You may have heard the
plunk, plunk, plunk of my marbles answering the call of gravity. I’ve been
losing my marbles ever since I was diagnosed with MSA, known to the public as
Multiple System Atrophy and to insiders as Marbles Slipping Away.
Dr. Freud never found
a treatment for downsizing, which requires hauling furniture, documents and
collectibles out of basements, attics, crawl spaces, closets, garages and sheds,
where they were stored decades ago. The person engaged in downsizing decides
what to give away, what to throw away and, what to sell and what to keep.
I live and downsize
with my daughter and son-in-law. As I sifted through thousands of papers I
wondered whether they had reproduced themselves, like a copy machine powered by
rabbits.
I recognized a copy of
L’Osservatore Romano’s weekly English language edition of January 14, 1991. I
had saved it because it included a two-page feature about its editor, Msgr.
John Muthig, whose death during a holiday visit to his home in New Jersey was
an unexpected shock.
John, a brother in
Christ, was a layman when I signed him up for his first newspaper job. It was
at The Catholic Review in Baltimore. He was a reporter at what was then called
NC, the National Catholic News Service, serving with distinction in the Rome
bureau while I was NC director and editor in chief in Washington.
He followed that with
two years at the Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations. He flew to
Chicago for the wedding of my loving landlords. Later he visited the family in
Orlando. We didn’t know it, but it was a goodbye visit of a gifted friend/priest/journalist/diplomat.
A couple of days ago I
emailed a long-time friend of John to offer my copy of the Vatican newspaper.
She accepted and mentioned blog comments she had left for me in the past.
When I was a kid we
all had bags of marbles, including agates, which were maybe twice the size of
ordinary marbles. When I read about those comments it was like being sideswiped
on the head with a bag of agates. I was humbled—or do I mean humiliated?—to discover
scores of comments on my blog, some of them several years old, a couple of them
subject to erasure because of vocabulary flaws.
I’ll order a copy of
Blogs for Dummies. Meanwhile I offer apologies to you. I’m sorry about my
oversight and my undersight. Right now I hear voices. They’re saying Get a move on.
© A. E. P. (Ed) Wall
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