Here's what does matter: the excitement of being in new places and trying new things and most of all, those seven other people waiting for me and the new shared history we will inscribe together.
So far, dating the engravings is "extremely difficult" and determining what these images actually meant to the people who inscribed them will require many years of study, if we can ever know.
The monument will be built of 67,640 concrete blocks, each of which can be inscribed, and will be sold.
As the Senate moved toward a vote this week, Handgun Control distributed an information packet inscribed "Who will cave in to the gun lobby and why?" It included a list of senators who had received large political contributions from the N.R.A.
On her shelves, she has a basketball given to her by Obama (inscribed "You will always be my MVP"); a program from the memorial service for her mentor Richard Holbrooke, whom she met in Bosnia, where he was a U.S. envoy negotiating for peace; and a photograph of her son, Declan, with his head in a bowl of apples on the coffee table in the Oval Office.
At the center of the book is the narrator's grandfather, a concentration camp survivor who tells his grandson, then a young boy, that the string of digits tattooed on his left forearm is his phone number, inscribed so he will not forget.
Inscribed You'll Never Walk Alone, they were opened by Nessie Shankly at a low-key ceremony in August 1982.
"We will not allow the word Allah to be inscribed in your churches," one shouted into a loudspeaker at the Kampung Bahru mosque.
The names of the 18 men, women and children killed will be inscribed, and compass arrows will point to the sites of other democratic uprisings, from China to Egypt.
He inscribed it to Hatch with the words "We'll leave the light on at the compound for you any time".
