Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Rachelle Gardner at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Soul Train
- Live Out Your Dream And Discard The Box
- Tears In A Bottle
- From The Young Mom I Once Was, To You
- I Can’t Help Falling
- What A Difference Ten Years Makes
- The Next Best Thing To Robert Redford
- The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
- Where Have All The Years Gone
- Fun With Kiki Cullen
- Stuck On Mom
- Ten Years Later, Our Girls From Northern Ireland Remembered
- The Thrift of Grief
- Job Security
- The Party’s Over
Syndicate
E me at katy @ ngenius.com
Come On, Katy. Tell Us How You Really Feel!
“Refined carbs are bad for your health, bad for your energy levels, bad for your mental state, bad for your figure. Bad for your career prospects, bad for your sex life, bad for your digestion, bad for your blood chemistry, bad for your heart. What I’m saying is that they are bad. “-Dr. Robert Atkins, “Dr. Atkin’s New Diet Revolution,” 1992
Man, I’ve waited nearly seven long years to put that quote up here—years obviously filled with self-restraint or you would have seen them on fallible MUCH sooner. But today, well, I just couldn’t help myself one second longer.
Anyway, now you know how I REALLY feel about refined carbs. Nice to have that out of the way, huh? :)
Mom’s The Word
I haven’t posted much about my mother recently because, well, she’s hanging in there. By that I mean, she hasn’t fallen since April or so. In addition, we’ve managed to wean her off 2/3 of her seizure medications and much of the narcotic prescriptions she’d accumulated. Now she’s down to anti-depressants, three Valium per day, and Ultracet as requested.
So while she still sleeps most of the day and all of the night, at least when she’s awake, she is not slurring her words or stumbling badly. For the most part, she makes sense, can do simple arithmatic and sign her name to greeting cards, and engages in family gossip with the best of them. She has regular panic attacks, basically every time she leaves her assisted living facility, but hey. We deal.
This may not sound like much of a difference to you, but compared to where she was a year ago, it’s an improvement. One I frankly didn’t expect.
She makes crummy blog fodder right now, unfortunately for us. I wish that when she’s not stoned, she could be happy, but it just ain’t so.
She recently told me that the years when all her five kids still lived at home and my dad was alive were the best years of her life. I nodded respectfully, but people, that’s not how I remember it. After a few seconds of silence, she said, “Of course, at the time I hated every minute of it.”
Ah, so my memory isn’t too far off.
Then she added this gem, “If I’d known how much more miserable life would get, I’d have been happy back then.”
Right.
Anyway, Mom’s taking a bit of a break from round-the-clock disasters, but as for Doug’s mom….well. Eight days ago, she moved to the nursing home after a five-day hospital stay. Some days, the extreme dizziness abates to the point that she can do therapy successfully, and other days, not so much. She’s in the same joint my mother was in earlier this year, right across the hall.
She is disturbed by all the loonies in the bin, because she’s never been around “those kind of people.” Heck, I know the loonies by name!
Hopefully, she’ll get to go back to her assisted living place. We shall see.
I will write something fun or profound soon. I promise. Until then, be good kids and have a lovely autumnal weekend!
Pent Up Theology
The Ted Haggard situation brings up a theological sticking point for me, one that rises to the surface from time to time like a chronically imbedded splinter.
Maybe you can be my tweezers and clear things up for me once and for all. I’m inviting you to give it a shot.
My problem is about forgiveness, particularly the type that is so readily extended to someone who has “repented” after just getting caught.
Do you believe (Christians and non-Christians welcome to respond, please!) that you are required to/should forgive everyone who asks, always, under every circumstance? And what does that look like?
Abused wives do it all the time, I guess. For some of them, I suppose their understanding of “I forgive you” includes a belief that when the abuser says “I promise I’ll never hurt you again!” he really means it.
If someone you loved and trusted had a very bad track record of actually changing after repeated episodes of getting caught, would you keep extending forgiveness regardless of the “truth” of his repentance?
Would the type of forgiveness you extend ever give you the option of disqualifying that person from your circle of friends, marriage, church?
In other words, is forgiveness conditional?
Can Someone Please Adjust Her Meds?
I’m really, really awful at remembering jokes. I know there was one going around when my kids were little that we told over and over for years. Even now, I can only remember the punchline, which went “My buns are burning! My buns are burning!”
