I had somebody real smart tell me one time that when somebody dies you don't just grieve the passing of that person you also grieve the passing of an era and I feel that with my grandparents at both of my sets of grandparents

houses there was this whole vibe this thing, this whole rhythm to life, stuff smelled a certain way, and a circle of people would gather around, there's a way we did stuff, it's a way life felt. And when they passed away,

slowly I came to grips with the fact that that era was over and it lives on in my parents and it lives on in us but it's not the same

this is a new era with dashes of that old era that I miss so much.

And I think this is very much true when you're talking about a ruler, especially a king.

I mean, for us, in my country, you, we got presidents.

We have four-year terms.

You're only allowed to serve two of them but I think a lot of

Americans lump the ages of our era of our lives into the era of given presence.

Like, oh, the Clinton years, that's when I was a kid and I was doing this or that.

Oh, who could ever forget the Obama years?

They were like this.

The Trump years felt like that. The Biden you know all of these things we're going to

have associations with those eras but they come and go really quick in our country

whereas in the ancient world the Darien era is quite the era.

It's a better part of a lifetime for a lot of people.

The Xerxian era is a very significant era.

It's a whole time when things felt a certain way when the

trajectory of the whole empire and the empire was all of life was headed in a

given direction and we get a slice of that pie, right, square out of the middle, more

like a fistful of that pie, right out of the middle, totally socially, inappropriately

grabbed and held a loft for all to behold, when we read the Book of Esther,

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