The Day in Brief

I wasn't going to post a personal entry for today until my wife gave me a reason to. We should go with the day in order though so we'll get to that at the end.

Yesterday I mentioned a bit of my life I'd been neglecting so early this afternoon I went for a stroll around the neighborhood. I took the GPS along and about 349 feet into it I reissued an old lament that my wife and I often discuss. Down in our part of the suburbs the new neighborhoods all include sidewalks as the houses are built. It's great if you want to walk anywhere in the neighborhood but eventually you'll come to a point where you find yourself thinking of a Shel Silverstein book. The options at that point are to either walk in someone's yard (which I find rude) or walk on the edge of the street. The latter is a bad idea and will be illustrated in a story once I'm done with this one. Anyway, further in my walk I reminisced that when I was a lad you could actually walk to places. You could step out of your front door, put foot to pavement and walk somewhere totally different from your house. It was flippin' brilliant. After about another mile I realized that I'd been complaining for 2 years about a situation that wasn't actually true. The library and a liquor store and a pizza joint are just 3 miles that-a-way. Forty minutes later I was ceremonially touching the flagpole as proof of concept. Sadly it was a Sunday so I couldn't buy a fifth of vodka for the walk back home but the point is simply this: I've been complaining about the fact that there's nowhere to walk from home when in fact it's just not true. I'm not sure how often I can bring myself to walk the 6 miles round trip to the library but the fact is that it's available. Reality listened to my complaint and retroactively addressed it.

Ah, yes, you're asking for the story about walking along the side of the road. Alright, fine. When we lived in our previous house I used to take these crazy walks around the 'block' of our neighborhood out in the country. A large part of this was along the edge of the street with no sidewalk and just a drainage ditch along the side. About 80% of the way through my walk I misplaced a step, turned my ankle and pitched straight into the ditch in a most graceless manner. About 30 seconds later as I sat in the ditch wondering if I'd make it home or not, a lady stopped to ask if I needed assistance. I refused and shook it off after about 5 minutes and hobbled home. A few months later the wife and I were driving down a similar country road and what should we find but a man sitting in the ditch obviously in distress. We stopped and gave him a ride back home. Apparently he was having some sort of sugar situation but the point of this rather long story is that somehow the wheel of karma had turned and we repaid the kindness paid to us just months before. Anyway, the point is: don't walk along the side of the road.

It has occurred to me as I write so much every day that this blog really is using up all my good smalltalk material. According to that stupid 'how to work a room' book the key to smalltalk is having your source material ready. So if you read this blog on a daily basis it's just possible that I may find it impossible to talk to you as I may not have anything left to say.

Lastly, I have to note what made this exceptionally trite post for the day worth writing. It should first be noted that my wife's relationship with this blog is a somewhat strained one. She seems to appreciate many of my highlight posts on topics of interest to the masses but classically she's not a fan of many of my more mundane babbling about books and various other crap. As a consequence she has ignored the last month's worth of posts since I've waxed unnecessarily personal. This evening, for whatever reason, she took a peek at some of my more recent posts and after her perusal said, "You are such a good writer, I don't understand why more people don't read your blog. You have a way of making even silly, everyday things sound interesting." I was flabbergasted. I'm not sure she realizes what a compliment that is but I thank her for it none the less. I have to say that much of the appeal may be because she actually LIVES with the person whose innermost thoughts are dancing across the page but I'll accept her kindness just the same.