JUST WRITE SOMETHING

That’s a directive from myself to myself.  Because it’s so important that I keep writing, despite all these obstacles.

This new computer is still giving me hell–I am told that it’s not putting out enough power to the modem.  But I have an Internet technician scheduled to (hopefully) remedy this problem next week.

I wish my nephew Chris were here–he’s an Internet technician, a very skilled one I understand.  Jessica, my niece-in-law who created this blog for me, is Chris’s wife.  But they have four children, and live way up in Virginia, so I haven’t seen either of them since 2003.  And two of the children I haven’t even seen yet.  I really hope they get a chance to visit me in Pensacola sometime soon.  I really miss them.

I also miss my niece Laura.  And I miss my nephews Jeffrey and Jonathan.  Jonathan got married in April, but I was unable to attend his wedding (way up in North Alabama).  I felt so bad about that.  I had been able to attend Chris’s wedding in 2000, but wasn’t able to attend Jonathan’s.  I couldn’t afford a plane ticket and a motel room, and I couldn’t rely on my truck to go that distance without issues.  It’s a wonderful truck, but it’s an old truck, and it has had multiple issues in the past.

I wish my sister Cathy and brother-in-law Tom could have stayed in Mobile–but Tom had to move away for work.  And I wish my sister Elaine and brother-in-law Jeff could have stayed in Mobile–but Jeff had to move away for work.  And I wish I could have stayed in Mobile, but I had to move to my late grandparents’ house here in Pensacola because my low-income apartment complex had become a loud ghetto, and my car was stolen from the parking lot of the more rural-area low-income apartment complex to which I’d moved to get away from the ghetto–three days after I’d moved to it!  So I came here, to this house, because I simply had nowhere else to stay.  And in the process of all this moving, all this uncertainty, I failed-out of graduate school because I was unable to complete a paper for the one required class in my major.  But that was in 1998.

And my parents still live in Mobile, in the house in which I grew up.

I miss my family.  But I especially miss a time, before I was even born, when most American families were able to stay in the same towns for generations.  Was there really ever a time like that?  I think there was.  I also think there was a time when people didn’t need to lock their doors, and when they knew their neighbors.

Family and community are arguably the primary cornerstones of any culture.  And there was a time when, even here in the United States, family and community were both very much intact.  But that time is no more.