Daily Prompt

Blindly Paranoid

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The story has a happy ending: my bank account is still a bank account, and—even better!—it is still my bank account. So breathe easy, everyone.

I do not know if 10:30 a.m. on a Sunday is the worst time to learn that something is amiss with one’s bank account or if it is the second-worst time to learn that something is amiss with one’s funds, but that was the time I learned this scary fact. Now, I have watched friends lose their ATM cards into an ATM at 2:00 a.m. because the ATM had been given instructions by the bank to stop my friends from doing more damage to their (the bank’s) reputation. That would be worse than what I experienced, except for one crucial point: this is me I’m talking about here, and it happened to me, not to a memory of a friend. Me. Everything is always worse when it happens to me.
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Blind but Now I See

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

An Anglican clergyman named John Newton wrote the hymn titled “Faith’s Review and Expectation” late in 1772, and he introduced the hymn in a New Year’s Day service in his parish in Olney, Buckinghamshire, on that date in 1773.

Many years later, the hymn became best known by the two-word exclamation that opens it: “Amazing grace!”
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Lighting out For ‘The Woods’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

We called it “The Woods.” Well, I did. Sometimes, I referred to it as a “forest,” which it most certainly was not. Our backyard ended at a line of trees and dross beneath them; the lightly manicured, suburban lawn did not grow beyond that line, despite my teen-aged lawn mowing efforts to expand the lawn by clearing the dead leaves and branches away. That tight boundary made The Woods appear all the more elemental, foreign, forbidding, and, of course, inviting.

There was nothing truly elemental or extra natural about The Woods, though; it was not even a particularly non-developed land that surrounded our development. High tension power lines that fed electricity to our thousand-house neighborhood ran along an unpaved road about three football fields away from our back door; thus, the three-hundred-yard-deep stretch of trees that ran the entire backside of the neighborhood, from the Metro-North train tracks along the Hudson River on up and away from the river, merely existed to separate us from the taller-than-average power poles.
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