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DAVID BENTLEY'S WEEKLY COLUMN |
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NO USE WORRYING
My mother is an octogenarian. She lives alone in a four bedroom home that once housed six people. She has no desire to move out even though it far exceeds her needs and, at times, even her stamina to clean and maintain it. So when I heard on the national news that her state had been hit by its fourth round of tornadoes this spring, I was concerned. I am a strong believer in the adage that no news is good news. Still I needed reassurance. I dialed her number, and after a brief pause, the phone rang. At least the lines weren’t down. When Mom answered, I asked if she had blown away yet. She said there had been lots of tornadoes, but they seemed to be farther north and moving east. In fact, she had become so annoyed at the tornado warning symbol on her television screen that she turned the TV off and played a CD instead. Her assessment of the situation was that she could not control the weather, so there was no use worrying about it. She wasn't going to go for a drive or do any gardening, but she wasn't going to aggravate her arthritic hip or get sciatica by sitting in her bathtub 24/7 waiting for a tornado to come ripping through. Suddenly Mother said, "Oh, it looks like we're having a thunderstorm. Maybe the bad weather is coming our way after all. You know the last time we had a big storm, we had golf ball sized hail, and my insurance company had to put new shingles on the roof." Then she hastily ended the call, not wanting to be on the telephone in a storm. As I hung up my receiver, I decided there was nothing I could do about a defiantly independent mother, so there was no use worrying about it. Grabbing my new library book, I headed to bed.
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SAN JUAN ISLANDER © 2008 |
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