The biggest thing that happened today is the birth of our nephew and his wife’s baby boy. I’m really hoping I can reword that first sentence when I edit this Thoughts paper. Now that I’ve mentioned wanting to edit it, I’ll have to leave it as it is so you can see what I’m talking about. Future me will figure it out. Back to the baby, he was born at about four in the morning. Mom was in labor for many hours and looked rightly tired in the photos of her. The baby had what looked like a black eye around one of his eyes. Patti hoped it wasn’t a birthmark. I told her we should wait until later to speculate about permanent markings. If it is permanent, he’ll have a built in bad-ass look. Nobody will mess with him. (Future note: It was not permanent.)
In my days off, I was finally trimming the bushes in front of our house. They’ve been needing it for some time. I was on the side with the front door, and I heard Patti hitting the ground. I ran over to her, and she had instant bruises up her arm. Later, she fell on the stairs by our back porch, and she couldn’t get up even with help. Eventually, she could get up. I try to talk to her about how serious these falls are, but she explains it away as just being clumsy. My biggest fear is this will happen when I’m not home. I told her she needs to see a doctor about it, and she said she’s seen a huge number of doctors recently and had lab work done. The only thing I could do is drop the subject for now because she was getting disturbed by my probing.
On brighter news about Patti, she has had no cigarettes for the past four days. She still acts disturbed when I don’t mention her not smoking. No matter how many times I explain to her it’s hard to notice when something isn’t happening, she acts like I think it’s no big deal. For an addict, it is constantly on her mind. For a non-addict, it is not physically drawing me to its non-presence. I tell her I’m proud of her despite my dislike of the word “pride.” More on this later. My dad smoked his whole life and died mainly from it. His diabetes and stroke were additional health issues he was dealing with. My grandfather quit smoking after 20 years but died of alcoholism. Addictions come in packs, so I know this is not the only one Patti has. It’s one of the big ones, though. I’m going to do everything I can to help her quit for good.
Perhaps I could explain in this paragraph why I don’t like the word “pride.” As religion goes, I agree with little to no part of it. The seven deadly sins represent behaviors to avoid. Why they were avoiding them was because they took you away from God. The list itself was still a good list of things to avoid if you are a good person. Pride is one thing on that list. When you examine pride in a modern context, you find where there is pride, there is also shame. Pride alone is enough to separate people. The things people are often proud of are things I don’t find to be good. Pride in one group over another is my biggest problem with it. We need less competition among people and more cooperation.
I’m listening almost exclusively to memoirs and autobiographies these days. Hearing other people’s stories helps me understand my own story. The author of the book is also the reader most of the time. Someday, these Thoughts papers will become my story that I read to other people. When I first started writing my thoughts, I pictured other people reading them. For many years, few other people have read them. When I published them in this blog you’re reading, I pictured myself reading them in a recording someday. Patti’s retirement has truly made me think about spending more and more time developing my writing. I’ve found the flaws in many of my dreams, but writing seems to be the one that has stood the test of time.
Thoughts from Life 
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