An Old Column

I did not write a column last week, so here is an old one...one that I received many comments on....


Gazette 12/09/04
I have been getting calls and notes from folks out there in the land of Gazette, asking if I was okay, said they had been missing me. I feel so blessed to have folks concerned about me. Thank you, thank you, and thank you.
I would like to have said, “I am Busy” and I might have told some of you that…If I did, I lied. Well maybe, I wasn’t lying at the time I said it, it could have been before my “Big Think” about “Busy”.
You all, here is just a few of the conclusions I have come to, after giving “Busy” a think.


1. “Busy” I have come to believe is a modern fad, for lack of a better term. It has become fashionable, to be “Busy”. We have come to equate “Busy” with important. We all want to be important, so those of us who were not important became “Busy”. Remember that old time phrase “Busy body” ? It was used to describe someone who had their nose in everything, busy was not a term of endearment.




2. Declaring we are just too, “Busy” is often easier then saying “No”.


3. When we call our selves “Busy” usually, we are trying make others believe we accomplishing something. However we are generally quite vague about what that something might be.




4. “Busy” and productive are not necessarily the same thing. Ripping up and down the roads does not “Busy” make, that is just busy.


5. “Busy” may be more of a time manage thing. Say, I have spent the afternoon watching the dogs dig for moles in the back yard, instead of fixing supper, suddenly its 5 o’clock and nothing’s cooking and I have to go scurrying to get supper on the table. That is not “Busy”.
“Busy” is the word we use to justify procrastination. It sounds better to say, “Oh, I am just too “Busy”. Then “sorry I can’t, I have been procrastinating all week”




6.Or a mater of scheduling, if there are two events at the same time, the same day…and we are invited to both, that don’t make us “Busy”. But, when we try to get to both and slide in huffing and puffing, trying to catch our breath, so we can give a detailed explanation to the gathering, just how really “Busy” we are. That’s just being busy.


Besides, when did we Americans come to believe we are entitled to great patches of free time? If we are doing anything at all we call ourselves “Busy”.




I don’t remember mother ever saying, “I am Busy”. Even though she cooked, she cleaned, she sewed, she gardened, she taught Sunday school and bible school, she was a den mother to a pack of scouts, she visited the shut-ins, and sat with the dying. …I could go on and on. Mother and the other women of her era got up in the morning, did what they could do until the sun went down….then did it all again the next day.


I am not sure young women today, even considering they are working outside the home, are any busier then my mother was, they have so many conveniences that mother’s generation did not have. Often, when mother served fried chicken for supper, she began by killing the chicken, then plunging it into a big vat of boiling water, plucking the feathers and butchering the bird. Young homemakers today often pick up already cooked chicken on the way home….it may equal out.


All things considered, my generation has had it pretty darned easy, we have had the conveniences of this modern world and many of us, by choice, got to stay at home, change diapers, wax our floors and clean our ovens.


I gotta go, I am very Busummmmm Ahhhhh…well lets just say I am otherwise occupied the rest of the day. I am fixing to get started on my holiday baking.
Call if you need me.
Love to all Gloria