The Mynah Bird Roosts

For many more years than I care to recall, I might have had the most annoying habit in the universe.

No, I didn't pick my nose or teeth in public and I have never once felt compelled to spit on a sidewalk...I did something worse: I was a mimic.

It certainly presaged my days of international travel, when all I could do was look out at the world and dream of the possibilities, but I was a class-A mimic. The worst part of the whole thing was that I rarely realized I was doing it until someone, convinced I was making fun of them, would rebuke me for being rude and unsophisticated. Or, thankfully, my ever-vigilant mother would catch me before I made a complete ass of myself.

"What did you just say?" she'd ask.

"What do you mean?" I'd reply.

"Well, for the past twenty minutes you have been drawling on and on like someone raised in a log cabin in the backwoods of Mississippi or on a dirt farm in Texas. Since when has 'y'all' been part of your vocabulary? And, for that matter, why did you just tell your brother he was a 'good ole hoss?' What the hell is a 'hoss,' Patti?"

Embarrassed, I would shut up.

Later, when I was in my late teens, my father became quite close with an English family of the most noble genes. I would listen, entranced, as new words filtered across my mind and familiar ones were given the most glorious treatment with that wonderful, high-stepping, accent.

Again, my mother stopped me.

"Um, Patti? What in the hell is a 'tipple?' Or, for that matter, why are you suddenly calling people 'wankers?' And did you just say 'thoust' to me?"

I'd turn red.

"Who are you?" she'd demand. "Who has stolen my daughter and replaced her with Emily Bronte or Margaret Thatcher?"

I think I finally stopped doing around the second or third month I was (finally! officially!) living in another country.

In this case, it was northeastern Hungary circa 1998.

Although a total of about ten people in the city where I lived spoke English (which was why I was there...to teach them this fine language), I immediately began mimicking their accented English words. I found it deeply romantic....until, of course, my boyfriend at the time pointed out that this could all be misconstrued as a little rude.

"Patti, is there a reason why you are suddenly talking like a lisping Russian field peasant?" he'd inquire.

"Why, what do you mean?" I'd ask.

"Well, for the past twenty minutes you've been mimicking George to the point where you sound like Dr. Zhivago and Joseph Stalin had a half-wit love child and implanted it in your body. It's a bit rude, don't you think? Why don't you just talk like...YOU?" he'd ask, flustered.

Humiliated, I vowed never, ever to do that again. I watched my speech carefully for the next year and only adapted British English words (not accents, just words) when it got my point across better than American English words. And I stopped mimicking people.

However, I did pause to consider why, exactly, I might have been doing this. At first I thought it was because I romanticized any and all things foreign and felt that the highest compliment to that love was to imitate it.

This, in part, was true, but there was a bigger reason.

And the reason was because I had absolutely nothing distinct about the way I spoke whatsoever. No accent, no charming drawl, no lilting speech, nothing.

Raised in southern Connecticut, a state that has the distinction, like California and Delaware, of being populated by many people who have no discernible accent whatsoever, I was at a loss.

Yes, years later I have had people tell me that I sound "a touch" like a New Yorker and that other people from northern Connecticut sound very much like Bostonians, but that wasn't good enough for me.

I never wanted to be "a touch" like anyone or anything. I wanted an identity, I wanted to belong to a distinct group of people, easily identified by their speech. The fact that most Americans and some foreigners could tell I was from the northeastern part of the United States was not good enough for me. I didn't want a region...I wanted a damn state or a country.

Still, I certainly did not want to give people the impression that I was being rude in my mimicry. So, with the exception of modifying the way I pronounced certain words depending on the country I was in and who the former colonial overlords were, I stuck to my own way of speech.

My own very boring way of speech.

That is, of course, until circa March 2010.

This marks the date that I became Rocky Balboa in female form. And, to be honest, I am not sure I am going back to my old ways ever again.

Mind you, other than Connecticut, the state I have spent the most time in is Pennsylvania. At this point, I collectively have logged just as many years in the Philadelphia region as I did in southern Connecticut. And no, not once during all of those years did I attempt to adopt the very distinct Philadelphia accent. I guess, because I had spent so much time there, I just didn't see it as exotic enough.

However, when I was deeply homesick while living in Uganda, all I wanted was Philadelphia. I love this city and its people in an almost over-the-top way. I know it is because some of the very best years of my life were spent here. My closest friends are all from Philadelphia, my most significant (although not always good) relationships were/are with men from Philadelphia, and I just love the way the city feels.

