With Apologies to Edgar Allan Poe…
Remember “The Tell Tale Heart?”
Well I don’t have a man I wish to kill for his weird eye…
But…the… snow “Nervous I always have been and am, but ” the snow is making me consider what truly crazy people might be driven to…
It was three feet drifts banking the lobby entrance… It was huge snow cairns out back, it was six inches deep on the ground *after* the plows went over it…
and then, after two months…*two months* it was *gone,* cleared out, erased, melted professionaly and hauled away…completely gone…
Except for one square. four feet by four feet if one is generous and about 2 to three inches high at most….
It’s in no ones way. It’s harmless. It’s not blocking my, or anyones access to the building, view from their window…
So…
*Why* *Isn’t* *It* *GONE!*
When I woke at 2 am last night I was quite seriously considering going down there with my broom and *sweeping the damn thing *up* just to have something to do until I fell back to sleep!
When I trundled off to two doctors appointments this am…
I got back from the first one and was dissapointed to see this pitful remnant of a once mighty blizzard still taking up space on the asphalt.
“Maybe,” I said…”Maybe the sun and the warm temperatures will make the maintenance staff incredibly productive and they’ll have some extra time and take five minutes and *get rid of the last of the snow!*”
I was brokenhearted when I returned and the stuff was still there….
If it’s there by Sunday morning I promise to have the roomate take a picture, because by Gawd, that snow is going to dissapear and I’ll be the one to do it!
When “Invisible” works….
When I’m grateful for the wheelchair for the oddest reasons.
This evening when I was disembarking from paratransit and noticed two earnest young men in black pants white shirts…
Hawking God.
There was no other word for it…they were *physically* pursuing another tenant and insistent that she must want to hear about their belief system….She was looking harried, and didn’t want to be impolite, but clearly wanted nothing to do with what the young gentlemen had been told to tell her with such persistence…
“Don’t you want to hear about a prophet of God?”
“Don’t you want to hear about how your family can be made eternal?”
She had gotten to the door, the door to my side of the building in fact and was trying to hustle into the doorway…
The youngsters were blocking my way in as well, so I very politely said “Excuse me,” and they quickly moved and lost their ‘momentum’ and let the chair through without saying a word. No prayers, no religious literature and no high pressure ‘sales pitch’…Even though I had split them apart, I was invisible to them, and profoundly grateful for that invisibility at that moment. The paratransit driver very quickly got me inside the apartment complex main door (so as not to be out of sight of her vehicle), and slipped away.
The door had closed behind me, and the two young ones were still staring inside like cats looking at goldfish (Sorry Goldfish,!)
I was a preachers wife, but I guess I was a lousy one.
Because the thing I could never get past, even while living the life of a believer quite sincerely…
I consider ‘evangelism’ as practiced by many religions in this country to be the height of rudeness, arrogance and unwanted imposition, bordering on hostility.
Each person’s decision to believe in Deity of some sorts or decide there is no God, or decide that *they don’t know* and and that that’s just fine… is a uniquely personal decision, growing out of their lifetime thus far of interacting with their family, their friends, their community and the rest of the world.
Grown people will ask people of faith, if they are searching…they will *ask* and *then* you tell them to plant purple flowers to get right with God, or whatever your particular doctrine is.
I have much less trouble with religious people who have no ulterior motive all the way along…you meet them, you become acquaintances, or perhaps the deeper level that is real friendship, and in the course of that connection they might open up, and so might you…That’s bearable, and even a genuine learning experience for both parties if handled well…(I’m not talking about people who try to fake this sort of thing just to get a convert…that’s hypocrisy and I don’t hold with that.)
It’s the assumption of truth, and imposing on people’s personal time, that gets to me…
Midlife And Treachery 
