There's a good reason I don't write here as much as I used to.  Thee are two, actually: Time and Audience.

Time can be dealt with, but we're all there at some point: too much to do, not enough time.  I do have the ability to find spare time over the course of my day, but it is usually in the evening when my wife wants me to be watching TV with her.  I also normally have my laptop with me since I am too ADD to watch a whole show, but I can't do a lot of writing since there is distraction, plus bad ergos and my wife would get annoyed at the typing.

Audience cannot be dealt with, at least not with this name.  I've mentioned it before, that my online name has poisoned my anonymity; it and I are one and the same to many people, most of whom are very close to me.  Though they do not all read what I write, they all have access to what i write, so I temper my words accordingly.  Not that I am going to write anything scathing about them or vent my spleen in their general direction.  But it is nice to be able to, to create without a microscope, no one reading over your shoulder. It is nice to write something...a missive, a screed, a rant...and not have it reported back to you.

So I've been very conscious of the public nature of this site, and very much at odds with my own impulse to write.  I can't not write, even though my time is very, very short and my passions have waned considerably.  I'm not at all comfortable, though, with the level of ferocity that I used to bring to the table, the sheer one-sided single-minded purity of self-delusional ego screed that I fully embraced five, ten years ago.

I miss that, though.  I do.  I know, I know, I'm probably more pleasant a person and certainly much more boring.  That's the thing: I never found a balance between interesting and shopping list, between "here's what I done today" and "It's time to set fire to the sky you idiots!"  I may have struck that balance twice, maybe three times that I can think of, but it wasn't often, and it wasn't pretty when I missed wide.

Two things have happened of late that have consumed my thinking enough that I need to write about them.

My sister-in-law, the youngest of the three daughters in my wife's family, miscarried.  She was in the very last of her first trimester.  The child was too large for a D and C, so they induced.  The induction of labor didn't work.  She spent a couple of days in the hospital with a dead baby in her womb.  Those are the facts.  She is out of the hospital now, had dealt with much of the reality of what she was going through well before she got to the hospital.  She's not "ok" yet, I don't think, and that's the problem.  Not that she isn't OK yet, but that I don't know.  None of us really do, other than her mom who lives 80-something miles away.  This whole thing happened via text messages and drugged-out cell phone calls, and in the end the disconnect from family was profoundly disturbing to me, since there was nothing at all I could do from here.  She and her three kids will be OK, I know they will.  She's a tough girl, quick on her feet.  She'll be fine.  But I really wish we could have done more, and we're trying to figure out a way to do more.

There's talk of a certain guilty relief that this happened.  Conflicting emotions based on reality (a single mom of three shouldn't be having a fourth, with no support mechanism other than our tax dollars and whatever work she can find) versus idealism.  There's a lot to say about that, and I won't be saying any of it.  Suffice it to say that we'd all rather none of it had happened, and maybe she'll learn to avoid future situations like this.  Me?  My mom always used to say "if you don't have anything nice to say, then shut the fuck up."

The second thing that I've needed to write about is my grandfather.  He's been...I think I've described him at various times as being a cross between Johnny Cash and John Wayne.  Not the kind of guy you wanted to drink with back when he drank.  And a tough mofo.  Germans couldn't kill him, drinking couldn't kill him, driving a loaded tanker truck into a ravine in the desert couldn't kill him (though it did break his back), and he found God (in the clothing of a Pentacostal ministry) and has been fine, since. 

Recently he drove my grandmother (herself a tough old bird but as kind as anyone I've ever met or read about) to a hospital some miles away from their rural Virginia home for a regular checkup to see how her cancer is getting along.  They stayed at a hotel nearby since it is a pretty long drive and neither of them are young.  When they got to the hotel, my grandfather got a nosebleed.  And not a small one, but a "your nose just tapped into your jugular" nosebleed, blood gushing from his nose.  It didn't take long for them to call an ambulance (by then he'd soaked a hotel towel with blood), and it took zero time for the ER to deal with him.  They scoped his nose and cauterized a point deep in his sinuses, and everything looked OK...then they got back to the hotel and it started again.  Once more the ambulance (they call the ambulance "the rescue squad" in those parts, which I find both hilarious and cunning). Once more the ER but this time they cauterized and packed, and held him for observation. His birthday a week away, a man who'd not been dropped by bullets was being drained by a weakened blood vessel in his nose.

They stabilized him, but were extremely cautious.  Packed a mile of gauze into his nose after the vascular surgery and waited.

My grandmother had enough meds and clothes for just one overnight stay.  She can't drive herself anywhere.  Nearest family was a day away.  My grandfather was out of the running for at least three days, they said, with a week being optimal.

My grandmother tells a nurse that she doesn't know what to do, but she has these meds they both need and she needs to get them.  The nurse drives her to her hotel to get them.  Drives her to the pharmacy.  Helps her get an emergency ration of meds for free.  Drives her to the hospital, waits with her while they assess my grandfather.  Takes her to the hotel that night, but stops first to get dinner for her.  The next morning she picks my grandmother up on her way in, has breakfast ready for her.  Checks with her throughout the day in the waiting area, and takes her to lunch. Takes her back to the hotel that night, though they stop for dinner.

Does this, helps my grandmother like this, for a week.  Picks her up and drops her off. Takes her on errands. Helps her with laundry and with finding cheap clothes at the local church store.  The community, one that is a mountain away from my grandparent's neighbors, becomes an open hand.  Everywhere she goes, my grandmother finds good, giving people, and she pays what she can even though they refuse. 

This nurse, though, is the best.  After a week, my grandfather is discharged, and she offers to have her husband drive them home.  My garndmother's sister was already heading in to get them, but just the thought...taking a hundred mile trip to drop off two people you don't know.  This nurse wasn't unusual, she's not unique to that area, but she is fantastic.  My grandmother knows the nurse now as well as she knows anyone, and I apparently have new kin, spiritually adopted through the kindness she provided for an old woman in need.

So even though I was not there and could not do anything, they were well cared for.  My father sent the nurse flowers.  I'm sending her a large sum of cash or a large amount of BBQ or both, and she's on our Christmas list from now on. 

When people say that the southerners are a backward, hateful bunch...when people make jokes about rednecks and point to idiots like Larry the Cable Guy or Jeff Foxworthy, hold them up as icons...they have no idea that the majority of them....of us...are caring, considerate people who live what we speak. Strangers in a small city pitching in to help my grandparents for no reason other than it is the right thing to do.  Now if only the southwest were as hospitable and as backward as the back woods, I'd not have a thing to worry about.