I'm not disparaging New York or Boston, two other fantastic East Coast cities, but I just like Philly the best. And I'm not budging on that opinion.

When fate was kind enough to land me back in the Philadelphia area after my seventeen month adventure in Uganda, I ran back to it with open arms. I think I was even a bit breathless, like being reunited with a long, lost lover.

And, of course, my boyfriend, Chas, is from Philadelphia. I think I fell in love with his thick northeastern Philadelphia accent (one I had never really paid any attention to before) before I fell in love with him.

And, around March of this year, I caught myself.

I was out in the backyard with Chas doing some minor yard work when I realized that I was mimicking him. That I was following him around like an anxious Mynah bird trying to mold my own speech to his. I heard words coming from my mouth that I had never once considered using before and I heard what had happened to any word that contained an 'e' followed by one of more 'r's'. Plus, people from Philadelphia can outdo just about any military man or woman I have ever met in the liberal employ of the f-bomb. I had gotten fairly tainted working with the military for years but had managed to almost completely lose that word from my vocabulary over the proceeding seventeen months in the face of the much more polite and proper Ugandans.

Still, once here again, words like "yo," had suddenly supplanted the much more proper "Hello" or even "Hey," as part of a greeting or an attempt to gain someone's attention. Such verbal gems as "knucklehead" were now in my once untainted speech. Calling someone a "bum" became common. And, the worst to my mind, I was using "at" at the end of sentences to clarify the location of things. It had gotten very, very bad.

"Yo, where is that knucklehead dog of ours at?" I would ask Chas. "What a fucking bum!"

I stopped short, just barely, of saying "yous" and "ain't" but I was rapidly sliding downhill.

And the 'e' and 'r' combinations? Well, let's just say I had a hard time with them in the beginning but have begun to slowly morph into that way of talking too, if only to make myself understood.

Early on, however, Chas and I had a very confusing conversation.

"What do you think of Kerry?" he asked me.

Of course, in Philadelphia-speak, when an 'e' is followed by an 'r,' it becomes a 'u.'

"What kind?" I asked. "I love Indian food in general but some of those sauces are a little spicy for me," I concluded.

He looked at me sideways, undoubtedly trying to discern if it was the last remnants of malaria or whether I truly might be a half-wit.

"Yo, what the fuck are you talking about? Indian food and sauces? I asked what you thought of Kerry...you know, the bartender?" he said.

Oh, K-e-r-r-y...not curry. My bad.

Or, when Chas is going golfing in Delaware or Maryland, he takes a "furry" to get there.

You know, the "furry" that travels across the water to get a passenger from Point A to Point B?

Most Philadelphians also do not modify or add subtlety to anything. Something is either good or bad. Words like "fine" and "well" do not exist in their vocabularies. Chas is never feeling "fine" and things are never going "well." It's either "good" or "bad" (and, on occasion, "nasty") but I have never heard him use anything more subtle than that.

The word "ignorant" also stands in for many different occasions. If you are rude, slow, in a bad mood, annoying, or just plain mean...you are ignorant. It always means something bad, the severity of the badness all depends on whether the f-word is placed in front of it.

If you are "fucking ignorant," then you might as well just curl up and die because you are truly irredeemable at that point.

Same goes with the term "bum," which truly reminds me of Rocky Balboa movies. If someone is a bit of a lazy and unmotivated person, they are a "bum (also a term for a homeless person in American English)." If they have done you wrong, personally or professionally, they are a "dirty bum." However, like ignorant, if the f-word is put in front of "bum," all bets are off. You are a social miscast, you simply do not deserve anyone's attention at all...ever...unless they are going to kick your ass for you "bum-ness."

Oddly, for all of the liberal usage of the word "fuck," the name of God is rarely, very rarely, ever taken in vain. I think it comes from some basic working class superstitions all mixed up with latent Catholicism, Protestantism, or whatever-ism is going on in Philly...but taking God's name in vain is a definite no-no.

For example, I have never, ever heard Chas say, "'Goddamn it" or "Oh my God." Nor does he put "God" in front of "bless you," when someone sneezes. Once, early on, when I tripped over something and stubbed my toe, I carelessly uttered, "Jesus Christ!" I looked over to see Chas staring at me in abject shock before quickly darting his gaze over to the Mass cards which decorate every picture frame in our home. He seemed to be uttering a silent apology to Jesus...no doubt telling Him what an ignorant knucklehead bum I was.

