A Global Reach

The amount of planning required to produce a post when you realize that your blog now has a global reach to all of 12 people becomes mind boggling. Next thing you know, someone from England and/or australia will show up and we'll have to go to a 24/7 operation. That means working like Desiree, who is still probably sick, and also at a company planning function with the Chairman and Board of Directors of her company. Too bad they are insensitive to the fact that she's so sick. Personally, I'd rather go to the dentist. Also, she lives closer to North Korea than I do. Now there's a reason to crack open another beer. Like I needed a reason. I keep trying to leave a comment on MonkeyLover's site, but it keeps blowing up. Don't you just love the high tech way I get the message out there!

I was told I couldn't write about anything serious without posting a picture of a busty woman first, but i can't find a picture of one, so, I'm winging it. There's a couple of things that kept coming up this weekend that I made a mental note about blogging about subject to fast breaking news, naturally. The first is my kotex belt. Ever since I had to use one, I can't seem to get rid of it. The other has been my grandfather. His death had a huge effect on me. My grandfather, and my wife's grandmother both grew up in a village called Minsk, which is now in Polland. They were both in Red Square in Moscow in 1905 for what turned into the largest pogrom in Russian history. That means that the people were there for a political rally, and the tsar allowed the Cossacks to ride their horses through the crowds and start executing the Jewish population there (they dressed differently in those days). Fifty thousand died that day. My grandfather ended up in New York City, my wife's grandmother ended up in Canada.

Can you imagine being killed for something you believed? People who are Jewish, Christian, and Muslim are all praying to the same God. It is written that way in the Koran too. The name for God is different. Can someone please stop the killing? Can someone please stop the hate? No explanations. Just an end. Thank you very much.

My grandfather gets to New York and he finds people that speak Russian. He learns the language. finds work. Marrys, has children, succeeds, works as a bookkeeper for the City of New York, learns seven languages in his spare time, retires, takes up religion and dies. I had talked to him my entire life. He told me stories, I listened. He was my grandfather after all. When I went to his funeral, people stood up and started saying these really nice things about him in Russian. I asked my grandmother, and she had never seen them before. They had seen his name in the newspaper when he died. They were still afraid of the Cossacks, spoke briefly, and left. My grandfather had died and never told anyone his name from the old country.

The same was true for my wife's grandmother. I actually taped her for 4 days before we got married. You can hear her crying about the Cossacks. You can hear her refuse to tell me who she was. You can hear her dodge telling me if she even knew who my grandfather was, particularly after she knew that he was dead. You can also hear how conspiratorial she got with me when i told her i was going to ask her grand daughter to marry me. Four days of me telling her that I would never let a Cossack get near her, and she wouldn't tell me. She died without ever telling any of her nine children what her russian name was. That's fear.

So, I decided to change the World. You do that one person at a time. I try to find something nice to say to people before they die. Makes me scary, I know.