That, too, is what it is?

Dearest Blog Reader

I hope this blog finds you doing well. It gets started in a befuddled state. That is right I am in a befuddled state.  Bev is back from Ghana. Suddenly, I don't have the brains to put two sentences together.  Which I am afraid feeds into numerous stereotypes about the organs used for male intellectual gymnastics.  But it is what it is.

Before I get started, I want to apologize for Bev's bad behavior. I have begged her to put the flannel sheets back on so that this March weather will relent and give us the April weather we so timidly desire and in the past have beseeched the Hoosier weather gods with our flannel sheets remaining in place until mid-May no matter what 70 or 80 degree temptations were placed before us.

"Don't be superstitious, " she says.

"Superstitious? Superstitious?” (Imagine Jim Mora type screech)

Well I never . . . I have scientific fact on my side. When it was 80 in March, we had flannel sheets on the bed.  Now, we have those easy breezy cottony sheets on and the high is low to mid 50's with wind gusts of 30 mph. One can't be so frivolous when the fate of the free world's food supply depends on proper decorum.

I will continue to try to persuade Bev. I know what you're thinking. If its so important Roger why don't you change the sheets and be the hero? What? Lose the opportunity to make Bev believe that she is responsible for the starving children in Africa, China, and Antarctica and fill her with guilt that will take years of therapy to undo? I will not. One has to have a purpose in life.

Back to the blog at hand; I have used the week long hiatus to think about why I write. Am I drawn to it? Is it for the riches and fame? Do I have to do it? If I don't write you every week, will I go crazy? Before I go further, I have a confession. This is not the only blog that I write. In fact, I write two other pieces each week. I am much more dedicated to its publishing deadlines than I am to your expectations, however low, for these weekly installments.

Each week I publish two other blogs to a very limited and exclusive readership. In fact each blog has one reader a piece.  For 4 years, I have written Ben a snail mail letter since he has been at IU. I doubled my output when Grace went to BSU 2 years ago. Each letter they receive is two pages of legal pad long. It hasn't always been that way; some, when reporting momentous occasions in their absence, strayed into 3 pages and maybe one or two tiptoed onto page 4.  But practice and repetition (not to mention redundancy) have left me with the impression that two pages are perfect, or nearly so, at times, my final paragraph has been a little under developed thematically in order to fit proper exhortations and goodbyes on the page. But that, too, is what it is.

My motivation for writing Ben and Grace are completely different than the reasons I sit with you on my weekend excursions. When I start those letter's;  Dearest Ben or Dearest Grace, I hope this letter finds you doing well, I dive into a story that has been going on for years. We are sitting around the kitchen table eating dinner sharing our day; there is no theme, not rhyme, no reason. It just comes out. I am loving on them the only way that I can within the dictates of distance and independence. It has become a beautiful ritual of my life and appears to be able to be sustainable until circumstances empties the ink from my metaphorical pen.

If I feel like I am diving into the deep end of my relationship with my kids when I start to write, the vision that I get when I type; Dearest Blog Reader; I hope this blog finds you doing well, is a vision of hiding under the covers late at night reading with a flash light after being ordered to go to bed. When I type that salutation, I am drawn to it. Like the last 75 pages of that mystery you've been working on all week, I want to get it done. It will be so worth it. Yet, at the same time, I am afraid that I will be caught, found out, warned to turn out that light and go to sleep right now young man. That isn’t what you are good at.

So if I skip a week, that's why. I can hear those warning footsteps wondering up and down the hallway, right outside the door.  That, too, is what it is. And it doesn't seem to be a permanent affliction.

Take care,

Roger