Let Me Entertain You

It helps to be a fan of something, no matter what it is.

I think that might be why people used to keep track of the weather. It was the one thing guaranteed to change everyday before we had Internet and television and smart phones. Before we even had libraries that everyone could access, we had the weather.

In some ways windows are the oldest venues for entertainment. Any window in a storm so to speak and if you just happened to have some beautiful scene, or garden, or distant mountain you could view, the entertainment value zipped right up there.

I once spent a year sitting with an elderly woman who liked to watch what went on in her alley. She waited for the school children to pass by at lunch time, and after school. She knew the can collectors and trash pickers by sight. If it rained we watched the drops that hit her lilies and dripped from the gutters above our porch window. It was a world that held endless fascination for her, because it was her world.

Taking ownership for some small part of this vast universe seems to up the ante for everything too. We become intimate with some aspect of our lives and notice those small nuances others miss, or perhaps don't care about, but we do care. We care because they are our things, our thoughts, our stories. I think that is a basic premise for living. Before there was mass communication we had intimate communication.

We knew if our neighbor walked by with a limp she didn't have the day before that maybe she could use a little help. We understood the tone of Uncle Mark's letter was really an invitation to visit, because he was lonely. We loved the excitement and tension of a thunderstorm, or sweet beauty of a spring rain. A sunny day brightened our thoughts before there were soap operas to tug on our heartstrings.

I think being a fan of something, whether it is the weather, a person, a neighborhood, or any of today's media opportunities is a basic part of being human.