So Where Have I Been Lately

If you’re a regular visitor (or you receive the digest email) I suppose you have noticed a decided lack of activity here lately. I have to tell you, I’ve just been tired. I think that’s the best way to describe what’s been going on in my life lately. It’s not that feeling of “being sick and tired of being sick and tired,” but more a general malaise that came over me during the last months. I didn’t send out Christmas cards this year, and didn’t even decorate the house. I came into the season with a good deal of the shopping done, and combined with some upcoming time off, I was actually looking forward to the holiday, but somewhere along the way, I just sort of lost that holiday spirit. I’m working on a comeback.

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The Free Marketeers and Cardinal Richelieu

Today, while running an errand, I passed a sight which gave me some pause. I’m not sure why I noticed, and I’m not sure why I am drawing the assumptions I’m drawing, but I’ll tell the story anyway. Some years back, to make ends meet, I worked a part time job for a lot of years. For several of those years, I sold shoes at a Florsheim shoe store right in the main corner of the largest mall in Greensboro, NC. To pass the time when we were slow, I would often pick out someone walking by, and just based on what I could see, I’d make up the person’s current life situation. If that person came in the store, and any sort of chat developed, I was often astounded by how accurate my story had been, and so, from that perspective, I tell another story. I have no clue how accurate it is, but it illustrates a point about the recent economic downturn.

We were driving up Dale Mabry Highway, the main north-south road here in Tampa. Walking north (going south would eventually run you into the water of the bay) was two men. One of them was maybe near my age in his late 40s or early 50s. The other person was a bit younger, probably in his late 20s. (I don’t think they were related.) They both had backpacks and were carrying more bags by hand. They had the look of people moving on to somewhere else taking along just what they could carry. I didn’t get the idea from their appearance they had been homeless.

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