You weren't.

Indeed. And so up at seven-thirty, a good hour and a half after the alarm, feeling (I must admit) pretty good. Another bullet dodged? The parade later this afternoon will go well? It's sunny out there, cold, but the day looks like a good day to photograph a parade?

It is December 7th, the day in 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I was born in March, 1943, two years before the atomic bombs and the war ended and so know nothing of that war other than what I've read and heard. Korea the same way. I can remember people talking about it in the early fifties, but it too was not a war I remember.

These thoughts were just rattling around, December 7th, thinking how many people must there be now young enough not to have experienced the time of Vietnam, a war I do remember, a war that changed my generation's lives in so many ways for those of us there and for those of us who never directly experienced combat.

Although my parents lives and attitudes were changed by the Second World War and those changes had a direct effect on my own life and upbringing, I don't perceive them directly, don't understand the connection. Similarly with Vietnam and now Afghanistan-Iraq. I'm sure they're fading for new generations, what effects they've had unnoticed, not suspected. Fleeting pictures on a television screen, pictures in an old somehow still remembered newspaper, stories in a history book. Tales of a past now lost in an ever passing fog. Hmm. We have perhaps drifted here into a fog of my own making.

Later. Three hours of running about shooting pictures with two cameras and I am tired. Physically tired: the aching back tired and not the fuzzy headed stuff. Which is good. Aching backs don't last.

Three hours?

Well, that's how long I was out. Probably something over two hours of actual walking/shooting/huffing/puffing when you take away the bus ride and the two quick stops for coffee and a bagel. It was cold, we needed those two stops inside this time for coffee and a bagel.

Cold but clear, a fair number of people to see the parade but fewer than I remember from past years. Broadway was lined with people but the parade took it's time in passing, spread out to a degree it seemed to be taking forever and I finally caved and walked the short distance to the bus on Grand, my needle on empty, the day in the bag.

Empty and the fact I figured I'd gotten enough pictures for a section. Maybe two, but I was thinking luck hadn't been with me with few good pictures. We'll see. Lots of shots, but not many pictures worth posting. Such it can be with parades.

Evening. Some work in the later afternoon on the pictures before a brief lie down in bed that lasted for four hours. My, my. Awakening at nine I checked to see what was on T.V., found nothing and said the hell with continuing working on the photographs (one section at the most after a first go through, I'm afraid) and went to bed. To sleep.