Category: Uncategorized

Day One

A few days after learning that we have been in close contact with persons who had since tested positive for Covid, both Sharon and I begin to experience symptoms. She has a cough and fatigue, I’m beginning to feel a sore throat coming on. Both of us have been fully vaccinated, but we go to a local urgent care facility to get tested just to be sure. We have plans to spend time with our young grandchildren the next day so we want to know.

It seems like the nurse shoves the swab so far up my nose that surely you can see the tip protruding from my scalp. We are told the results will come in 24 hours and will be sent to us via text message. We go home and start to ponder several things. Was getting vaccinated worthwhile? If the test comes back positive, who do we need to inform? What do we need to cancel? And most importantly, can I still go to a drive up and get a cheeseburger?

Day Two

We sleep very little overnight. Too much to think about. 24 hours passes and no text message. Sharon tells me to relax and be patient. So naturally, I immediately get on my phone and call the urgent care place to ask what the heck is holding up the results. I am told they are running behind because of the high volume of tests coming in, but that we will be informed by the end of the day.

About four hours later, my text arrives. I am positive for Covid. Sharon gets the same news minutes later. So it’s real now. The message says we must quarantine for ten days from the date of our test if our symptoms have been resolved, fourteen days if they have not.

For a moment I am in disbelief. Sixteen months of being careful, wearing a mask, keeping my distance, getting the shots. And yet I wind up getting the virus anyway. Doesn’t seem fair. People are out there who never got the shot, who threw caution to the wind, and they haven’t gotten it.

After an hour of feeling sorry for myself, I shake it off and start looking at my calendar. I spend the rest of the day contacting folks, postponing appointments, and generally clearing my schedule. Our house will be our world for at least the next ten days.

Day Three

I am bored to death already. Our symptoms, mild up to now, are getting more pronounced. I begin sneezing and blowing my nose incessantly. So far, just feels like a classic cold. Sharon is sitting in the living room eating a popsicle, when she informs me that she has lost her sense of smell and taste. She is having to imagine what the popsicle tastes like. She is coughing a lot and has little energy.

A thoughtful friend brings us home cooked dinner and leaves it on our doorstep. Several others call or text to offer prayers and help. Word gets around fast. One of our church ministers calls to check on us. We are struck at how blessed we are to live in a community that cares about us.

I am popping two Tylenols every six hours and still whining. Sharon is taking nothing and yet utters not a complaint, even though I know she is not feeling well. Where do women get this capacity to endure pain?

Day Four

Our sweet daughter and son-in-law drop off groceries and treats on the front porch. In one of the bags are cards written to us by our young grandkids. They all wait in their van in the driveway as we open the door to pick up the supplies. We briefly shout greetings back and forth. The grands are excited just to see us and it breaks our hearts to see them drive off.

By afternoon, I can’t take it anymore. Cold symptoms or not, I decide to go out and mow the grass in the front yard. The heat is sweltering. I am exhausted when finished, and veg out in my recliner until evening. I get on the internet and start ordering things I don’t really need on Amazon. I wonder how much money I will spend doing this before quarantine is over. Sharon feels well enough to do some vacuuming and water her flowers. Our symptoms haven’t gotten any worse, but they haven’t gotten any better either.

Day Five

It may just be the Tylenol talking, but I seem to feel a bit better today. At least I stopped sneezing every five minutes. Sharon also seems a tad more chipper. I have actually started reading a book. That’s something for me because I have never been a reader. I wish I was. There are so many incredible books out there. I just never had the patience to get through them. The shelf in my closet is stuffed with books that have a bookmark about fifty pages in where I lost interest. Ironically, I love to write. Usually writers are readers. Somehow I missed the gene.

Sharon keeps a beautifully clean house, but it is understood that the downstairs man cave is my responsibility. Therefore it doesn’t get cleaned nearly as often or as well. But it did today. Dusted, vacuumed, picked up, and bathroom cleaned. Why not? What else have I got to do? Tomorrow is garbage pick up day. I never thought I would look forward to rolling our garbage cans out to the road, just to get outside for a bit.

Accidentally looked in the mirror today and realized I hadn’t shaved in five days. Facial hair doesn’t work for me. I look like somebody who got lost in the woods. Meh, maybe I’ll shave tomorrow. I’ll just avoid looking in the mirror until then.

