I’m going to work very hard to keep this a short post. It won’t be easy. After a pretty good night’s sleep I woke up in a stream of conscience state which could easily lead to 10,000 words on the blog. I didn’t have it in me to edit the 2000 plus words of the post with “more prologue” in the title.
Who would visit a site so untidy that it spews out thousands of unedited or poorly edited words? Well So far in October I’ve had 554 visitors in four and a fifth days. Here are my stats for the first four full days:
01 Oct 2013 312 725 927 17.48 MB
02 Oct 2013 274 848 962 23.42 MB
03 Oct 2013 339 704 902 17.92 MB
04 Oct 2013 372 1,007 1,216 25.99 MB
The column after the date is the days visitor count. Totaled up it is 1,277 visitors. But I’ve only had 554 actual visitors. How can that be?
Well obviously some folks are stopping by to check the blog out more than once. I’m in that mix but I probably don’t account for more than 25 visits. Perhaps my incredibly long and undisciplined posts aren’t driving people away although I sure as hell know I won’t bother to read a finished 700 word in a regular publication if the first paragraph doesn’t grab me.
This desire of mine to put it all on paper must go back a long way. I was a day dreamy kid. After High School I thought I might write a little bio on every one of the 454 kids in my graduating class. I even began writing the first bio of the first kid in the alphabet. It only took one kid to bring the project to a halt.
I think its my Mother who had the most influence on me in this regard. Since I was little she would talk to me about her family and this kicked into overdrive when her Father was put in a nursing home. She lived 600 miles to the away to the North and she and her sister lived a little farther south. It was a Minnesota/New Orleans axis with Topeka, Kansas pivot point in the center. My Mother felt guilty as hell because she couldn’t be right next to him but could only see him every two months after a day long drive. She would stay in Topeka for a couple of days and drink in family history by talking to him.
Its only recently that I’ve put two and two together to figure out what must have been happening. My Mother was belatedly finding out about her family’s history from an historically and story minded father. That’s not uncommon as an older child sees her parents life nearing its end. She in turn, perhaps in part to reinforce these conversations in her own head and to instill the memories in mine would spill them out to me after her return.
My Mother liked to chat and explore people she’d met or read about or who were family. As a consequence I have a lot of family history in my head that I’ve been spilling back out from my fingers to the page, or computer for twenty years and more. I do that because I haven’t had the same kind of chats with my kids and never expect to. But like my Mother I don’t want the data to evaporate completely when I die.
I know, I know. I said I wanted to make this a shorter post. Its going to be tough.
One of those talks with my Mother was about Earl. He was a rough character in my Dad’s fraternity. He slept around and was about 180 degrees different from my Mom and Dad but he was part of their crowd. He may not have sworn off women but I suspect he had sworn off booze. That’s because my Dad had started a little group withing the Fraternity called the “Elkhorn Club.” It was a group of kids who did not drink. It even had a cheer which consisted in part of repeating the club name elkhorn several times in a row.
Mom had obviously mentioned Earl and his easy ways to her Father in one of her extended weekend visits and he had stongly disapproved of this fellow who my Mother had found engaging. Why he could have ruined the life of a young woman by getting her pregnant. That comment must have revved up my Mother because she evidently took him to task with some vehemence over something he had told her about his experiences in World War 1.
My Grandfather got along well with another lieutenant that was his coequal in rank. This fellow, a New Yorker, had been a worldly man and told my Grandfather his ethics where women were concerned. Now my Grandfather was an attractive man with the ladies himself I suspect. I also suspect he was a pretty virtuous fellow, a good boy if you will. Well Lt. New York told my Grandfather that he liked to sleep with married women because if they got pregnant the difficulties could be hidden without shame or fuss because everyone would assume it was quite natural for her to become pregnant because she was married.
Oh, my Mother disagreed with her Dad. Why, a married woman getting pregnant by another man could break up a marriage. How could her father not realize that. Easy Earl wasn’t a threat to a family. Hoe dare her Father judge him so harshly
I’m laughing as I think and type about this now. Its partly the odd defense of different kinds of cads, Its partly the strange lesson I was being taught in my high school years by my Mother. Its very funny to me. It is also something I’ve thought about for forty years so I do understand that it was memorable. It was an ethics lesson in which there is no conclusion. Its like that Zen Buddhist word puzzle to make you get reflective, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Which is worse breaking up a family or knocking up a single girl?
I don’t know if I’ll proof read this after posting it. I’ve probably caught the worst mistakes as I’ve been typing. I can’t say that about posts that run several thousand words long and are the result of sleeplessness late at night. I don’t care. I do fuss over finished products but not as much as I should. On the flyer I’m passing out I discovered that one “his” is missing the h and so comes out “is.” I spent $329 on it and I’m not going to spend it again to fix that darned “is.”
I approach my blog like I do a piece of artwork. When I sculpt snow I begin by piling it up in one place. Over time it takes form as I move snow around or chop it away. I don’t obsess about what people think about it. They treat it like a guessing game. Maybe the unformed snow looks like a hippo or an elephant to them. They ask me and I make them guess. I don’t worry at any point because I can’t form my sculpture instantly into something. People understand that. Well writing is like that too except it is only a few privileged few who get to see the rough drafts. I guess the hundreds of people who come to read posts here manage to wade through my drafts.
Some posts like this are reasonably tidy. Others a short sparkling gems. Others are labored, turgid unending nightmares of word streams. Visitors can take from this over grown garden what they wish. Maybe like me this one will get them to weigh the relative crime of messing around with single women vs. married women. If so, enjoy the mental wrestling. I have for the last forty years. Take down. Two Points.