I smiled as I typed those words, because I have such happy memories evoked by them, but honestly, what was the joke? Can anybody clue me in?
My dad—dead lo these 22 years—used to tell a fabulous joke about a Western Union telegram delivery man. The punchline was sung in a Broadway musical type of rendition. “Da-da-da-da-da-da! Your sister Rose is dead!”
What the heck came before that line? I’ll never know. Dad told that joke for a few years until one day the call came from Scotland. He answered the phone to receive this message: “Your sister Rose is dead.”
It might be the whole repeating the scenario three times with only slight changes and then doing the punchline thing. I can never remember the three dealies and I concentrate so hard on saying them perfectly because I’m so sure that’s the key to telling the joke that I can’t get all the way through it.
I used to watch the Carol Burnett show every week when I was a teenager. I remember only one of her comedy sketches. She performed it with Harvey Korman, and this episode must have been on TV after I married Doug, or it would not have stuck with me through the past 30 years. Or then again, maybe it would.
She played a woman about to be released from an insane assylum, where she’d been in a padded room for years. Korman played her loving, patient husband, who’d remained faithful to wait for her recovery, desperate to have her home again, whole.
He arrives on the long-anticipated day, and she seems totally cured. She’s smiling, fit, serene, obviously in love with her husband, and ready to meet the world.
He opens the car door for her, such a gentleman, and presents her with two dozen peach-colored roses.
“You remembered!” she says.
“How could I forget?”
He smiles, starts the car, and drives toward home. She relaxes.
Then the tapping begins. On the steering wheel at first, but he doesn’t stop there. While his left hand plays bass and guides the vehicle, his right reaches over to the stick shift to tap out the melody. Of course, he still had a freakin’ spare foot, so why not add tympani? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The corner of her mouth twitches. “What song is that?” she asks. Wait….what’s this feeling of deja-vu all over again? All of a sudden, she knows what he’ll say.
He smirks and taps harder. “Whatever do you mean, my love? Song?”
Her twitches become something like mild seizures. She puts a palm over his right hand and tries to stop the tap-tap-tapping, which has rapidly escalated to a mind-rattling cacaphony, but it’s no use.
“STTTOOOOPPPPPPPP!!!” she shrieks.
He grins evilly, makes a U-turn, and takes poor Carol back to the funny farm.
Why on earth would I remember this particular sketch, you ask, when I’m pathetic at recalling all but the lamest of jokes?
If the psych unit has free wifi, I’ll get back to you on that.
Half The Night
Here’s a book recommendation, one I stayed up half the night reading. I don’t lose sleep over too many books, but I could NOT rest until I found out whether Bell Brown escaped from the hands of her tormentor back into the arms of her unavailable (sigh…) love interest.
Those of you who’ve been reading fallible for long know I have an affinity for occasionally bringing up underwear-intensive topics. It shouldn’t surprise you, then, to realize that any novel with the word “Wonderbra” on Page One gets my vote.
Claudia Mair Burney’s first novel is “Murder, Mayhem, and a Fine Man,” and it’s a debut extraordinaire. You will laugh, cry, and—towards the end—hold your breath.
Her blog is one of my faves, too. She’s known among bloggers as “The Ragamuffin Diva.” Claudia Mair and I have gotten to know each other through blogging and then—joy!—met in person in September at the American Christian Fiction Writers conference. She is a doll, and I’m privileged to call her my friend.
Check her out, leave a comment here, and win a chance for your own free copy of “Fine Man.” I’ll pick the winner around noon on Saturday, KC time.
A fine author, a fine book, and a fine man, indeed. Mmm-mmm.
Either Or
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” Benjamin Franklin.
This is my motto for November, with the emphasis on Phrase Number One. So far, so good!
NaNoMomO?
Doug’s mother’s world has come to a spinning halt.
So far, the best the docs can determine (she was admitted to the hospital Sunday afternoon) is that she has a inner ear imbalance. Basically, she can’t lift her head from the pillow without feeling like she’s going to toss.
Inner ear things are so freakin’ unpredictable. She could feel better next week or…not. One thing is clear: We can’t let her stay in bed in a (so-called) assisted living facility (risk of pneumonia, blood clots, etc), and she can’t ambulate without real help.
From the looks of the situation, Adele’s moving into a nursing home. We don’t know which one or if it’s temporary or not, only that some snappy decisions must be arrived at and a bunch of heavy lifting accomplished on her behalf.