Also, getting away from speech for a moment, this incident brings up another interesting factor in dealing with many working-class and middle-class Philadelphians that had somehow slipped my attention in the nearly two decades of living there.

Superstition.

Philadelphians are very, very ("vury, vury") superstitious people. Particularly when it comes to God and their money. I have already mentioned the Mass card thing (you know, those cards they hand you at funerals that have a picture of Jesus or a saint on the front and a prayer and the name of the recently departed on the back?) but it gets even more bizarre.

Take, for instance, the time I accidentally washed Chas's wallet. He was furious, of course, and I don't really blame him...it was rather ignorant of me....but he was not angry for the reasons I assumed.

I thought, stupidly, that he would be upset that I had laundered his money, his credit cards, and his social security card. Hey, maybe even be a bit pissed off that I had washed a few pictures of his kids...but no, that was not the real problem, the real transgression. The REAL problem was that I had washed Jesus.

"My Mass cards!" he screamed. "You washed my Mass cards (yes, they are found in both wallets and picture frames around these parts), I have had some of those Mass cards for twenty years," he moaned, rescuing a soggy image of St. Paul from the washing machine.

I, ignorantly, tried to make a joke out of it.

"Look, Babe, it's OK. I will lay Jesus and St. Paul out in the sun on the porch and they'll be good as new by tomorrow. Maybe the printing will be a bit faded but...."

"Stop it!" he yelled. "Don't say those things!"

And, for the next 24 hours, until St. Paul and Jesus dried out, Chas crept around the house waiting for the lightening bolt to strike. He made sure to steer well-clear of me.

The money thing is also unusual. For example, many people from Philadelphia absolutely do not trust banks. Despite the fact that Chas and most of his friends are far too young to ever have experienced the Great Depression...well, it might as well have happened yesterday.

Money is kept under beds, under floor boards, in the ceiling...anywhere but in the bank. The bank is seen as a necessary evil for occasional bill-paying when some of the money is secreted out of its location in the house and deposited (in the exact amount of the check to be written) in the bank but, otherwise, banks are viewed as Evil.

The fact that I carry very little cash on my person (my own weird superstitions gained from years of traveling to places where one can easily be relieved of one's cash) and pay for everything with my bank debit card horrifies Chas.

Never mind the fact that Chas, when not paying in cash, conducts almost all of his financial transactions online...a markedly less secure place than the bank. It doesn't matter. Banks are Evil and that is the end of the story. Money is either cash money or money that can be spent online, on the ever-so-secure Internet, but money never, ever goes into the bank. That is where The Man is waiting.

This superstition, of The Man (aka the Government), also lends itself to finer points. For instance, the fact that someone is unemployed or having a hard go of things does not ever reflect on that person's character. Sure, if you're a mass murder or someone who washes Jesus every now and then, you might be held at fault but, mostly, the fact that The Man finally caught up with you is through no fault of your own. Life is hard...we need to stick together...and so goes the philosophy.

Unless, of course, you are a bum or you are ignorant. Then, by God, all bets are off.

In the beginning, when I was reacclimating, I found Chas's Philadelphia-isms charming, worthy of complete adoration. That's why I mimicked them.

Then, about five months into the whole relationship, I made the one huge faux pax you NEVER make with people from Philadelphia: I tried to correct his speech.

He tolerated if for about a week and then we had an arguement.

"Look, this is how I talk, OK? I can, as you have pointed out, talk differently when I need to be around rich and ignorant bums, or people who will judge you about that because of me, but when I am not around them, I like to talk like me...I am comfortable talking like ME...is that such a problem?" he asked.

Ashamed, I admitted that no, it was not a problem at all. It was actually something I loved about him.

"Good," he declared. "Because you are freaking my friends out with your six-syllable words. We all can figure out what they are eventually and, hey, I even KNOW what they mean because I went to college, but why don't you take a break and find a few synonyms for words like 'perturbed?' No one really understands that one anyway..." he said.

"Perturbed is not a six-syllable word," I corrected.

Eyebrows raised, Chas said, "Yes, I understand that. But it is a word that is haughty and annoying. So, given that, why can't you just say 'upset,' or 'flustered,' or 'uncomfortable?'" he countered.

