It’s just 24 hours after hearing about the news of Whitney Houston’s death at the age of 48.  The autopsy results are not in yet so the cause of her death is just speculation at this point but there’s lots of talk of her drug issues in the past.  Time will tell if drugs ended her life too soon but it has caused me to reflect today on Whitney and Bobby Brown and the high cost of allowing the wrong person in your life.  There’s been a lot of anger on Twitter towards Bobby Brown…some even saying that he killed her by getting her into drugs.  I don’t feel he killed her.  Whitney was a grown woman and made her own choices in her life.  Would she be alive today if she hadn’t allowed him in her life?  Harder question to answer, isn’t it?  How many of us have gone down the wrong path because of the person or people we have allowed in our lives?  Like it or not, the people close to us DO influence us.  For better or for worse.  And I strongly feel her life would have gone in a different direction without her relationship with Bobby Brown and I think most people would agree with me.  Her talent was legendary.  I always hoped she’d be able to fight her demons and make a strong come-back.  It wasn’t meant to be.  Rest in Peace Whitney and thanks for giving the world your great gift.  I am sorry you suffered so much and I hope that perhaps if any good comes out of this it would be from women who might have their eyes opened to the high price of letting the wrong man in your life.

“WELCOME TO BURDOCK COUNTY, hails the peeling roadside billboard out at the county line, THE ASPARAGUS BED OF THE COMMONWEALTH.

Not that anyone in Burdock County actually grows asparagus in any noteworthy quantity; we’re in tobacco country here, and asparagus makes, at best, an indifferent smoke.  It’s rather that the noble vegetable is reputed to insist upon the choice spot in the garden for itself, and civic-minded Burdock Countians like to suppose they’re at least as discriminating as a stalk of asparagus.

At what is purported to be at once the highest point of ground and the exact geographical center of the county, the Burdock County courthouse, an ash-gray pile of colonnaded, crenellated stucco, bulks exceedingly large, with the village of Needmore, nine hundred citizens strong, abjectly huddled around it, and the wrinkled hills and dales of Burdock County tumbling off to the four horizons like a vast unmade bed.  Until recently, the predominant color in this great rumpled patchwork vista would have been green–the bosky verdure of woods and thickets, the paler shades of meadows and cornfields and tobacco patches–but the harvest season’s over now, and the first frost has come and gone; and on this day–a certain fine late October Sunday afternoon in 1941–the orange and dun and russet hues of autumn are in the ascendancy.

Atop the courthouse, that imposing eyesore, is situated yet another imposing eyesore:  a bulbous, beehive-shaped cupola with four clock faces the size of mill wheels, each asserting with all the authority of its hugeness four entirely different times of day.  Two sides of the clock have, in fact, long since concluded that being right twice a day is better than never being right at all and have taken their stands at, respectively, 9:14 and 7:26.  The remaining pair toil on, not in tandem but quite independently, one gaining several seconds every hour, the other one just as resolutely losing them.  There is, moreover, a bell in the clock tower that has a timetable all its own and is liable to toll midnight at three in the morning and noon at suppertime.  The dedicated public servants in the courthouse learned long ago to ignore altogether the two broken clocks and the bell and to come to work by the slow clock and knock off by the fast one.  They regard their singular timepiece as a labor-saving device and treasure it accordingly.”

–Ed McClanahan,  A Congress Of Wonders

I will be posting pieces on a regular basis to share…feel free to use it!