Day Six

Sharon and I decide to just get in the car and go for a drive. No destination. Just get out and see if the real world still exists. We head out into the country. About fifteen minutes into the ride, we are overtaken by an intense thunderstorm. Is God punishing us for leaving the house? Thankfully the storm is short-lived, and we just cruise around enjoying the scenery for about an hour and a half.

I am convinced that there are only about five different commercials on daytime TV that run over and over again. If I hear Tom Selleck tell me about reverse mortgages one more time I’m going to scream. And I don’t understand why lawyer ads all have that disclaimer that basically says “No representation is made that the quality of legal services is any better than anybody else”, when in their ad, that’s exactly what they ARE saying!

Oh, and I did shave today. That should hold me for about a week.

Day Seven

Definitely think my energy level picked up a bit today. Actually felt good enough to go downstairs and work out with my free weights. We’ve now gone a week without eating restaurant food. You know those people who said eventually you will stop craving it? They lied. I’d sell my car for a burger and fries. Surely I’m well enough to go to a drive up window, right? Humor me and just nod.

Why do they make all those TV game show contestants act so artificially excited? It comes off just phony and contrived. That’s why I prefer shows like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, where the participants don’t have to jump around and do cartwheels every time something breaks their way. Also, when you watch the same game show every day, doesn’t it seem like you’re watching the exact same show each time? The host and the players say the precise same things every show every day. Sigh. Where is that book I started reading?

Day Eight

Okay, I might have overdone it yesterday a bit. Felt pretty tired and weak today. One thing I am learning about this Covid thing is that you have to pace yourself when you start to come back. So hard to do because of the prolonged inactivity. You start to feel a little better and you want to jump back into your exercise and activity routine. My body is telling me to dial it back.

Early in my quarantine I ordered an Amazon Fire Stick for my living room TV. It came today. I hooked it up and began drooling over all of the movies and cool content I can now stream. Most all of it is subscription based. They all want to give you a free trial. I feel like the fly being lured into the spider’s web. Am I really going to want to watch enough television once I get up and running again to make the fees worthwhile?

Day Nine

With our symptoms all but resolved, we decide it’s okay to get in the car and journey to a drive up window. Ahhh…….junk food. How I’ve missed you. We brought it home and I must have spent an hour just slowly enjoying every salty, greasy bite. Felt sorry for Sharon. She didn’t get the sauce that she ordered put in the bag. But then she remembered, she wouldn’t be able to taste it anyway. Her taste seems to be the last thing to return.

Today was our best day by far. We both felt much better. So well in fact, that we begin to negotiate with our consciences as to whether to end our quarantine a day early. After all, we rationalize, shouldn’t we count the ten days from the time we started having symptoms? Let’s recheck the instructions from the lab……

(Sigh) They clearly state it’s ten days from the date of the test.

When we first tested positive, we tried to make ourselves feel better about it by thinking about all the projects we would get done around the house during our quarantine. Now, looking around, we are kind of disappointed that we really didn’t get much done at all. Guess we were just not feeling up to it. Makes me wonder if we’ll ever get around to these tasks.

Day Ten

So I guess we’re supposed to have antibodies now? I don’t really know what that means. Does that mean we can’t get Covid again? At least for awhile? I don’t trust antibodies to keep me healthy. We’re going to be careful. After cases went way down early this summer and all the mask requirements expired, Sharon and I pretty much went back to life as usual without regard to Covid. Especially after completing our vaccinations. In retrospect, that was hasty.

We’re not going to be hermits, but I think we’ll look a little more critically at all of our social activity. I’m putting the mask back on around crowds of people. I don’t care if I’m the only one. I’d rather be the oddball in the group than go through another quarantine. We’ll go to restaurants, but we’ll shoot for times that are not busy when we can sit apart from folks. We’ll go back to church but be mindful of our distancing.

Can’t wait to see our grandkids again. To spend time with our friends and church family again. Mostly we feel blessed and thankful that our symptoms were relatively mild. Have to think our vaccinations had something to do with that. I get why some have their doubts about the Covid shot. It doesn’t keep you from getting infected. We are proof of that. But it does seem to stack the odds in favor of milder symptoms, and anything that helps me stay away from lying on a hospital bed hooked up to a ventilator is okay with me.