That’s all for now. NaNoEdMo starts tomorrow. I think.
As Several Spanish Speaking Panera’s Employees Are My Witnesses…..
I know I SAID that Doug always witnesses me pulling a free book winner’s name out of the torn pieces of scrap paper in my fist, but I lied.
I totally forgot to do the drawing until just now (two hours late), when I’m at Panera’s!
The very extremely fortunate winner of Lisa Samson’s latest novel, Straight Up, is AMBER—who, by her own admission on fallible, just purchased her first ever Lisa novel yesterday!
Girl, email me with your mailing address, and I’ll get the book right out to you. Congrats!
You Only Have Until Friday Morning, Eight Central Time!
If you’d like a chance to win a free copy of Lisa Samson’s new release, Straight Up, read the post below this one and leave a comment! At eight tomorrow morning, I’ll draw a winner.
If you have never read a Lisa book, this may be your chance to get started on a literary habit you’ll never want to break.
I’m just sayin’.
Let Me Give It To You Straight Up, OK?
A while back—maybe five years ago now?—I sat eating lunch with my good buddy, Nancy Moser, an author in the Christian market whose books we chatted up a couple weeks ago.
At that time, I’d read all of Nancy’s books and all of George MacDonald’s—the wonderful Scottish preacher and novelist of the Victorian era whose stories have been edited for the modern reader by Michael Phillips. (Never mind that I grew up with a father from Scotland, and listened to an unedited version of his thick brogue every day.)
I’d also consumed everything by Brock and Bodie Thoene, whose historicals taught me more about WWII than I’d ever have learned otherwise. They even produced a lovely four-book Irish series, much to my delight.
“Who should I be reading?” I asked Nancy. “I’d like to write for this market, but I’m not finding authors whose books do it for me. Is there anyone writing anything…different?”
Nancy suggested a number of authors to me, but the one whose name stuck all the way until I got to the bookstore was Lisa Samson.
“You’ll love her,” Nancy said. “She’s funny and quirky and…just trust me, you’ll love her.”
Of course, little did I know that I would eventually be privileged to know Lisa in person. First we emailed, then we became blog buddies, then we met in Baltimore with our hubbys for a lovely night in Little Italy. Last month, we reunited at the American Christian Fiction Writers Conference in Dallas. Here’s the two of us, looking gorgeous.
I’ve read every Lisa book out there now (except the early romance novels because, well, I’m just not into romance novels) and last night I finished perhaps the most ambitious one of them all—Straight Up.
Do you remember that kid’s song from the eighties, wherein the children sing, “I am a great big bundle of po-ten-ti-al-ity”?
That describes Lisa’s main character, Georgia. Her parents were all that and she was seemingly destined to follow in their footsteps. She had musical talent to beat the band and attracted a husband second to none. But when not one but both of her parents died too young, Georgia pushed away love, risk, success, motivation, God—in fact, pretty much everything but booze.
To describe her as a late bloomer would be, well…an insult to late bloomers.
What happens in the end is guaranteed to keep you up all night, examining your own conscience for sins of omission—those pesky areas in which you’ve somehow failed to show up for your own life.
Whatever you do, don’t fail to read Straight Up, straight away. One of the commenters on this post will be chosen to receive a free copy of the book, too! So don’t be shy.
It’s NaNoEdMo For Me!
Five years ago right about now, I committed to my first National Novel Writing Month. I was also going to school full time that semester, and my mother had just begun her long-term downward trend.
Did I complete the writing of 50,000 words during the month of November, 2001? You bet I did!
Those words represented my very first stab at writing a novel. The next year, I made another stab with a sharper blade. (OK, never mind. I’m ditching the blood-drawing metaphor while I’m still ahead.) Totally different story in 2002, also now abandoned on the rain-slicked, dimly lit streets of Novelville and left to….oh, phooey. DIE. Left to die a lonely, grisly death!
NOW I’ll abandon the metaphor.
This November, I’m switching to National Novel Editing Month. I don’t know if there’s an official chapter for those of us who want to wind something up rather than start something new, but even if I must go there completely alone (and by there, I mean whichever coffee joint will keep topping it off at no extra charge for the most hours running…), by the end of the month, I’ll have this puppy ready to roll.
I may not blog much. I may even force myself to go on a wifi fast. I’m shuddering even as I type the words. I am SO addicted to wifi, people. But it is such a distraction, especially for O/C, mentally hyperactive folks like I am.
