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IN THE BIG picture, nothing small matters. This translates into first obtaining and then maintaining a devil-may-care attitude about everything. Sadly that attitude is my weak suit; I worry about everything and always have, apparently because of an early childhood trauma. It doesn’t matter what trauma since everyone has one so everyone worries. Thus the overwhelming popularity of various addictions useful as buffers from painful memories.
These thoughts clogged my brain early this morning, and I do mean early. Eyes wide open at 2:30, I was consumed with doubt and fear over an upcoming 12-hour flight to Israel. Could I possibly have been sane when I agreed to such folly months ago? Surely not. Finally I left my bed and resigned myself to the new day, softening the blow with a handful of raspberries and a look at yesterday’s paper.
I had to read yesterday’s paper because here in Maine, the Monday papers including the Portland Press Herald and the Wall Street Journal (local edition printed here) will no longer be published due to some sort of printing problem or glitch or union decision or fill in the blank, who knows. All I know is we got a letter weeks ago stating that beginning on March 2, our Monday paper would be delivered on Tuesday.
At first I was incensed, thinking that’s crazy! Until I realized that the news is virtually the same every day, give or take: the November election, Trump, Biden, Bernie, and the coronavirus continuing to kill people.
So I have no right to be bothered about any little thing. I was going to recount how when my husband showed up at about six o’clock and blearily prepared a pot of coffee he forgot to replace the carafe under the spigot on the electric coffee pot after filling it with water and turning it on, then left the kitchen for just long enough for me to enter and find a decent quantity of hot brown liquid pooling on the kitchen counter and dripping down the front of the cabinets onto the floor and clean up the mess. Many paper towels were involved and so in some small way our planet was harmed. But in light of the big picture, I guess it’s too insignificant to mention.
—Andrea Rouda
Andrea Rouda blogs at The Daily Droid.
