I. What's this about a bridge?

                Has this ever happened to you? You’re sitting at your desk one day writing a “Get Well” card to your uncle in Topeka (kidney stones) when the phone rings and it’s your buddy Harry reminding you that the check for the trip you’re planning is due at the end of the week. You stop writing the card and take out your checkbook. Meanwhile, your secretary buzzes you to tell you that Fluntrik is on the phone and he says it’s urgent. So you pick up the phone to find out what Fluntrik is bothering you about this time (third time today) and your pen falls on the floor and rolls under the desk. It’s a fountain pen and you have beige carpeting, so you want to retrieve the pen before it bleeds into the rug. You tell Fluntrik to hold on while you get down on the floor looking for the pen (an expensive gift from, of all people, the uncle in Topeka--what a coincidence!) when, all of a sudden . . . .

                That’s how it is sometimes, isn’t it? One thing leads to another and that leads to another which moves us off in a different direction and so on and so on until we end up far from where we started and there is no longer any connection between what we’re doing at the moment and where we started only twenty minutes ago. (And I might point out to younger readings that the older you get, the more often this happens.) And if we look at the larger picture of our lives, we might actually notice that the same thing has been going on not for twenty minutes but for months or even years, and we look back and wonder how the time went by so quickly and at the beginning we never we never would have dreamed we’d end up where we are now.

                Where were you ten years ago? Ten years ago, Hobblestone was in seventh grade taking one of those annoying standardized tests while thinking about the piece of pineapple upside-down cake sitting in his lunch pail. And now? Here he is in his car on the way to his first day of his first job—and you’re just meeting him! I bet that ten years ago, you never even knew that Hobblestone existed. After all these years, just now your paths have intersected, simply because you happened to click on the link to this blog. And at this moment, you have no idea what your relationship with Hobblestone is going to mean for the quality of your life. (. . . or not. You never know. You never really know).

                And now you have to make a decision. Will you continue reading this blog? Will you subscribe to it or put it on your favorites list?

              Choices, choices, choices. Think of them as bridges. Which one will you cross?

                And in case you haven’t noticed: this blog isn’t only about Hobblestone.

                Un-topics: Here are some things this blog will not be about “No Child Left Behind,” “Fun with pineapples" or “the sad plight of a college graduate in this economy.” Just so you know.