Me again folks. In my previous post I was trying to be facetious as hell. I'm rather amazed and a bit hurt by the vindictiveness of some of my favorite folks here in this thread. My wife of 32 years, Carol, is a Jehovah's Witness and I'm an atheist Jew. We agree to disagree. Her religion bugs the hell out of me, but the Witnesses are some of the nicest people I know---as long as we don't talk religion. (They know to leave me alone where that topic is concerned.) Some people just have an amazing need for certainty in their lives. One thing that the Witnesses are is certain. Their rule book, the Bible, has all the answers as they see it. Personally, I've always felt that in the game of life the directions don't come on the box! But fragile folks need to KNOW---it's something that gives them a bit of control over stuff that I'm content to see as simply a mystery that I may never have an answer for. Just is what is--as Gordon Bok has often said to me.

2 years ago, while recovering from one of 7 surgeries I've had in the last decade, I was given blood thinners to lessen the chance of blood clots. That caused (from my point of view) a situation similar to Catspaw's; I got 12 pints of blood before the thing got cotterized and plugged. All the time I was in the hospital the Witnesses took care of Carol and came to visit me in the ICU often. They did that even though I was getting tons o' blood. Some of you might know that somewhere in the damn Bible it says don't take in blood---so they reject all of that. Drives me nuts---as I said. They were always visiting me all the time I was getting the transfusions that I'm sure offended them but that I'm sure saved my life. And I'll always defend their right to voice and practice their beliefs---as off the mark as my common sense tells me they are.

I mean no disrespect to you people. I just think that live & let live is a better way to go about things like this than starting this quite useless thread. Hell, no, it isn't easy sometimes dealing with people with whom we differ. But as Stan Rogers so eloquently said speaking of another difficult thing to make work---marriage, "What the hell's it (life) for." It's the difficulty that makes it so damn interesting. I'd be bored otherwise.

And I paraphrase Stan's song once more: I want to see Carol's smiling face 45 years from now!

Art Thieme