Time to resume the new normal. Things will never quite be the same.

P.S. Sharon was eating pudding today and suddenly exclaimed “I think I can taste this!!” Life is good.

For several years now I’ve been watching my toddler grandkids play with their modern toys. They have been provided a steady flow of soft or semi-plastic items, mostly modeled after characters and vehicles they watch on their cartoon shows.

As with all toddlers, ours give these toys a real workout, throwing them around, stomping on them, and sometimes using them as weapons of combat. The vehicles especially take a beating. Within weeks there are routinely wheels missing, roofs crinkled, and holes punched. When the toy reaches a certain level of punishment, the children lose interest and move on to the next batch.

Today’s toys are brilliantly designed to be clever, entertaining and educational all at the same time. They are also safe……very safe……painfully safe. No sharp edges, no hard surfaces, nothing that could pinch or squeeze or cut or scrape.

All well and good. Except in order to make toys this safe, you can’t make them to last. The soft materials just can’t hold up to a three year old stepping on it and kicking it across the room.

One day as I was observing the daily demolition, I thought back to the toys of my childhood. And then I remembered. Somewhere, stashed away decades ago in the deep recesses of the attic, are two of my favorite childhood playthings, toys which, for some mystical reason, I was compelled to stow away. I had to go find them.

Or rather, I had to do what all married men do when they want to find something in the house. I asked my wife Sharon to find them. Women have this uncanny ability to know where things are, no matter how long the items have been in obscurity. It’s probably because they are the ones who wound up putting them away when the men neglected to.

It was a good thing I went to her right away, because she promptly informed me the ancient toys were not in the attic at all, but rested behind decades of odds and ends in the closet of our spare bedroom. I would have never, in a million years, thought to look there.

After rummaging through the debris for several minutes, Sharon emerged holding my two precious keepsakes. They were spectacular. A dump truck and a bulldozer (I guess today they call it an excavator). My first impression was of how huge they were, compared to the smaller toys of today. These suckers were made of solid cast iron. Each one weighed about twelve pounds. They came from the hardware store my Dad used to own and operate back in the 1950’s.

The ‘dozer had an adjustable plow on the front that lifted up for traveling down the road, and then dropped when you wanted to move something. The plow was complete with sharp, pointed edges and corners. The dump truck had a lever connected to the bed, and when pushed down, the lever caused the bed to lurch free, and then slowly, hydraulically, lift up and dump its load. It was, and still is, the coolest thing ever. Plenty of ways small fingers could get pinched and scraped. After I triggered the truck bed upward a few times, it started leaking some sort of old lubrication fluid out of the hydraulic pipe. And, unlike modern toys, neither one talked, buzzed, rang, played music, or attempted to teach multiplication.

Golly, I thought. These two toys probably violate every safety standard in today’s book. They are injuries waiting to happen. And yet, I clearly remember spending much of my childhood playing with them in our backyard sandbox, and I don’t recall ever hurting myself.

What would happen, I dared to think, if I presented them to my grandkids? Would they immediately be rejected as being too big, too heavy and too solid? I couldn’t resist. After getting permission from my daughter (their mother), I gave the two relics to my two grandsons, aged four and almost three. Much to my surprise, they were instantly big hits! The boys couldn’t stop plowing and loading and dumping everything they could find. Making them even more gleeful was the fact they could rough house the toys to their hearts’ content and yet nothing could dent, crush or scratch them. The wheels were inseparable and the moving parts beyond incapacitation. Every time they come over, they rush to the old toys and fight over who gets which one.

Before you ask, nope. Not a single injury or mishap. I guess I’m probably a terrible Grandpop for exposing my little loved ones to these archaic but so realistic toys, but the joy I see on their faces takes me back to my days in that sandbox, and I guess I wish I could go back there. So, at least for now, the dump truck and bulldozer will remain out of the closet.

Just please don’t report me to the Consumer Product Safety Division.

I am constantly seeing people introduced on TV and social platforms as “Influencers”. I have to confess, until a few months ago, I had no idea what an “influencer” was. I had to ask my daughter, who couldn’t help but smile at my lack of pop culture currency. She explained to me that influencers are people who blog or post consistently about various products or services or causes in an attempt to “influence” public opinion. This is usually done with the ulterior motive of selling something.

