Jottings from the Past

Welcome to Friday's Jottings from the Past on Post Oak Chronicles.
I'm going to do my best to do a different one every Friday. We'll see how long that lasts, knowing full well what a procrastinator I am.
I was encouraged to do this by a new/not-so-new friend who presented a program last week at a local writers group meeting. Meaning I'd met her once a year for several years at a writers conference. Her name might be Donna and she might be a professor at King College in Bristol, Tennessee! If you see this, thank you again, Donna!
She talked about blogs and posting regularly on them being such a chore. During lunch I mentioned to her that I wrote a short chatty, family-friendly column that lasted four years for a small local weekly (no longer published) a few years ago. She told me I had a veritable backlog of blog posts! And she was right.
So I'm going to start off with posting one of those with maybe a few comments on Fridays. And also that I'm changing the appearance of the blog, still working on that. Tune in next week, it might be entirely different!
This first Friday's Jottings is a column I did on inspiring people, of which there are many in this old world, believe it or not.

Inspiring people
aren't necessarily famous or prominent. They can be, but aside from a various sized circle of personal friends and acquaintances, well-known people inspire at a distance, you might say. However all of us, I hope, know people who inspire in our own circles. Either because they are the doers of inspiring deeds or just by keeping on putting one foot in front of the other in spite of being hindered by obstacles we might feel would have put us down.
We all probably know people for whom illness has been an obstacle. Once I knew a woman, a neighbor, who became paralyzed from the waist down after an automobile accident several years before I met her. Afterward she was confined to her bed for the rest of her life. She had been engaged but broke it off, refusing to allow her fiance to be bound to a disabled woman. She worked daily from her bed, providing the only telephone answering service in town. Her life inspired able as well as disabled people in much the same way that Joni Erickson Tada, paralyzed in a diving accident at eighteen.
Others also do their inspiring deeds out of the public eye. One person I know is generous with her time and talent for preparing delicious food for others’ special occasions, weddings, anniversary celebrations, etc. Another spends little of her money on herself. She gives monthly not only to members of her family but to other individuals around her with fewer resources, to an organization that helps injured returning soldiers. People like these are my inspiration.