Extreme Makeover: Iraq edition

I was watching home improvement shows on TV, waiting for the HBO special about injured veterans. In one, a crew of 30-somethings renovated a lazy man’s kitchen while his wife was ensconced in a Vegas spa, awaiting the transformation.

This was not one of those feel-good shows about the Louisiana family that is just now recovering from two-year-old Katrina. These people are living in another kind of fog—a consumer fog. They have accumulated a houseful of low-cost building materials at various sales. Now, they live in the clutter of their unrealized projects.

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Still silently watching

One hundred and seventy years ago, a group of families emigrated from Northumberland, just south of the Scottish border, to the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Among those hardy settlers were some of my wife Caroline’s ancestors, folks with names like Messer and Swan and Patterson. (I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your ancestors were in that group as well, Dear Reader.) When they arrived in the New World, they found that conditions weren’t exactly as promising as the nice man from the New Brunswick Land Company, Mr. Nicholson, had said… (Some things never change, eh? I wonder if they were promised sub-prime mortgages, to boot… )

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