If you’ve got any words of encouragement for me, I could use them now. Tell me how you can go all day without checking your email or watching the funny guy in Minsk dance on youtube. Tell me that you believe I can fine-tune my novel to completion in a month, and then how you even have high hopes that I’ll turn right around and start the next one.
Really. Tell me.
Cool
I place a low premium on being cool.
I can honestly say I haven’t invested much time, money, or effort attempting to be cool in my entire 53 years of living. Maybe the freckles or the unsophisticated turned-up nose or the fact that I’m vertically-challenged squashed any latent hopes of coolness early on, I don’t know.
I will say this: in spite of my personal lack of coolness, I very much appreciate and admire coolness in other people. Especially—in fact, only—if it seems to have occurred spontaneously, without the cool person trying at all. If it’s an affected coolness, it’s just plain stuck up. And that’s NOT cool.
This is why I love Bono. The man exemplifies cool for me. I ran across this Bono quote today, and it made me love him even more.
“Coolness might help in your negotiation with people through the world, maybe, but it is impossible to meet God with sunglasses on.”
For Your Monday Morning Entertainment
Here’s a piece of fiction I’ve started. I’m posting it here just for fun. If you have any ideas about where the story might go from here, let me know. Hope you enjoy it!
Not every innocent Catholic girl gets shouldered with bearing the life-long cross of being named Dympna. I think I’ve finally figured out why.
Saints Online spills the theological beans in no uncertain terms: “St. Dympna—Patron Saint of the Mentally Ill.”
That’s right. They go to the trouble of capitalizing Mentally Ill like it’s a professional title or an academic distinction or something. Isn’t that Special?
On alternate websites devoted to the saints, she’s variously described as the patron of the Emotionally Disturbed, the Insane, and my hands-down favorite, the Lunatic.
So there you have it.
I’ve never known which one of them deserved the most blame, Mom or Dad. If naming babies is anything like dancing the tango, I figure it takes two. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re both sober.
When I finally figured out the finer points of the facts of life, I decided that Mom popped me out, took one look at my blotchy baby-acne, amniotic-fluid-logged wrinkles, forceps-induced cone-head, and confused expression, and didn’t waste a second brainstorming a name for the pathetic bundle in her arms.
Before Dr. Sinclair severed the umbilical cord and stitched her up, Mom gave a shout-out to Dad over the hospital’s public address system (fathers paced alone in waiting rooms back then), adding to my young life the psychological insult of a crummy name on top of the minor injuries of a traumatic birth.
“What do you think, Frank? We’ve always loved the names Rose and Teresa, and then there’s Angela…”
“I don’t know, babe. I’ve been burning up the linoleum out here, trying to come up with the perfect—”
“Frank, wait! It just came to me! It’s like heaven opened up and a bolt of lightening shot through my soul, and I know—I just know!”
“Don’t tell me, Chrissie! Let me guess…”
And then, as if they’d individually seen apparitions of the venerable saint herself in the textured covers of the sound system’s speakers, they shouted to each other in the ecstasy of one voice, like deep calls to deep, or—in their cases—like shallow calls to shallow.
“Dympna!”
Upon hearing that single word, a whole hospital full of people who’d been listening in on this discussion burst into gales of uncontrolled laughter, but Mom and Dad simply thought that the angels in heaven had come to rejoice over their sweet baby girl.
Yeah, that’s the way I picture it happening when I’m feeling generous and forgiving which, you’ve probably guessed, isn’t often.
If St. Dympna’s claim to fame is shaky on the saintly websites, you should see how she rates on the name-your-baby sites.
“Dympna. Female. Irish. From the Irish name Damhnait, meaning fit or eligible.”
Well, okay. First of all, there’s no getting around the fact that the Irish spelling (and pronunciation?) of the name looks, and probably sounds, suspiciously like a curse word. There’s a good reason for that, don’t you think?
Now, about the name’s supposed meaning: The only famous Dympna-of-old—my erstwhile namesake—was certainly eligible. I’ll give her that. She was so eligible, in fact, that her loony father, an Irish King, tried to take her for his wife because she reminded him so much, in his unabated grief, of her beautiful but recently deceased mother. Dympna fled to Belgium from her father’s insanity, which is how her fitness came in handy, but she still ended up getting martyred for resisting his advances.
