Paradigms...where shift happens!

Susan M. Baile

We were together for a long time, Harry, Sue and I and when she stopped working with (not for) us it was as if a wheel had come off. There the metaphor, as they all do, breaks down because although we limped along, we never quite got around to even looking for a replacement for this lady who came to work with us,  practically on a whim and stayed for 14 years. Maybe we knew it would be a fool’s errand to even try to fill the hole she left.  

It’s difficult to describe what she meant, not only to our business but to our personal lives as well. She made the wedding cakes (works of art) and was the wedding director for Harry’s oldest daughter and for mine as well. We never asked her to do that. It was just a need that she saw and she stepped in and filled it and filled it with a joyful energy that few if any people could match. 

But that’s the way she was…throttle at the firewall all the time. Surely the angels spun in her wake as she arrived to grace the streets of Heaven. 

As I think of this rocket powered angel whom we will all miss so dearly, a few lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “A Few Figs From Thistles” seem an epitaph written specifically for her:

"My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light."

Indeed it did Susan and it still does.

Ann Coulter

I cringe every time I see something on line about Ann Coulter because I know I’m about to read yet another outrageous comment by this hack that has managed to crawl to the top of some web page. Her comment during a recent appearance at Philander Smith College in Little Rock about the necessity to poison Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, "We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee," was followed by, "That's just a joke, for you in the media." (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060127/ap_on_re_us/brf_coulter_stevens )I guess I’m just naïve but I fail to see the humor in that. If you said that about the President, the Secret Service would be on your doorstep faster than a lobbyist picks up a dinner tab. Since when is an attempt to murder a public official a joking matter?

Do the folks who allow her into the public forum not realize how much credibility they lose by giving voice to this hate spewing idealogue? I even hesitate to mention her here because someone will surely go charging off to Google her.

Birthday Parties and The Great Zucchini

Blogs are, for the most part, are where you post your own writing. Sometimes, however, I stumble across something that is so well written that it demands to be shared. From this past Sunday’s Washington Post magazine section:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011801434.html

I should live so long to be able to craft a piece like this.

"What the heck...

...is a blog?"

That's not the actual question I hear when I mention my blog to people but it's certainly the background thought of most people when the subject comes up. Blog is a contraction of the two words "web log"  and is well short of being self explanatory. A blog is really a public diary or journal published on the Internet.

By most accounts there are somewhere between 20 and 30 million blogs on the internet although a good many are dormant. Of the dormant ones, my guess is that they were, for the most part, started by people who abandoned them shortly after the novelty of publishing their own writing wore off.

I like blogs, I really do and I think I pretty well understand the basic mechanics of blogging.

When I began to write my blog in the summer of 2004 I wrote to clear my head. A relationship gone bad left me with more stressed out consciousness than I could handle without an outlet. The effort served its purpose and in the process I received a fair amount of positive feedback which I suspect was driven more by sympathy from friends than by the quality of my writing.

Once into this blogging thing I found myself reading other blogs and I became fascinated by the phenomenon and the more I learned the more questions I had. Very near the top of the list of questions was how to increase readership. How do I get what I write in front of more eyes?

Aside from all of the web based methods like syndication, RSS feeds, and the ever evolving world of Google it seems to me that the simplest and most reliable methods are  the hardest ones to achieve and maintain: content and regularity.  If I put things in my blog that people enjoy reading or that they learn something from then they will read it, bookmark it and they will tell others. The rest of the methods are really little more than marketing short cuts.

If I write stuff here that you like then you'll continue to read this blog. If not you'll find other ways to spend your time. As for attracting new readers, although there are several ways to accomplish that the most reliable is when you tell someone else about it and they take a look and so on.

If you don't like what's here then feel free to tell me with a comment posted via the comment function or send me an e-mail. I would really appreciate the feedback. I'm not fishing for compliments here by any means. I want to make this site better and your help is invaluable.

Hoping you will pass the word.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it...

Presence

I first met Charlotte Garrett this past summer at Hyperion Espresso, a downtown coffee shop here in Fredericksburg. Charlotte was a writer, a poet and an artist. She had lived for many years in New York City and upstate New York but was a daughter of the South having grown up in South Carolina. At age 75 she even retained the soft drawl of the genteel southern belle.

The Poetry Workshop of the Fredericksburg Center for The Creative Arts was her pet project. She seemed to like a few poems that I had written and was constantly urging me to write more which I never did. She always seemed disappointed and gently chiding when I told her I had nothing new for her to read.

Last night her daughter called me at home. She was calling to tell me that her mother had died on Tuesday the 2^nd of January. For some inexplicable reason Charlotte had taken a liking to me and had me on her “notification” list.

The last time I saw Charlotte was as I was heading for the door on New Year’s Eve at our down town coffee hang out. She came in bubbling over with the story of her Christmas trip back to upstate New York, her old home stomping grounds where she had spent the family holiday.

When I saw Charlotte that New Year's eve, I greeted her with a hug and the requisite Happy New Year greeting. Her eyes lit up as she answered my question about her Christmas trip. Instead of sitting back down with her and listening for a bit, I went ahead and left. Of course, had I known that she would be gone in a few days, I would have stayed. I wish I had. 

The point of all this is presence, being present to the people around you. We never know how much we can give with our time and sadly we only find out when it is too late. That is the sorry debt of not being ‘present’ for someone, for not recognizing their need for your presence. I’ll miss her.