On last night’s CBS Evening News, Steve Hartman did a story on a 78-year-old blind man who lives in a small town (only 1 million people!) in India. This man lives in a house with four generations of his family. They share one bank account. Even when he goes to work grinding flour, some family member is always following and watching to make sure he is okay, even if he does not know it.

Toward the end of the story, Hartman suggested to the man that in another country he could well be alone and fending for himself. The old man replied:

And I would ask myself, “What’s the use of having a family if when I need help I get shooed away like flies from milk?” What kind of family would that be?

I have some supposedly “Super Christian” relatives who could well ask themselves that question.

Indeed, “What kind of family would that be?”

Posted: January 26th, 2010 under Blogging, Christianity, Current Events, Life Journals, Religion.
Comments: 1

Ah, another in my long sub-genre of “Why I am not writing” writings. Irony appreciated.

I wrote the original draft of this article in March of 2009 — nearly a year ago. The opening paragraphs read:

It’s not a matter of writing but not posting, which I sometimes fall into — I haven’t been writing at all. Period.

It’s not writer’s block. I think of plenty of things to write, I’ve simply let them flit away. And while it’s not unusual for me to stop writing for 2 or 3 months on occasion, this is something altogether different.

(As a free aside: anyone who tells you “there’s no such thing as writers’ block” is full of a bovine byproduct which prize-winning gardens find extremely nutritious.)

What happened to me? What drove me from the keyboard, the blank piece of paper, the written word? If the title of this blog article didn’t clue you in, allow my younger self from a year ago to do so:

I got my heart broken around the mid-point of (2008). Over the last two years or so I could have had no more graphic a demonstration of why I gave up on romance. I tried to “hang in there, baby,” tried to “soldier on,” even limped into September, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t go on-line at all for nearly 4 months. Didn’t even turn on the computer for nearly three months. It had become a source of pain I meant to avoid at all cost. Even now I am trepidatious at venturing into cyberspace. There’s no call for it. I assiduously avoid anywhere she might be. I know she has no intention of contacting me in any way. But still. That instinctive shying away, as if to avoid touching a deeply bruised area, remains.

She broke my heart, she broke my blog. (She broke a lot more, but that sounded like a pithy title to me….) I don’t blame her. It’s all on me — as usual. If I was any good at this stuff, I wouldn’t be 40 and single. My mistake was answering when hope knocked. The biggest mistake of all was loving to begin with. (I’d like to think if there’d not been history between us, I wouldn’t have fallen for it… but I know what a fool I am.)

Looking back, it seems ridiculous that “I couldn’t take it anymore,” ridiculous to have feared the computer, to have not even turned it on for months… but there it is. And here I am… still thinking of things to write but doing nothing… still dreaming futilely… still wondering what I can ever do to be all right.

As I concluded a year ago:

Though I have started turning on the computer again, and even dipping my cyber toe into the bit streams, writing is something I have completely fallen out of. If only love were so easy to leave.

Posted: January 25th, 2010 under Blogging, Life Journals.
Comments: 1