House Party

Oh, my wonderful friends from J-land, how I wish I had a great big house with a jillion guest rooms, and a huge parlor with a large fire place. I’d have an on-going house-party and you’d all stay over and we’d sit around together and tell about our cats, and kids, and jobs, and ailments, and cures, like we do in our journals. We’d share our dreams and hopes and fears and joys.

It’d be a come-as-you-are party, because that’s the way we dress when we write our journals. We’d wear our scruffies, our nighties, our jeans and our robes, they way we do when we write. I’d be bare and you wouldn’t care ‘cuz that’s the way I write my best.

We’d be in our best and most relaxed story-sharing mode, each sipping his own favorite beverage, and like our journals, nothing would be un-mentionable, for we’re all new-found fast-friends.

We’d recognize each other from the pictures in our journals, or from the names we call our kids or our pets, or our regional accents. We come from all over the world.

Conversation would be easy. We already know one another.

I know it would be a wonderful exciting, entrancing social encounter, because that is just what my reading our blogs is now. Just like an evening’s conversation, I start with one guest and read his entry, and then listen to the comments of others, and follow the links in their comments to their journals. From their journals I follow to the next and the next. Like a true conversation, the subject changes naturally from one experience to the next.

We’ve become such friends that very little is “off limits” in our discussions. You know that I’m an old bachelor, living in an old folks’ home, and I know you’re an ambulance driver, a store manager, a housewife (or house-husband), an artist, or a long distance trucker writing on a lap top from the sleeping compartment of your eighteen wheeler. I know that you’re estranged from your family, happily married, unhappily married, looking for love, or living with a partner whose gender is not stated. You know I’m eighty with an eighty-nine year old girl friend.

How did such a varied group as we come together at this happy house-party? Because of a common interest we share with the unlikely name: blogging.

Thanks for coming to my party. Come again soon, y’hear?