Fully reprimanded, I stopped. I didn't stop using my six-syllable (or two-syllable) words completely, of course, because I adore language and words, but I did stop acting like an ignorant bum, so to speak.

The most amusing part of this whole turn of events is that my language overlord, the woman who would not only constantly chastise me for mimicking but also correct my own English to ensure that it was both proper and expansive...my mother...has been dating a guy from West Philadelphia for over a year.

She is completely in love but went through the same thing I did, sort of, except that she never lived in Philly so this came as a whole new territory for her.

By the time she encountered it, I had accepted it. But the conversation was funny, nonetheless.

"He just said 'yous," she whispered. "And he says 'ain't' all the time...."

"Who cares?" I suggested.

"Patti, PATRICIA, instead of saying beautiful, like it's one flowing word, he says, 'Beau-TEE-ful' like a bad caricture of someone...or something...I don't know...from the mob, from a movie, maybe like from the Rocky movies or something...I just don't get it," she continued.

Knowing where she was going, I volunteered,

"He doesn't speak like that around people who are not from Philly or people that he feels that are important for you, you, to impress, right?" I asked.

"Exactly! How does he do that? How can he go from perfect English to, well, 'city' English just like that? Why can't he speak one way all the time?" she flustered.

"He's a mimic," I informed her. "He can mimic people but, at the end of the day, he has found that he is most comfortable in his own skin...with 'you' and 'yous'...so don't be ignorant," I concluded.

I hung up the phone to see Chas looking at me thoughtfully.

"She's perturbed, ain't she?" he inquired.

Very much so, I agreed.

"You birds are amusing," he opined.

Yes, we are. We are indeed.

Keep Showing Up?

A couple of days ago, getting my morning tea at the local WaWa, I found myself waiting in line and skimming the headlines of the local Philadelphia newspaper next to a well-dressed man in his late fifties. I was buying the paper and he was reading over my shoulder. It was one of those adult "share with your neighbor" moments that are, thank God, frequently common in this part of the country. People in the Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey area are friendly. Gruff, but friendly.

So this gentleman and I were crammed together in a line that snaked around the counter top in a sea of humanity, most dressed in clothes speckled in paint or in nurse's scrubs, and we started up a conversation over the headlines in the newspaper, most of them covering the spiraling unemployment rate in this country.

"It's ugly out there but the worst part of this whole blasted mess is the human toll," he observed.

Curious, I asked him what he meant.

"You know, relationships busted up under this kind of strain, marriages falling apart, kids getting abused more...that kind of stuff," he said.

"And me," he continued, "I am one of those guys," and he pointed to a headline saying that workers over 50 years of age were at very high risk for never finding employment opportunities again.

"What did you do, um, before this?" I asked.

"Lawyer," he told me, "But one of the good ones, not the ambulance chasers. I worked in Trenton doing environmental protection law. They downsized all of those 'wasteful' programs, like protecting our state's environment and resources, and then I was out of a job. Just like that, after almost 30 years."

We paid for our teas, coffees, and newspapers and continued our conversation in the parking lot.

I was intrigued by this man not only because he seemed very open and friendly, but also because he was dressed as if he still DID have a job.

I pointed this out to him and he laughed.

"Yeah, I still put the suit on. I don't know why but I think it has to do with the fact that if I keep showing up everyday dressed for the job, well, maybe I will eventually get a job!"

I laughed, noticing that I was NOT dressing as if I was ready for the job, in my yoga pants and t-shirt.

"Plus," he continued, "it's my wife too. It's for her. We had to give up the house in Trenton and the place we had with my kids up in Philly. We are still able to afford our shore(beach) house because I managed to pay the place off when...well, when I had a job...so now we live down here. But it's killing her slowly so I think it is important that I put on a suit everyday like it is still the same. It's important to her even if it just...well, just an imaginary thing for now."

I felt tears start to come but I willed them back. I was not going to get all weepy around this guy who, for whatever reason, had decided to grace my life with some dignity that day.

"But you're in such a good mood, it seems," I said to him. "How do you remain in such good spirits?"

"Well, I ain't dead!" he joked, "And I still have a home and my kids are helping us out now so we're not poor...and what's the point of being miserable? If they ever decide to hire an environmental protection lawyer again, they are not going to hire the miserable guy."

I envied him his goodwill and bid him farewell and good luck. Before he asked me about my story.

