Baghdad Burning

Riverbend and her family have left Iraq. Guess the surge is working.

OK, that's a bit snarky. But her story ties into some ancient history in my family.

Do you remember Woody Allen's line in "Annie Hall" about his grandmother: "My grammy never gave gifts. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks." One side of my family came from that era. They left everything behind that they could not carry.

Not all of of them left. Some were doing OK, some even were prosperous, They stayed.

And decades later, they and their descendants died in the Holocaust.

My grandmother was a girl when they left. The lesson she took away from that was that possessions are traps. You don't own things, they own you. She tried to drill that into her children: Every few years they would move and she would only let her children take with them what they could carry out the door in one trip. Her lesson was that when it is time to leave, you leave. You may be able to buy more stuff later. You can't buy your life.

As Riverbend knows full well.