My daughter further tells me that people are making a ton of money and becoming national celebrities doing this sort of thing. Apparently all they do is sit by their laptops and type opinions. Companies pay them money to express favorable opinions.

Really? Gee. I could do that. I spend a lot of time sitting by my laptop and typing opinions, but so far nobody has offered me a cent. Guess I just don’t influence anybody.

Let’s see, if I wanted to become an influencer, what exactly would I want to influence people to do? Buy clothing? I don’t know clothing. I’ve had the same three pairs of blue jeans for ten years. When I hang them up they curl into a sitting position in the shape of my posterior on the hanger.

Review restaurants? My idea of a big night out is ordering the combo instead of just the burger. I’m not what you would call a connoisseur. I couldn’t even spell connoisseur. Had to look it up.

Evaluate TV and movies? All we watch these days is Andy Griffith, game shows, football and local news. I can’t make it through the sexual saturation, graphic violence, and profane language of most everything else.

Books? Never been much of a fan. I read a lot of child stories to my grandkids. Maybe I could blog about what’s really going on between Winnie the Pooh and Tigger.

Home improvement? Yeah, right. The biggest home improvement project I’ve ever undertaken is picking up toys after grandkids have scattered them everywhere.

Fitness? Please. I’m in such bad shape my mirror refuses to reflect my image.

(Sigh) Guess I just don’t have any strong enough opinions to be an influencer. At least not strong enough that somebody would pay me to express them. I’d love to influence people to keep those Bernie Sanders memes coming. Can’t get enough of those. I love chocolate brownies, old insulated slippers, Tom Hanks, dachshunds, two person porch swings, cashews, and daffodils.

Anybody want to pay me for influencing about any of those?

Didn’t think so.

In 1989 Sharon and I moved our family from the Birmingham, Alabama city limits to the northeastern suburb of Trussville, about 20 miles away. At the time, our new home was about two miles from the heart of this scenic little town, borderline “out in the country”. It sat on a fairly big lot, in a cul de sac, with a half acre backyard and a full basement in a peaceful subdivision sparsely dotted with similar homes.

We built a screened in porch off the back, and finished the basement, which, at differing times, would become living quarters for both of my adult children when they moved back home. When they eventually went off and got married, it became my man cave, gloriously repainted in the colors of my beloved Green Bay Packers.

Progress being what it is, much has changed in the last 31 years. The town pretty much sprawled out to us. Where once we were on the periphery of civilization, now we find ourselves right in the middle of it. The town built its beautiful sports and recreation park next door. Two of the finest elementary schools are on either side. Access to the interstate is just up the street. Shopping and restaurants have sprung up all around us. Our subdivision has expanded into four phases, most all of which are completely built out and lived in.

Combine this with everything that is happening today in the housing market. Interest rates are incredibly low, and new houses on large lots with full basements are hard to find, especially in central locations such as ours.

All of which is to say our humble little burg is suddenly in very high demand. Because of the interest rates, young couples with small children are able to pay top dollar for homes like ours. Many of my neighbors, seeing the ridiculously high prices they can now get for their abodes, have not been able to resist the temptation to put them up for sale, and they usually sell instantly.

People are constantly telling us its time to do the same. That we’re crazy if we don’t capitalize on the current housing climate. My own daughter is among the loudest voices, repeatedly reminding us of the money we could make on the deal (of course, with the ulterior motive of having us move next door to her for purposes of instant child sitting). Apparently we are fools if we don’t sell.

Here’s the thing. I love our place. Everything about it. Walking my dog in the backyard as he investigates the trees that I planted three decades ago, working crossword puzzles sitting in my porch, cheering on my team in my man cave, taking walks along the creek that winds around the sports park.

We’re content as two pearls in a clam, and I refuse to feel anxious about it just because there is money to be made.

I suppose home ownership for many is simply viewed as an investment. You buy it, make the trendy renovations, and when the time is right, you sell at a nice profit and restart the cycle somewhere else. Not the case for me. To me, a home is a place in which to grow roots and to seek refuge when the world gets too crazy, as it has during this Covid-19 madness. My kids were raised here. Now they bring their kids here. The walls witnessed the twisting trail of my middle-aged life, and ushered me into the senior stage. I know every inch of it, cleaned it, painted it, treated it with tender loving care for all these years. All of my victories were celebrated here, all of my defeats consoled.

