SENDING LITTLE CHASE UTLEY ZIP LINING FROM THE CEILING FAN

There's a call. Lots of calls, really. There are causes everywhere. Good causes. I want to donate, volunteer, share, vote, do, help. Everything. Something!

It's overwhelming.

Doing "what I can" never feels like enough. In fact, too often it feels like chasing rainbows.

I've been fired from delivering meals to the elderly for getting too involved. A foreign illiterate I was teaching to read was given a new teacher because he got fresh with me. Jobs I took in the name of purpose instead became reasons to self doubt. 

Such examples link a long chain.

"So it goes." - Kurt Vonnegut

Little Chase Utley is dangling above my computer screen. 

I'm supposed to be sending out requests trying to get my book published. It's about a mother hiding from her own mental illness. I wrote it hoping to inspire, create understanding, tell a story with which I am too familiar. 

Now I'd rather send a plastic man and his paper clip down some yarn and smack him into the silverware drawer again. That made my son laugh last night. I didn't feel like a failure. For that moment, maybe I wasn't.

Alas, zip lining Little Chase Utley is only a temporary fix.  

I know I have to keep trying because I know I will never stop caring. 

My tiny donations won't cure any diseases or solve any crises, but I've seen change jars grow up and become bank accounts. It can add up.

And maybe they'll always only give me "busy work" at the soup kitchen and there will forever be someone else better suited for tasks at church. But maybe not.

And yes, I might be too risky a choice to be an adoptive parent and just a number in the literary rejection piles. But my fiction writing mind won't allow itself to entertain sucky endings, so on I go. 

Oh, Little Chase is still going for a ride. Worry not. I'll make it quick. Besides, my hot glue gun is loaded.

Thanks for reading, friends. 

May all of your plastic men have strong limbs. 

Ruthy