Two days ago, in Paris, eight terrorists armed themselves with rifles, and went to nightclubs, restaurants, a concert, and a soccer game, where they shot dozens of innocent people at random. They then triggered explosives strapped to their bodies, blowing themselves and anyone around them to bits. One hundred and twenty-nine are dead. Ninety-nine remain in critical condition.
Once, long ago in college, I went through the necessary ritual of dating. On Valentine’s Day my junior year, I received a gift from a young man I had been seeing for several months. He sent me a singing telegram of the song “You Light Up My Life.” I think he meant it to be “our song,” because a month earlier at Christmas, he gave me a spinning musical unicorn plinking out the very same “You Light Up My Life” on a metal cylinder. He was clearly very excited about the Christmas gift, he thought it expressed our relationship perfectly: a brass, horned equine, revolving on itself to strands of Debbie Boone. I accepted my Christmas gift with a bewildered smile, not knowing what to say. The poor boy never realized I absolutely hate the song “You Light Up My Life.”