On the way home I was processing what he said about the human toll of being unemployed and I was suddenly transported back to graduate school nine years earlier.

I was a student of international relations and had harbored a lifelong curiosity about war. No, not just the munitions and the battlefield, but the actual human effects of war.

I had an incredible professor at the time and she was dedicated to helping her students and everyone else she encountered understand that while war was indeed devastating, the worst part came in its aftermath.

Not just in the broken and bruised bodies, or the mass graves, or the leftover landmines, or the post-traumatic stress disorder....the worst part boiled down to one thing: unemployment.

Wars devastate national economies in their aftermath. Yes, while some wars indeed provide hyper-inflated economic growth during the time of planning and the active military campaign, almost all come to a crashing close with a shut-down economy and hundreds of thousands of people unemployed.

And that, my professor used to say, was when the shit hit the fan.

We were studying Kosovo and some small wars in Africa at the time and I remember reading articles, testimonies, books, etc., about the spike in divorces, suicides, spousal and child abuse, and stress-induced mental disorders. Alongside those statistics were spikes in alcoholism, drug use, and other substance-related abuse.

"A human being not being allowed to exhibit his or her potential is one of the most destructive forces on the planet," this professor used to say.

Years later, in Washington DC, I remembered her words when I worked on various task forces planning for post-war Iraq. I also remembered it when I was asked to do assessments of why various initiatives in post-conflict countries were not working. Why, with all the money being poured in to prop economies up, were they still on the verge of war all the time?

This is just a blog and not one intended to go into the shortcomings of international development assistance and pre-and post-war planning but something struck me that day in the WaWa parking lot talking to the unemployed lawyer in the suit that hadn't occurred to me with such clarity before:

This was us. This was me. This was the United States in 2010.

I started to count back in my head the number of couples that I knew, really good couples, that had either broken up or gotten divorced over the past year.

I thought about the phone calls from formerly upbeat male and female friends who would call with a litany of things that were suddenly driving them nuts about their significant others, their kids, their parents, etc.

And I realized that all of them, ALL OF THEM, had one thing in common: someone had recently become unemployed.

And not one of them, not one, had ever been unemployed in their adult lives. These folks are all go-getters, over-achievers, and highly skilled. They are doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, graphic artists, musicians, former military officers, etc.

If life were a baseball game, these are the people you would definitely want in your starting line-up. Creative, impassioned, driven, and intelligent (both the school and street-smarts variety), these friends of mine are now unemployed. Most with a spouse or a significant other, many with kids, and all sharing one particular problem: their relationships are falling apart.

Sticking to spouse/significant other relationships for the moment, the theme is something like this: "He or she knew me as a certain person and now I am not that person any longer. I am still the same person inside but how can he or she know that because no one else seems to see that anymore. It's not just the money, it's the fact that I can't share in the experience anymore. I cannot be part of the experience because I have no money. I can't give or receive. And so we fight because I am angry but there is no one to be angry with. How can I feel angry when everyone else is telling me that this is happening to EVERYONE? But I am not everyone, I am me and I am angry. How can this be happening to ME?"

Something like that.

I am, of course, in that category as well. This is why I think I can articulate it clearly. I am also one of those friends of mine who sneak out onto the porch or the balcony or into the backyard with a beer or a glass of wine, and participate and initiate the phone calls. I am also one of the people whose own relationship is suffering. I am also one of those people who is angry all the time but feels guilty about feeling that way.

The cruelest part are the people who say, "You're just being picky, just go get any job."

I wish.

My friend Kelly, a graphic artist who used to work with autistic children, told me about her recent experience:

"Tom and I have been fighting non-stop and it's because of money. I used to make about $70,000 a year and now that whole income is gone and we are surviving on his $30,000 a year job as a glass blower. I have been searching for two years and nothing even remotely close to my field has come up. So I decided to go apply at the diner down the road because they were hiring and I needed to do something, anything, to make money and be active again. I went in and filled out an application where I had to list my education and prior work experience. You know what the manager did? He threw the thing back in my face and said, 'We got people who need work a lot more than you with your fancy education, go try somewhere else.'"

Same with my friend, John, a former Marine Corps engineer who left the military to work for a private contractor for a few years. When they downsized, he was out of a job and spent two years looking for something, anything, that might put his talents to use. He called two weeks ago to tell me that he and his wife were getting divorced.

