was to take place. In addition, the headstone carried the words "I Kept My Promise" and the dates February 25, 1990 as the day she "departed this earth" and March 25, 2005, the day she was finally "at peace." The Schindlers' attorney described those two dates as a shot at "the grieving parents;" frankly, the fact that her parents and their lawyer are still carrying on this crusade to destroy their daughter's legacy, and went on the offensive on the very day which their daughter's remains were finally committed to the ground -- says a lot about them. What it says is they talk about right and wrong and obeying god's word; it also says they have no clue about karma. Grieving parents do just that; they grieve. They don't issue press releases and use the media as some sort of weapon to continue a vendetta against their daughter's husband. I can't even imagine -- well, actually, based on several years of personal history, I can -- how awful these parents were to their daughter while she was alive. It saddens me to learn that parents won't stop their relentless, overbearing, maniacal destruction of any- and everyone connected to their daughter, including her legacy. Message to the Schindlers: parents who are grieving their daughter's death don't have some shyster mouthpiece taking shots at their daughter's husband via the media. The three of them are imbeciles...pure and simple, total, utter, complete imbeciles.

On top of that, the Yankees -- after a six-game sweep of the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Chicago Cubs in the friendly confines of Yankee Stadium -- managed to tank yet another game against the Tampa Bay Devil-Rays. That's not especially good news, of course; but it is interesting, considering Tampa Bay is one of the worst teams in baseball (the other being the Kansas City Royals) and Tampa has managed to beat the Yankees in each game they've played save for twice. Oh, and the other team that's among the Major League Baseball bottom-dwellers -- the Kansas City Royals -- swept the Yankees.

That's not particularly good news, so we'll leave the Yankees out of the equation.

A very brief wrap-up, however, vis-a-vis Father's Day...there is no better news for my family and I than watching my father quietly and contentedly opening cards and gifts knowing Sunday was a day in the making for the better part of nine months, a third of which time he spent in the ICU. He opened at least a half-dozen cards from the three of us, and I am sure each carried with it a message of appreciation and relief and happiness that we could celebrate with him, and he with us, this day. I think, overall, that there are things in life which leave their mark on us forever. Some are awful; some are simply memorable for their significance to us; and some are awful in their scope, their significance and their ability to change our perspective (not always in a good or bad way). This past summer's events did so for us all, and this past Father's Day went a long way in not so much erasing the difficulty of those days or the gut-wrenching hours we spent watching and waiting; what it did was remind us why we were so scared, who our true friends are, and why we can smile so deeply today.

And for me, there's no better news than that.

Period.