Spent the weekend with my grand daughter at her college. Seven hours of driving, we must have passed a couple dozen colleges much closer to home but as she put it, " I stepped foot on campus and knew it was the place for me."

As it was the place for her mother and aunt decades ago.

As it was the place for her grandmother half a century ago.

Much has changed since I was an undergraduate student. The freshmen no longer have to wear those insipid little beanies during freshmen week. The cafeteria is a buffet of different foods, open most of the day, eat all you care to for one price, which is included in the board. They've moved and improved the tennis courts, built a science building, a fine arts building and painted the bleachers. The post office is new yet in these days of cell phone communication hardly anyone checks the post office twice a day for mail like we did.

Yet somethings have not changed. Humanities is still one of the toughest courses taught, grits are still on the menu (and may in fact be the same batch of grits uneaten from the 60s), the athletic fields still have sink holes that appear by surprise, the hill to the cafeteria is still brutal for the legs and lungs, and college kids, for all their maturity, continue to get homesick (yes, the same home that many of them could not wait to leave).

It was a good time. So good that I'm going back next week, yes driving the seven hours, to see another soccer game. And hug my favorite college freshmen.

And that's what I'm thinking about today.

The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence...from bondage to spiritual faith...from spiritual faith to courage...from courage to liberty...from liberty to abundance...from abundance to selfishness...from selfishness to complacency…from complacency to apathy...from apathy to dependency...from dependency back to bondage.

Attributed to an 18th Century Scottish writer

Just spent the morning with a friend whose husband was having a biopsy at a local hospital.

A dozen people showed up to lend support for the couple and we crammed ourselves into the tiny, drab surgical waiting area. Of that twelve, at least ten had experienced some sort of health crisis which required medical intervention. Surgery, reconstruction, biopsy, replacement, chemotherapy, bunions, the group had pretty much tasted all of the medical specialties, with the exception of pediatrics, in the past year or so.

Each encounter seemed to place a mantle of expertise over the one having had the ailment. Each was an expert on doctors, nurses, drugs and hospital procedures. And while our mutual friend laid there trying to keep up a brave front, which I think he was able to do by simply ignoring most of the chatter, his friends recounted every ache and pain and treatment option for their own situation. At each telling the stories became more and more dire. It was a wonder, there at the end, that any one of the twelve was still breathing.

It was fascinating...not.

OK, it was a little fascinating. I was appalled and curious at the same time regarding what possible excuse people could give for this type of conversation in a hospital room in front of a patient. Was it to show that they too had suffered, perhaps more than the current patient could even dream of? Was it one-ups-manship or that ability to have a worse malady and a more consequential outcome than anyone else? I do not know.

My friend and I will laugh about that some day. And that's what I'm thinking about.

This week I had one friend leave for Afghanistan, trying to get into the country between the elections and any aftermath of those elections and another friend being deployed to Baghdad.

I am sad and a little concerned.

Both are dedicated to their callings, one to the military; the other to an NGO (non-governmental organization).

Both are independent, competent women who are able to take care of themselves...under normal circumstances. But Iraq and Afghanistan are not 'normal circumstance' kind of countries.

And so I am sad and a little concerned.

And that's what I'm thinking about today.