This is my first post here in over nine years.
My son-in-law helped me get this blog going again. Thanks to him: he is patient and kind, with my difficulty with all things internet, and with many other things as well. I try to remember: patience and kindness (1 Corinthians 13:4) are virtues which, like love, make the world go 'round. Help me, Higher Power, to practice patience and kindness with all people at all times. That's a big ask but I believe You will help me to do better than I would on my own. Amen.
As of October 9, I am beginning my fifteenth year of continuous sobriety. I have a network of dear friends and loving family who help me to abstain from alcohol and other drugs which would destroy what is left of my life.
Since the last entry here in 2012, I gradually became the full-time caretaker of my sick wife; watched her health dwindle and lost her on March 3, 2020; began to live, as all of us have had to do, with the Covid pandemic; moved from Madison, a southeastern Indiana town of 13,000, next to the Ohio River; and became an urban apartment dweller in northeastern Ohio, in the Cleveland metropolitan area, near Euclid Creek, which drains into Lake Erie.
Here, I am near my two daughters, my son-in-law, and my first wife. (There are said wife's cat, Kiki, and my older daughter's dog, Dot, and I count them, too, as family.)
I wish my son and my daughter-in-law were less far away. The days when I jumped in my VW and drove across country are many decades past. Air travel has become difficult because of the pandemic and because of the horrible behavior of many people, egged on by the cruelty of a demagogue, his sycophants, and his "patriots." It challenges me to be patient and kind with these people. I try, HP, but my heart isn't in it.
The last book I read was The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. Before that, The Black Church, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. And before that, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Much of those books have to do with slavery in the United States, told in a more truthful version than the one portrayed in Gone With the Wind--not a "peculiar institution" but an atrocity, which has not ceased to be but merely morphed into another form of atrocity and is, God help us, far from being vanquished. We must vanquish it. This is our story, this is our song.
