Decorum, Please

Greetings fellow human beings. (We hope that’s an accurate description of us and our readers.) Enjoy Friday Letter #94.

Taking ownership

Here’s a rare but true story. I was there.

This week while the City of Greeley and a construction crew were installing curb and gutter in front of our home and our business, a city staffer chased me down.

She was from the city engineer’s office. She said to me, “The curb will soon be complete. But it’s going to be a while before the asphalt portion is done.

“It was my fault. I made a scheduling error. The concrete and the asphalt couldn’t be done at the same time because I made a mistake.”

Can you imagine. A municipal bureaucrat actually looked me in the eye and said “I made a mistake.”

She took ownership. So far as I was concerned at that point, any inconvenience was moot. It’s a pain, but we’ll put up with it.

Bitch bitch bitch

One of our neighbors over here has been even more vociferous than we have about flooding that comes from the street onto private property.

She would be on the phone immediately whenever it rained or snowed, complaining loudly to whomever at the city. To be sure, that business has usually been flooded worse than ours. However.

What did she do when the huge project began? She called whomever at the city and complained loudly about how the corrective construction was interrupting business.

I sort of thought, which way do you want it? Like it was? Like it should be? What?

At my pastor’s suggestion, I’ve been reading “The Imitation of Christ.” My neighbor probably has not.

Can you imagine? A Catholic religious tract is actually having an impact on what I say and do. Incredible.

Visuals

(Reader alert: If the shoe fits . . .)

How would you feel if you were an old grampa and you inadvertently discovered that several of your far-away dear ones had their own secret “blog sites?”

You might ask yourself, “Wow, I wonder why none of these people mentioned to this old grampa that they had blog sites?”

So I looked some of them up. Immediately, I found out the reason no one had said anything.

Frankly, I was disgusted. I found: indecent exposure; sexually provocative photographic images; bondage photos and literature; politicizing for marijuana use; new-age hocus pocus; sadism and masochism; proffered personal information that would more sensibly be kept private. And more.

I’m no prude. I think I’ve been exposed to just about anything imaginable over my 67 years. I really don’t care what people do in the privacy of their homes or their bedrooms.

Privacy. Privacy? The internet or “My Space” is a public domain. Not private. Here these people are, publicly displaying their quirks, their perversions, their immoral behavior, their illicit desires, their pandering nature.

To be sure, I have my own oddities, my own culpabilities, my own strange behaviors, my own shortcomings and peccadilloes. But I try to clean it up in public, because indulging in open display of one’s idiosyncrasies would be poor taste, poor manners, just too boorish for words.

I considered ending the Friday Letter and closing down the blog site. I didn’t want to be in the same crowd as these people. I think I read someplace that one is known by the company he keeps.

But here I am again, for the 94th week, bravely forging ahead.

I have my sister-in-law Heather to thank for giving me hope. Heather has a regular blog which features the life and times of her delightful daughter Sarah.

It’s a joy to read. It’s a clean and wholesome example of photographic art and heartfelt text, a wonderful diary of the child’s early life.

My own mother, long before the computer was invented, kept a “baby book” for me and one for my brother. I still have mine. There’s a lock of my curly blond hair. Early photos and greeting cards. Notations from Mom. Sort of like a miniscule version of what Heather is doing for Sarah – and for the rest of us.

Thank you Heather. As for you others, can we show a modicum of decorum here? Is there no modesty among you? Where is your sense of propriety? What happened to your self-respect? Grampa is not amused.

My new friend

This week I went to a lumber yard several times to buy supplies for our ongoing battle against the roof leaks and water damage to our building.

On one trip, I met a fork lift operator whose name is Mario.

Mario mentioned to me that he had read a story about me and Laura and our business in the local paper.

That story appeared more than a year ago. Mario remembered a year later that I am 20 years older than Laura. He remembered that we have become Catholic, that we offer Catholic-oriented books and gifts in our retail business.

Remarkable. Here I am out in the middle of the vast lumberyard, discussing scripture with the forklift operator.

Mario told me that he teaches Sunday school at a small protestant church a few blocks from here. He told me that he was once Catholic but had left the Church. He told me that he would stop by the store some Saturday and he and I could discuss the reason he left the Church.

Perhaps I’ll never see Mario again. But the Lord works in mysterious ways. I like making new friends – and the Holy Spirit is entirely responsible for my profitable meeting with Mario.

Life is good.

Word of the week: Masochism. The Austrian writer Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch described this behavior in his writings. It means the derivation of sexual pleasure from being dominated, mistreated or hurt physically. Not a pretty word.

Next week’s word: Missal.

Gripes? Complaints? Whines? Comments? Adoration? Puppy love? Reciprocal rant? Feel free to express yourself in the comments below!