By Georgie Bright Kunkel

People ask me how I find something to write about for the weekly paper. I reply that every morning I wake up with my mind whirring like an electric mixer. As I often say, “I get no sympathy because I have no life threatening illnesses –not even Alzheimer’s.” So my little aches and pains must go unheralded and un-pampered. Not that some mornings I don’t have the urge to roll over and go back to sleep. Luckily I come from upstate Maine stock with some Missouri stubbornness thrown in. My mother used to get up at first light to have some quiet time before her brood of eight children still living at home bounded downstairs asking, “What’s for breakfast?”

I remember when one time we couldn’t get out the door from the upstairs because an earthquake had knocked the dining room stove over blocking our way. That meant that one of my older brothers had to crawl out the upstairs window and drop from the sloping roof onto the back porch and go in and clear the way. We kids thought it was exciting but my mother was upset even though she never let on that she was.

Fast forward to 1949 when we got a really big rumble in Seattle. I remember carrying my second son, still an infant, out into the yard in fright. That probably was not the best idea as our tall fireplace chimney could have crumbled and fallen onto us. But it is difficult to feel anxious about an earthquake that might not occur again for hundreds of years. Urgency would not be a high priority. Stockpiling food for such on occasion doesn’t seem high priority. The little tremors that have swayed my dining room chandelier a few times over the past few years haven’t brought a sense of terror into my life. We Seattleites can deal with such little annoyances. We see the floods and typhoons in other parts of the country and say, “That won’t ever happen here.”

That got me to thinking of the nervous tension that is created by the fact that technology brings all the catastrophes of the world to our television and smart phones. Isn’t it enough to be aware and involved with our family problems and the downturns of close neighbors? Must we add the war and terror erupting all around the world to our consciousness? I answered these questions for myself and decided that I don’t need to watch the news every day or even read a paper every day. The weekly paper suits me just fine. And as long as I am not too controversial in my discourse, I can bring some sense of awareness to the reader—awareness to everyday life and the importance in living it.

But it is impossible to please everyone. Even though I pride myself on being almost perfect, I have made some glitches in my writing from time to time. My only hope is that I have never written glitches deliberately. I have never been vindictive or blaming. Well, blaming the corporate world isn’t actually like being vindictive to a human being. Oh, oh. The corporation is now a human being under the law since they got the status of person under the constitution. You have already heard me rail about the fact that women are not persons under our law as yet but corporations are.

It takes many years to make needed change. As they say, nothing is perfect, and certainly life is not perfect. Perfection is measured by each one of us on earth and what may be perfect for one person might not be acceptable to another. That is why humans develop empathy in order to live amicably in a world of other humans who have different value systems from our own. How is that all working for you? Hope you are finding an acceptable balance in your life. We need to enjoy life after all.

Georgie Bright Kunkel is a freelance writer who can be reached at gnkunkel@comcast.net or 206-935-8663.