Thursday, August 30, 2012

Resurrection of a wayward blogger

Reading my old blogs, I can't believe I haven't posted one since June! Trying to figure out why, I've realized that an unusual phenomenon seems to have developed, actually a combination of things.

First, I think I've just been overwhelmed by the reams of Email that turn up in my inbox, all hollering for comment or reply. Between Facebook and messages of the millions of friends of President Obama, individual personal messages from friends and family and readers of my books are often lost in the shuffle.

Add to this the natural slowing up of my normal mental functions nas i approach my 98th birthday, and the recent development of an uge to concentrate one one project at a time. Unthinkingoy I accepted an urgent request from a fellow member of my writing group, the High Country Writers, to take over as editor-in-chief of an Anthology project of our short prose and poetry. For a month or more I was so focused on its complications that it seemed to fill my hours to the exclusion of  almost everything else.

Happily, that effort is now completed -- at least my role is -- so I can retrn to my own life, and make my peace with all the websites I have so shamefully neglected. As my mobility becomes more unsteady, I am determined to continue my efforts to promote my five published books, three of which form a trilogy of memoirs. My major media for making them known to the reading world must be the electronic ones.

There are not too many of us left to tell the stories of the most critial times of the last century -- the years of the Great Depression in the 1930s, World War II, and the chaotic life in eastern Europe created by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, where I was born nearly a hundred years ago. Though my writing may seem too far behind the younger generations to be of interest to them, my five children and eleven grandchildren have kept me involved in their lives and concerned with the 'sturm und drang' of their times.

It also works the opposite way, and my experiences are of valid worth to young people in many ways. The old warning still holds good: "They who ignore the lessons of history will be forced to repeat them."

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