Fit and eligible, indeed. In my limited experience, I’ve found that headless chicks—no matter how the baby-naming websites may lead you to imagine otherwise—are rarely as fit and eligible after the axe as they were before.
“Out of 5673 votes,” one site proclaims, “0% have this name themselves, 0% wish with all their souls that they’d been blessed enough to be given this name, and 0% chose this name for their own precious child.”
Those stats are hard to believe, huh?
If Mom and Dad had a scant ounce of mercy between them, they would have added the name Mary in there somewhere, like other families did who chose off-beat names for their offspring. You know the drill: Mary Honoria, Mary Philomena, Mary Virginie.
When it came to naming little girls, Mary covered a multitude of sins.
If they’d only gone with that magnificent moniker, my childhood might have been normal, like Mary Beth’s and Mary Kathleen’s and Mary Alice’s. Even the twins who lived down the block, Mary Janice and Mary Jeanette, got off easy.
I, though, entered Miss Pendergast’s kindergarten class and became the immediate object of relentless name-related peer-review, tantamount to taunting.
“What’s a Dympna?” Dougie Aylward proposed marriage to me on the first day of school, armed with a fake diamond ring from the lid of his mama’s floor wax container. But our young love was fraught from the beginning with the misery of emotional abuse. “Do I dip my Lay’s potato chips in it? Bet you can’t eat just one!”
Why, oh why, didn’t my parents give me the chance to ditch Dympna once and forevermore and go overboard for the Blessed Mother?
I would have done it, too. I would have proclaimed my devotion to Mary with my whole being and consecrated my entire future to her renown, if the old folks had only given me an out. But did my parents think their actions through to the likeliest outcome and do the right thing?
Not on my life.
No, for some reason known only to Mom, Dad, and the thousands of Patron Saints of the Mentally Stable they could have named me for, they lacked the type of common Catholic parenting sense necessary to baptize me Mary Dympna or even Dympna Mary.
Instead, they named me Dympna Shayne.
Shayne, you understand, isn’t a saint’s name, which means they might as well have spared themselves the effort it took to dream it up. It’s not like a nun back in the day would have disregarded the church’s naming traditions by actually calling me Shayne when I was a fledgling catechism student at St. Elizabeth’s Grade School.
In order to be baptized, either your first or middle name had to be a saint’s name. From infancy on, whenever you were on the premises of an institution operated by the church, you had better be prepared to be addressed by whichever of your names passed muster.
I’m pretty sure Sisters Cecilia Gertrude, Bernadette Paul, and Agnes Irene—themselves personally in cumulative possession of half the saints’ names in the known universe—could have been, for a much milder offense than calling me Shayne, put out to pasture at the Holy Family Home for Weary Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph.
So until I entered public high school, I was stuck with Dympna, a second or third-tier saint by even the most inclusive of Catholic standards, but a bona fide saint, nonetheless. That’s just the way it worked. It didn’t matter that by some accounts, her life’s story might be only a legend. It was of marginal and incidental interest that perhaps she’d never lived at all, much less had her Olympic sprinting career cut short for disagreeing to become her deranged father’s second wife.
It didn’t make an iota of difference that she was merely the patron saint of the mentally ill, or the patron saint of the merely mentally ill—only that she’d been duly canonized and remained, posthumously speaking, in consistent good standing with whomever it is who follows up on stuff like this.
And if Dympna’s a lousy name with which to punish a defenseless child, Shayne’s not much better.
Not only is Shayne not a saint’s name, it’s not a girl’s name, either. Or even much of a boy’s name, for that matter. I’ve searched a legion of sources, and I’ve accumulated all the variations of John-with-a-Celtic-twist in existence, whether male or female: Ian, Sean, Shannon, Shawn, Shane, Shawna, and maybe even Shania (like I’m lucky enough that Shania and I ever the Twain shall meet—ha!).
Rarely have I found a reference to the name Shayne, and never for a girl.
All I can think is that my parents went through a linguistic phase during which they became overly fond of the letter Y. And because of them, I’ve spent a lifetime being overly obsessed with the question why.
Weren’t three boys in the family—Patrick, Brendan, and James, with handsome saints’ names, one and all—enough for them? Mom and Dad weren’t sports-oriented enough to form a softball team and no ranch hands were needed to take over the family farm, since the homestead consisted of a duplex and a dog.
Why couldn’t they name me Bridget and be done with it?