Likely, there will come a day when all of our familiar and treasured neighbors will be gone, and we’ll be surrounded by young folks who will form their own social relationships, uncomfortable with including old fogeys like us. A day when I will no longer enjoy the smell of freshly mown grass when I cruise the backyard on my rider, a day when the increasing traffic around us will be too busy to bear. A day when we will eventually sell this place.

By that time, the housing bubble will probably have burst. Any profit we might make will be minimal or non-existent, and we’ll wonder if we were foolish for waiting so long.

In the mean time, if you need me, I’ll be on the two person rocking chair on my porch, listening to the blackbirds and mourning doves chirp me into taking a nap.

Well, I’m about to have one of those landmark birthdays. In a few days I will turn 70 years old and, quite honestly, I’m not handling it well. It’s got me a bit depressed.

I have no justification for being down. I feel great. By the grace of God I have no physical limitations. Just finished my annual physical exam whereupon my doctor pronounced me fit as a fiddle. I have an incredible wife, loving family, wonderful friends. I lack for nothing.

Yet, there’s something about that number. Why is it that 70 sounds so much older than 69? I was okay with 30, 40, 50, and even 60. But 70? Ugh.

I made the mistake of taking out my phone and asking Siri what the average life expectancy of a male in the United States is. She came back with an answer of 76.3 years. Gulp. That rocked my world.

So there you have it. In your 70’s you have to start seriously contemplating the big finale, the end of the road, the home stretch. I’ve reached the stage where, whenever I learn of the passing of an acquaintance or a celebrity, the first words out of my mouth are “Gee, how old was he?” All too often the reply comes back “Oh, he was seventy- ______”.

I have made absolutely no arrangements or plan for my final resting place. I’ve never wanted to think about it. Do I want to be buried or cremated? Who wants to ponder that? How do you even make that decision? On one hand, it would be kind of nice to have a grave with a nice headstone, a place where my kids and grandkids could occasionally visit, a cute epitaph like “I told you I was sick”.

But families travel their own path and one day mine may move on and leave me to the worms and the erosion of the wind.

Cremation seems cheaper and less hassle for all involved. Maybe my ashes could be split and lie in separate urns on the mantels of my son and daughter. Until the cat knocks it down and spills me all over the living room carpet, at which point I wind up getting sucked into a vacuum cleaner and deposited into the trash.

Maybe Michael Jackson had the right idea. I could be frozen in a hyperbolic chamber and reawakened when they find a cure for what killed me.

Nah, that won’t work. I get the chills when someone turns on a ceiling fan.

(Deep sigh) All this thinking about one’s demise can make you feel forlorn. Dang 70’s. It’s your fault.

Wait a minute….I just found another article on life expectancy. It says because of medical advances, the chances of a man reaching 80 are now about 62 percent. And the chances of reaching 90 have doubled from 50 years ago. Says here one of every seven Americans is over the age of 80!

Wow. That’s more like it. Looks like there’s a whole new chapter yet to be written. I feel much better. Guess I’ll put away that phone number for the cemetery office for awhile.

Happy Birthday to me! Anybody want to go jogging?

Before there was e-mail, before text messaging, before Face Time or Facebook or Face Masks or whatever, if you wanted to catch up with family and friends at this time of year, you would do so via Christmas cards. You’d go to that hard-to- reach drawer or shelf in your closet where you put things you knew you would only use once a year, and pull down that red box containing cards and envelopes……and……The List.

Yes. The List. It might be an address book. Might be a legal pad. Maybe just a ripped out sheet from a notebook. No matter how hard you tried to keep it organized, it was a mess of crossed out names and addresses, with updated names and addresses scribbled into the margins. It might well have coffee stains and sticky spots from where food and drink was spilled on it during long hours of writing and updating.

It was a pain keeping it current, and, of course, making those critical decisions about who stays on it and who goes. Did they send me a card last year? Exactly how many years should I send them a card without getting one in return before I take them off? What if I take them off, and they send me a late card after Christmas? Do I send one back? Wouldn’t that tip them off that I took them off my list?

