Tag Archives: Wendy Welch

New Year’s Resolutions —

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Writer Wendy’s weekly blog

New Year Resolutions
We all make them. We all break them. I’m not sure I take them all that seriously anymore, but I do have a list of goals for 2024.

  1. Set up the still. We have a sorta jumbled collection of what we think is most of the equipment in one of our outbuildings. This is the year we try making that bundle of tubes and barrels and little metal thingies into a working machine. Outside town limits, of course.
  2. Befriend a crow, maybe? This one is speculative, but gee, it looks like fun. The crows bring
    people pretty presents, and they seem to be excellent conversationalists. Plus, maybe they’d keep that effing chicken hawk away…..
  3. Say the eff word less in casual conversation; save it for important moments. This one might be hard because I’ve been binge watching Succession. (IYKYK) Still, I would like to maximize the impact of my selected f-bomb moments by making them more, well, selective.
  4. Make some new friends. As we age, we all know that making new friends is weirder, perhaps even harder. A widowed friend took up salsa dancing in an effort to meet people, and now she’s beating back male attention with a stick. A divorced friend joined the women’s club, a do-gooding society that raises money by baking stuff and selling it and then spending the money to buy more stuff for baking, etc. They’re also really good at feeding homeless people and holding the government accountable for not taking care of homeless people. Sorta like librarians, the Wytheville women’s club. Do not eff with them; they will eff you up with soft pillows and sweet treats and kind words so that you will not realize until you cannot get a loan at the bank or a seat at the coffee shop that you have been well and truly EFFED around town. They do their best work undercover. I’m not a good dancer, so I joined the women’s club. Since then I’ve met a lot of nice homeless kids with the same sad slide of small situations tumbling together to form disaster in their lives. Homelessness is made up of a bunch of tangled circumstances coupled with one piece of bad luck or timing. But hey, in a small town, bad luck is bad karma which somehow became a Christian concept known as “not working hard enough.” Never have figured that one out, but we laugh about it a lot at the women’s club, between making box meals and crocheting hats for the homeless kids.
  5. Do not fall for the “God is mean” trick making the rounds. Read Matthew 20 once a week or so (that’s the one where everyone gets paid the same for working the vineyard, even though some worked all day and some worked less than half the day). Cruelty is not listed as a fruit of the spirit; preying on the weak is not Biblical. I will ignore the growing Gordian knot of White supremacy mixed with “God only loves those who (insert X here)” mixed with abortion is God’s most important cause, and thus “we all know that means God loves straight white men more” lunacy flowing from so many spigots these days. Imma read the Bible and stay out of the extrabiblical literature zone. And I’ve always been good at staying away from men preaching a Jesus who has their exact personality. They’re easy to spot.

    So no, not too many resolutions really. Now, where to meet crows….?

Box of Delights

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Once again Jack gets his guest post in on time – –

When we rearrange things in the house (in fact all the houses we’ve lived in over the last twenty-five years), one thing has always turned up at some point.

I’m often looking through our stashed boxes of old tapes, cassettes, and records for my radio show. I end up searching under beds or in cupboards. When I do there’s always a particular box that emerges, although it doesn’t contain tapes, and it’s not a box I remember ever packing or moving.

It contains all the letters and emails that Wendy and I exchanged when we were ‘stepping out’ – except we were dating by correspondence back then, on opposite sides of the Atlantic: me in Scotland and her in Newfoundland!

The first letters are hand-written and lengthy (we called them ten-pagers because they usually were). Those first ones are charmingly diplomatic and careful. Soft-pitching woo, one might say. Then they turn into letters typed on a computer and become much less careful. One might even venture to say some fairly specific offers are being made. Finally, there are printed out emails, and they’re much shorter and to the point on events of the day, a little less kissing, a little more bitching. Wendy had to type these in a public space, and I was often at my college office, so….

While these are, of course, delightful memories of the heady days of early love, they’re also something of a time capsule. There were big changes in technology over that brief time of a few years in the mid-1990s. I bought my first home computer, so I could get back to writing the more explicit letters!

Even after we married, there was no internet as we know it now – no Google, no Facebook, no YouTube. To read or write an email you had to ‘dial-up,’ sometimes going round 4 or 5 phone numbers before connecting and then a strange noise to tell you that you had.

Now we have a car that talks to us, takes us places almost by itself and tells us how well we’ve done when we get there. Wendy and I have been married 26 years, and the other day she texted me from upstairs, and I answered her. Obla dee obla dah life goes on…..

The post title references the book by John Masefield first published in 1935.

Come back next Wednesday for more from Jack