And if one of my two names had to be in honor of a patron saint, why Dympna? I’ve asked my immigrant father any number of times for an explanation, and he just lowers his gaze, shakes his head, and gets all misty-eyed on me.
“You’ll understand someday, Dimps. I promise.”
Understand the decision of a man who calls his own daughter Dimps? Sure, I will. About as much chance of me understanding an error of judgment like that as there would be if he called me Pimples or Thunder Thighs or Cellulite.
All I understand is that Dad must have been drunk if he’s the guilty party, if he’s the one who suggested the name to my long-laboring, anesthetized mother. Or, I don’t know, maybe smoking one of those “It’s A Girl!” pink-banded cheap cigars stunted his growth in the Compassionate Naming Department.
As a full-grown woman, I won’t allow a single soul besides my father to call me Dympna—or any of its many darling derivatives like Dimples and Dimwit. And you know what? I’ve got ongoing issues with Shayne, too.
Ongoing issues, and a lot of unanswered questions.
Legally, I’m Dympna Shayne, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that, at least as long as my parents are alive, I’ll never have any fewer Ys than I have right now.
But by the time this story’s told, as St. Dympna and Shania Twain are my witnesses, I intend to have far fewer whys.
What Jeans May Come
I’m stuck between a shock and a hard case.
It’s hard when you’re losing weight and you gave away a lot of your smallest clothes from the last time you lost weight before you started regaining and you’re the size in between the pair of jeans you used to wear when you weighed 25 pounds more than you do now and the ones you kept for nostalgia’s sake that are still a tad too small.
The shock comes in when you raise both arms in a public venue, in this case Panera’s, and your jeans very nearly fall to the floor in front of God and everybody.
It reminds me of when my mother-in-law started dropping weight like nobody’s business. She must not have realized how drastically her body had changed shape, because she did not seem to think she needed to buy smaller clothing. The phrase “dropping from a size 20 to a size 10,” though, has the word “dropping” in it for a reason.
One Sunday, she exuberantly raised her hands during the singing at her church and her pants slid all the way to the floor.
“What did you DO?” I asked, thinking that at her advanced age, she must have been SO embarassed.
“I just pulled them up and praised the Lord!”
Go therefore and do likewise.
Scary
I’ll go ahead and admit up front that I’m no great fan of Halloween.
I’m also, in principle, against the whole concept of saying stuff like, “What if just once we all agreed to ban (name your least favorite holiday or movie or fast food restaurant or coffee joint here) for one day? And then contributed all the money not spent foolishly to some worthy cause—say AIDS relief in Africa?”
We will never agree to do anything on one day, because each of us believes that other people’s vices should be easier for them to forego than ours are. So, it’s easy for me to think “Let’s all abandon Halloween JUST THIS ONCE and contribute the money we would have spent on candy and costumes and decorations to eradicate hunger in the world,” because, you see, I don’t love Halloween.
There’s my caveat. I know I’m prejudiced against Halloween. Now that you know, too, I’ve got to ask: How much do you think Americans will spend on everything related to Halloween this season? (If you read the answer in the papers or online recently, please don’t answer! I want genuine guesses, because I’m curious what you think.)
How much will the nation spend to celebrate the holiday? Ten million? Twenty million? Fifty million?
Bono launched his Red campaign on Oprah yesterday. A portion of everything (marked with the Red trademark) purchased from selected outlets will be used to keep AIDS victims in Africa alive. So far, the shops who’ve signed on are The Gap, Apple, Armani, and a couple others. I personally love everything Bono does and stands for and bet he’ll raise a gazillion bucks with this idea. More power to him for recognizing what it will take to motivate Americans to give.
Still, it makes me sad that all that’s required of the American consumer to make him feel like he’s “saving lives” is to purchase a Red Ipod at Apple, since good old Apple will contribute $10 to the campaign for every Red sold. Shopping now equals giving, and while consumption-based giving is better than nothing (a lot better), it feels…funny.
I think about the Scripture verse where King David says “I will not give a gift that costs me nothing,” and I wish I was willing to hurt a bit more than I do when I suggest that all of you Halloween lovers should cough up your candy money to make the world a better place.
Just in case my idea (which costs me nothing, by the way, since I spend nothing on Halloween) takes off, tell me: How much will Americans spend this October? Anything you’d rather see us spend it on than skeletons and witches and pirates?
Or would you keep Halloween and harvest the money saved by forgoing Starbucks for a day?