Regardless, it was worth the stress, because sending them out usually meant you got several back in return. Each one would have a little hand-written summary of how things were with them and their family, maybe even a photo or two. It was your life line for staying connected. I looked forward to the mail arriving every day in December, anxiously anticipating another stack of news flashes from loved ones I seldom got to see.

Over time, much has changed. It seems fewer folks every year are motivated to put in the time to work through their list and write out the cards. So much easier, I guess, to bang out a group e-mail. I get it. Life is busy. Time is short. Still, I can’t help feeling something has been lost.

Those few minutes it took to write something personal to us in the card meant that, if only for a moment, that person thought about us and thought enough of us to want to share their own highlights, if only briefly.

Sharon and I still get several cards, and I’m still excited to open them and see who they’re from. Very few have any kind of personal message hand written in them. This makes me sad because I really want to know more about what’s going on with them. But I’m thankful nonetheless to still be on their list, and I console myself by keeping in mind that maybe they did have to think about us for a moment as they addressed the card.

At this point, I must engage in full disclosure. I have easy talking. Sharon takes on the task of writing out and sending our cards. Sometimes we consult together about…..The List…..but she does all the work. I just reap the benefits of reading the cards that come in. So I don’t mean for this blog to come off as being critical. As I said, I get it. I appreciate the time it takes to commit to the task.

I just hope it’s a tradition that does not fade away, as so many do because technology allows it.

So election day is finally here. I’m not sure why, but elections, particularly presidential elections, seem to bring out the worst in us. I don’t remember this being true when I was growing up. I remember Republicans and Democrats. We don’t have that anymore. Now we have friends and enemies.

The side that I like represents everything that is good and true and wholesome and American. The side that you like represents consummate evil, falsehood and betrayal. Can we just sit down and debate the issues? No, because everything you say is a lie and a direct threat to my family, my health, and the future of our great country, so I must shout you down so that you cannot be heard.

Of course, the candidates feed off of this. They know full well that most of us don’t have the time and/or the ambition to delve into the issues in a comprehensive way. They know full well that the great majority of Americans will cast their vote based on broad perceptions. Perceptions that may, or may not, be accurate, but which the candidates will try to promulgate nonetheless.

How else to explain the brutally personal TV ads which accuse candidates of everything from being senile to not caring if Americans die of coronavirus? The allegations are then denied in a reply ad, and then reiterated in the next one.

You see, it doesn’t really matter if the accusations are true. Only that they help to reinforce your broad perception of the candidate as being incompetent, uncaring and misguided, if not downright evil.

I am naïve enough to think there was a time when we could at least rely on the national news media to walk down the center of the road, to objectively interpret the noise and sift through the lies and half-truths. Where have you gone Walter Cronkite? Huntley and Brinkley? Sam Donaldson? Alas, today it seems clear most national outlets have chosen a side. The tilting of their coverage toward the political philosophy of their chosen side of the aisle has never been more obvious. Their newscasts are now more a pep rally than an analysis.

So into this morass we cast our vote. We hold our collective noses and pray we make the correct choice for our country. Deep down inside we all want the same thing. We want what’s best for America. Come Wednesday morning when the ballots are counted and the electoral votes are awarded, we will have our president for the next four years. Then could we all be friends again?

No matter who wins, it won’t be the end of our country as we know it. Our founding fathers were incredibly wise and constructed our government with so many checks and balances that good old democracy is not going away any time soon. The country will go on…..at least until the next election, when once again the destruction of our great nation will be at hand. (sigh)

The other day my son asked me an interesting question. He wanted to know if there was this much division and demonstration and open conflict between races back in the days of Martin Luther King Jr. My son was born in 1984 so the MLK days were well before his time.

I thought for a bit, and I told him I did remember a lot of protest and demonstrations in the 1960’s, but most of it was directed at our involvement in the Vietnam war. I do recall some racial violence and tension, but I told him I did not think it was as intense and “in your face” as it seems to be today.

He asked me what I thought the difference was. I thought for another moment. I’m pretty convinced the difference is social media. Back in the 60’s there was no vehicle for the emotional back and forth dialogue that exists today. We saw news reports on TV and read them in newspapers, and if you wanted to be heard you had to take the time to write a letter to the editor and hope it would be published.

