EXCUSE ME?

It's easy to get inpatient with people.

People who get in the "8 Items Or Less" express line when they have the entire store's stock of Michelob in bottles in the shopping cart.

The driver in front of you who, when the light finally turns green, is twisted around trying to adjust the DVD which is keeping his toddler happy, and (obviously) does NOT stomp on the gas (as he should) the INSTANT the traffic light begins to twitch its wavelength towards 495 mm & frequency to 606 THZ (i.e. green).

The grandmother who repeats the same stories that you have heard from your infancy, forgets what day of the week it is, asks you the same question time and time and time again...

Wait a minute, that is me. Right now.

Alzheimer's and senile dementia were both blessings for my mom. Yes, she couldn't hold on to an explanation for more than a few seconds, but she also had forgotten all heartache, bitterness, and anger, and became an extremely agreeable person.

Hmm.

Only trouble here is that since I let go of most of the anger, bitterness and heartache a long time ago. And so with the memory going...

I'm sorry, what we were talking about here just a minute ago?

Oh, yes, this was prompted by my husband's difficulty in listening to his mother tell him "four times" the same story during our weekly call.

I'm going to be there very, very soon.

Wait... where am I going to be?

FALSE FEELING OF FELICITY

It's been kinda an emotional day for me.

A very nice kind person sent me one of those critically-ill-child-orphan-dolphin who will get 3 cents-five-dollars-a-lifetime-supply-of-ill-operating-Vista-PCs-directly-from-Bill-Gates if you only forward-this-email-repeat-a-prayer-or-help-the-king-of-Nigeria's-sister's-uncle's-half-grandfather-god brother.

Can you tell I don't like these things?

This one was about and included a photo of a severely-burned young girl in Poland who needed this email forwarded to cover her medical needs etc. etc. etc.

And it hit way too close to home to let me simply hit the delete key.

My older sister and her two girls were horribly burned in an auto explosion when I was eight or nine. My sister was in the burn unit for six months; my nieces, both over a year. They have all had extensive plastic surgery, and although both girls are happily married and have children themselves, they will always be extremely physically scarred.

So I wrote back a very sedate, calm email, ccing everyone whom this lovely person had emailed this particular email to (note: another reason to always put email addresses under bc instead of send) that this was one of those partially true emails, noted the snopes.com site with information about it and other such emails.

To begin with.

I even put "and you do not need to read anything else."

And THEN I imploded about how instead of allowing yourself to feel righteous about forwarding a *^%#&(!@# email, you should go volunteer at a hospital, support your local fire department's fire safety programs, go read at a nursing home, donate your furniture to Habitat for Humanity...

It brought more emotional memories back than I had anticipated.