Oh, no...another blogger!

As I near retirement, I hope to find the time to ride my bike.  I also want to learn to kayak fish, find my way back out on the golf course, camp more in my RV, visit out-of-town family, and be more active at church.  And I want to travel over to Cherokee, North Carolina, from time to time and play cards.  And I want to write.

Writing is an itch I haven't scratched often enough.  I’ve got the makings of a book with 75,000 words in it that I’ve been working on for about 10 years.  It is far from being finished with only a fraction of it rewritten or edited.  It started like a fledgling romance, something I fell in love with.  But like all of those romances, the longer I worked at it, the more I found the need to commit.  The relationship between a writer and his book is more complex than I imagined.  It is still there, receiving enough attention to keep it alive, but my writing needs something smaller.  Blogging might be one way for me to scratch.

I've tried blogging before--several times in fact--and it has never stuck.  I think I was absorbed in having just the right content and audience.  I would select a theme for my blog, visualize an audience, and then try to make the content fit.  But alas...once I sat down, the content was like a dog getting out of its fence.  It ran here and there, returning close enough to almost catch it, and then out into the street again.  Across my neighbor’s yard, bothering people I knew well, barely knew, and then those I didn’t know at all.  I could never find control of those blogs so I’d just get rid of the dog.  This time, I’m going to keep the dog and get rid of the fence.  

Like the content, I worried too much about writing for a particular audience.  I tried to fence them in with the dog.  I’m getting rid of that fence too.  Instead, I’m putting out a welcome mat.  Maybe my children will visit from time to time, and maybe even a grandchild or two.  Maybe a few friends and maybe a wife.  Maybe a few wandering souls who find words that articulate something in their lives.  Maybe you.  I guess what I’m saying is that I’m going to turn the dog loose and see if a few dog lovers appear.  (Albeit, a more accurate metaphor of my writing might be herding cats.)  

So here we go, blogging staccato style, the way my life has unfolded.  Such living doesn’t flow from one thing to the next; it jumps.  One minute I'm teaching and the next I'm home cooking or taking a walk or attending a meeting.  The hats and masks fly off and on like an actor in a one-man play.  And yet the echo of a common voice remains.  One note hangs in the air as the other is hit, and staccato though it is, all the writing has hints and clues of its other lives.  My life is a popping around, from this to that back to this over to that.  This blog will pop too, for a writer who can’t stay away and for readers who spend a few minutes here before rushing off--both of us hurrying back to the next event in our staccato lives.  

I hope you visit again.  You’ll probably never find musings bristling with purpose or offering closure for problems in your lives, but perhaps you will find some joy.  I think that will be enough for both of us----mine as a writer and you as a reader--even if it's ever so brief.

Now go...get back in your own yard.