"It was just too much strain. She knew me when I was bringing in about $180,000 a year and could afford to take us on all of these expensive trips. I was the asshole at the time and told her to stop working so hard as a teacher. So she lost all of her accreditation and now she has had to go back to work making less than she did when we got married. Now she works in a crappy school district making $27,000 a year and I have no job. She can get more benefits from the state with the kids if she divorces me. I can't blame her but I just never thought my life would turn out like this...I was given a full scholarship to Duke, for Christ's sake! Now I work at a drug store and make $8.00 an hour and she is too embarrassed to have me as her husband...but it's my fault."

The last significant story is about my friend's ex-girlfriend. Her name is Lydia and she was, for years, one of the most sought-after linguists in Washington, DC. Half Lebanese, half German, she grew up on military bases around the world after her father became a U.S. naturalized citizen following his service in Vietnam. She had a natural talent for languages and found gainful employment for years teaching rich kids in DC how to speak French while working part-time at a charter school giving lessons. When the war in Iraq happened, Lydia volunteered because she was fluent in Arabic. In 2008, several civilian tours later, and with her beloved boyfriend and my friend, Kevin, an Army NCO, on her arm, she returned to Washington, DC.

Kevin tells it like this:

"She was convinced she would find work again but no one was hiring. The economy had been hit hard and private language lessons were one luxury that quickly got cut from rich people's budgets. None of the charter schools were hiring and neither were the public schools. She would try to get jobs that matched what she could do, even stuff like teaching immigrants English, and she would be turned down once they saw her resume. They just assumed she wanted the same amount of money again even though she didn't. She just wanted to fucking work! So she tried and kept getting more and more angry and more and more distant. The worst time was when she was working at 7-11 and a bunch of kids came in and called her a 'dot-head' and pushed her around. I tried to do everything I could but supporting two people on my salary was getting tough. We started fighting all the time because we were both drinking too much and I couldn't find work either. It just all went to hell. I sometimes wonder how it would have been if she could have found work or I could have gotten a better job. But there's no use thinking those thoughts anymore, what's gone is gone."

This blog is not meant to be a formerly-rich or upper-middle class person's manifesto of collective distress.

But it IS reality.

Relationships at every level are being torn apart as people are cast adrift in a society that has become closed and is shedding its pool of talent. My own included.

Chas has insisted to me that things will get better and I love him all the more for his assurances. But I also know that I have had the same thing happen to me that my friends have had happen to them: my resume or job application turned back in my face and some wise ass who doesn't know me in the least say, "Oh, I am supposed to hire you? With your fancy Master's degree and all this time spent in foreign countries? I am supposed to feel sorry for you? Well, go knock on someone else's door, we hire people who really want to work."

Or applying for jobs that ARE in my field only to get: "Look, we'd love to hire you but there is no way we can pay you that salary again...I know you say that you are willing to take less but it's better for us to hire someone with fewer expectations and far less experience, we hope you understand."

What? Fewer expectations and less experience? Is this really what our country is about?

So we creep home with the news that, once again, we failed to get hired.

And our spouses or significant others try to be understanding but still ask, "How is that possible? How can you not get a job?"

They don't mean it, but the words slip out and, like a surgeon's knife, lob off another part of our identity and another piece of our soul.

Chas asks me sometimes why I stay up so late at night, why I don't come to bed with him.

He thinks it is because I am rejecting him or that I don't love him.

The reality is that the new job posts for people who work in foreign relations come up on a website at midnight and I keep watch over it like a mother would with a sick child.

Resume or CV at the ready, I write relevant cover letters, piece together writings that seem to fit, run through my list of references to find the ones that are most appropriate, and then fire off the application into the ether with a prayer.

Then I check my chat box on gmail and see about five or six of my friends online at the same time, doing the very same thing. We inevitably start chatting and then I crawl into bed at 2am exhausted but better for my late night chats with people who are experiencing the same thing.

We normally convene again the next day, sometime past 10pm, to talk about how another fight has happened, another marriage has come closer to breaking, another person is more distant and less forgiving. We send each other articles and postings of relevance and try to keep each other sane.

But no one is sane.

I shared the story of the man at WaWa the other night on one of our chats.

"That IS a good story. Inspiring," Kevin chatted.

"Maybe we just keep showing up?" another friend said.

So, yeah, I guess we just keep showing up and hope, pray, that those around us know that we all have far greater abilities and potential than what is currently on the surface.