Hey everyone.  I feel that right away I need to tell you Babu is doing well!  🙂  Yes, I have been away from the blog for a while.  Whenever this happens, which some of you long time followers know happens a lot, I feel its tug.  When I’m not working on the blog or transcribing passages I think about it all the time.  Probably more than I do when I am constantly working on it.  And when I finally do return, I think about the lovely people who check in with Babu every once in a while during my long absences.  That sincere, sweet interest from this lovely blogosphere is not the whole reason I write this blog, but it’s not not a reason.

Maybe I also feel that I need to start that way because I know a time will come, a time when I am not writing because she is gone and I don’t know how to handle it.  It’s written to reassure:  “No, no, it’s not that, not yet.”

There are two reasons that I have been away for a while.  One, life has got me down.  I’m suffering another bout of depression and anxiety.  That’s probably the wrong way to describe it.  I am always dealing with it in one form or another but lately it has gotten on top of me.  Every once in a while my knees give out from the weight and I need to spend a lot of time in bed.  Those times go hand in hand with dry spells in my writing.  Hey, it happens and I am on a path now, with a counselor and some changes in my life, that I think is really going to strengthen my core muscles.

The second reason I’ve been away from the blog is that I’ve been thinking about making some changes with it.  Maybe that’s just a cover for the fact that I’ve developed writer’s block.  Either way, I feel like I cannot keep bopping along writing month by month posts.  It doesn’t feel fresh anymore just to relate to you what each month of her journal speaks of.  Also, 1940 is heading into an important, very important, time both personally and nationally, (internationally, actually) for Babu.  She is maturing through these pages and the way I write about them needs to mature as well.

Also, this current time in Babu’s life is important as well.  This is her 100th year.  Actually, it’s technically her 101st, but you know what I mean.  Little significant things happen throughout the day in my routine with her.  I need to write about those as well.  Yes, you understand.  I’m doing what many (all?) writers do.  This is how I process my stuff.

Through it all, there still remains the unadulterated excitement of reading and transcribing these passages.  I peaked ahead to December, 1941 and cried my eyes out.  There are twists her life is going to take, and a bunch of them rather soon.  She’ll have me laughing, shaking my head and tisk tisking her, and sobbing into my pillow.  Nothing I’ve ever read has captured me like this.  I wish everyone created a record like this, yet, I’m not even keeping my own.  Not in any organized way.  Most of us just can’t.  Most of our daily recorders will look like Babu’s January, 1940.  But Babu is something special.  A born archivists and I thank her for it.