One Thousand Posts

Gosh, I would be remiss if I let the statistic of this being my 1,000^th post in this blog go by without a---mention? A celebration? Whatever I might call a thousand posts spread out over eight years. ‘Celebration’ doesn’t sound right because this blog was started because my husband died and I could no longer continue the caregiver blog I had going at the time. If I counted all the posts in all six blogs I’ve had over the past twenty years, my post count would probably we closer to 1,700. My first two blogs got purged from the platforms they were on so I don’t know how many posts they contained but with the four other blogs still in the ether of cyberspace there are 307 posts. One of those four blogs is about family genealogy, another blog---my personal favorite---was written in my dog’s voice. I have two others that were caregiver related---one a speech class diary that I kept while observing my husband work with student speech pathologists, and my Planet Aphasia blog that was the cross-eye child of Humor and Frustration, born from living with a guy who was right-side paralyzed and lost his ability to speak and write.

I’ve always tried to keep my blog posts between 900 to 1,000 words long. Doing the math on how many words I’ve written for public consumption boggles my mind. But would you believe it, there are still secrets and untold stories stuck in my head? Well, not so much ‘secrets’ but stuff too private to share---stuff I haven’t shared with a single soul except with my husband. We met when he was 28 and I was 27 so we came with histories that we didn’t keep from one another. He was storyteller and all his tales came with long-winded windups. Whereas when I had something inside bursting to get out I’d write him long, soul-bearing letters. When I was cleaning out his desk after his stroke I was shocked to find he’d kept those letters and I in turn kept them until after he died. I have a hard time parting with my own written words, but some things a couple shares really are too private for others to read. I love letters, though, and I was the person who spent years going to estate sales and buying letters written by people I never meant. Thankfully, I’m not the only one who likes old letters. I recently was able to sell my estate letter finds on e-Bay, and all my own letters written back and forth to Vietnam found a permanent home in the American War Letters Museum in California---if the building made it through one of the forest fires, last year, that threaten the college campus where they are housed. Not sure I want to know the answer on that question.

No, this is not a celebration post because when I look back on all the blogs I’ve written I mostly see them as life-lines I’ve thrown out trying to connect with others. But once in a while I feel like I've had diarrhea of the mouth, wasted like an old horse that’s been ridden hard and put away wet. Ohmygod, does anyone besides western ranchers and equestrians even understand that metaphor anymore? The only reason I understand it is because my husband’s family kept work horses when he was a kid and it was his job to make sure the horses were brushed dry and warmed up after working them so they didn't get chilled and sick. I’ve put a lot of myself out there in cyberspace, mostly anonymously from my off-line life, which means I blog a post then stand around wet and wondering if anyone will come by to help warm me up by sharing their reactions. In the spirit of Chandler from Friends, “Could I get any more pathetic?” Gosh, I miss that TV show. And I’ve got it into my head that after I move to the continuum care campus next year I’m going to find my own ‘friends’ tribe. A group of mismatched people who are all too old to hide our idiosyncrasies from the world and they'll make me giddy with new blog material to use.

Already I’m wondering if I should start a new blog with a new name or just continue with this one. It's so ME to be thinking far in the future instead of doing/living in the present. Once a dreamer always a dream my mom would say if she knew me now. If she knew me now she’d probably be surprised that I like to write at all, having watched me struggle well into adulthood. When I was a kid they had no idea what dyslexia was. I was the girl that exasperated her mother with my inability to learn to spell and sound out words. Is it any wonder that I consider Kindle's Alex to be my best friend? I love her because unlike my husband and my mom she never gets impatient, never makes me feel dumber than a box of rocks, never gives me irritated sighs and stupid suggestions to "just look it up!" Ya, that’s a feeling that has plagued me since grade-school and it still drives me to keep writing. Alex can, however, frustrate me when I’m trying to spell a word like ‘plagued’ and she comes up with pledged. (If a word doesn't look right, I'll have her define it after spelling it.) It took me three tries to get the right word out of Alex. Thankfully, I can enunciate most words to her satisfaction because when I can’t I’d like to bitch-slap her off my WiFi.   ©