Now you can sit in your living room with your phone or your lap top and instantly react to comments and posts you like or don’t like. The result is the equivalent of people vehemently arguing with each other, with emotions rising as the words get more intense. Except you don’t have to risk physical intimidation by doing this in person. You can say anything to anybody and still remain safely isolated in your recliner.

I know many people who are sweet and amiable in person but who then get on social media platforms and express blunt and inflammatory opinions they would never verbalize face to face. My Dad used to tell me “just because you think something, doesn’t mean you should say it.” Yet social media allows us to do just that. To pour out our festering fears and emotions with no concern of personal intimidation.

It has brought us to a kind of verbal civil war. Our side against their side, whatever your definition of sides are….black against white, liberal against conservative, Christian against secular, young against old. The problem is everybody has a side these days and social media is the battleground.

Problem is, there can be no winner in this kind of war. The casualties include our sense of love, trust and security.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The platforms we use to fight can also be used to understand and heal. Let’s try that. Imagine the possibilities if everyone would post something constructive and non-hostile.

If Martin Luther King were still here, he would click the “like” button on that.

I have two Facebook accounts. Well, anyway I used to have two. One is my “fan” page which I was required to set up by my employers when I worked in local TV news. The other is my personal account. While anyone is welcome on my fan page, I only friend people I know on the personal version.

If you got access to this particular blog post from a Facebook link, then you must have “liked” my fan page, for which I am very grateful. The reason I know this is because weeks ago I tried to access my personal Facebook only to receive a message that it had been disabled. I received a message saying this happened because FB has reason to believe that someone other than me was using the account. In order to have my account reinstated, the message went on to say, I have to “apply” for it by proving that it is really me trying to get in.

No problem, I figured. I’ll just call the customer service phone number and talk to a helpful tech person and we’ll straighten this all out………except that there is no customer service number. In fact, there is no direct way to contact Facebook whatsoever. You are directed to a “help center” where you can “send them a message”.

In order to get reinstated, I had to send them a recent photograph of myself. Whereupon I was informed that I then had to send them a photo of a valid picture ID, such as a driver license, to prove its me on the first photo.

I was convinced this was a scam from some hacker and I did some internet research on it. Turns out it was completely legit. FB does indeed require all these hoops just to “apply” for reinstatement. Then, having sent them the picture ID photo, I was tersely informed that it may take longer than usual to review my application because of the Covid 19 effect on their personnel.

That was about a month ago. I’ve never heard back. I still have no access to my personal account. Apparently Facebook will get around to it when they feel like it, if ever.

I couldn’t help but wonder how any business can get away with treating customers like this. But I have since come to some moments of clarity.

First of all, I now understand that I am not a customer. I paid no money for FB. The customers are the advertisers and the services that buy the email addresses of all the accounts. Secondly, the most recent public tally puts the world wide number of FB users at 2.6 billion……..2.6 BILLION!

Just think. You could have one billion unhappy users, and still have 1.6 billion more! With that kind of user base, Facebook doesn’t have to provide a customer service phone number. They don’t have to be in a hurry to help you get back on. They don’t have to care about you, period. And evidently, they don’t.

Turns out, there is life without them. The first several days I found myself trying to get back on just out of habit. but after about a week I have pretty much forgotten about them. If they never get around to reinstating me, I’ll be okay with that.

It does occur to me that if I was hacked and my account hijacked, the same could well happen to my fan page. I truly do appreciate you for reading my blog posts. If you get any enjoyment out of them, the best way to ensure you get them is to subscribe. That way you’ll get them in your email. In case you’re wondering, I don’t make any money off of these. I am not even remotely close to having enough subscribers to interest advertisers, and I’m totally okay with that. This is just a hobby and self therapy for me. Occasionally someone will comment that something I wrote made them laugh and brightened their day a bit and that is wonderful reward for me.

I will admit that Facebook has been good for me. It has enabled me to reconnect with several childhood friends and former co-workers with whom I had completely lost touch, in addition to keeping up with the day by day adventures of all my community friends. But if the FB gods never get around to plugging me back in, I’ll use the fan page and Twitter (@KenLass3) as much as I can.

Either way just know that your reading of my musings is a blessing to me and makes my day.