Hung Up on Romancing

I’m out of line today so you may be better off just skipping on by. My feelings won’t be hurt (I’ll never even know) and your day won’t be scorched before it begins.

If you’ve kept reading, I’d apologize but once I got that started I know we’d be here all day and into the night (cue you know who). Let me back up to go forward or at least try. It took me a very long time to fall in love and get married. As is so often the case for misanthropic trolls such as myself, I fell in love repeatedly but in a non-reciprocal situation. When the person I love chose to love me back, stuff got very real, so to speak, really fast.  

I wanted to tell you that before offering a characteristically caustic comment or two about a news item that shrieked at me yesterday around mid-morning and depressed and distressed me no end. I dare you to find the happy ending in this mess.

I don’t know the people in the story and chances are neither do you. Do we each know people who fell in love with one another, married and then for any number of reasons, fell out of love? Yeah, sure we do. When we meet one or the other now, we lower our voices, avert our eyes and there are some names we don’t speak. We are so civilized, aren’t we?

When I was a kid, sometimes a family in the neighborhood did have a divorce. I think most of the time everyone ended up moving away which saved emotional cripples like me from having to interact with pieces where there had once been a whole. I didn’t learn anything from any of that, but I didn’t forget  it either.

I look at a story like this and have no idea on any of the background that brought these people to where they are. I’m pretty sure they’re not especially happy about ending up in a news feed (wait until they realize they were here today, eh?) and I wonder what Elia might say.

Actually it was Essays of Elia, penned by Charles Lamb who wrote the (to me) achingly beautiful Dream Children. And more specifically, I wonder what those children would make of a story such as this most especially if they had been the objects of the litigation.

I have and will always see our children as my deal with God (I use the big G just in case that atheism stuff is wrong; no need to gratuitously anger a Supreme Being, right?). I suspect I am not alone.

Every time I think we cannot be more hurtful towards one another than we already are, there’s a reminder such as this suggesting the contrast between that which we do for our children and that we do to our children...

-bill kenny