My name is Carol and I approve this message. You know that phrase that goes  “a mind is a terrible thing to waste?" Well it could have been coined by my mother had not Lou Rawls beat her to it. For my mother didn’t believe in wasting anything, not one’s mind, surely not one’s Pig's Ear. Yuck! In her opinion ‘waste not’ should have been one of the commandments, right up there with honoring thy mother and father and the one about not coveting thy neighbors’ stuff. She used to tell us that an ‘idol mind was the devil’s workshop’, so to avoid that pitfall, she introduced my sister and me to chores around the house and to books, foraging a lifetime of reading and cleaning.

As a child I read everything from mysteries to the Bible. I particularly loved reading the stories in the Bible about people who overcame challenges. Like Daniel in the Lion’s Den because I have always admired cats of all breeds. And David and Goliath, where I heard somewhere after that incident there was a ban on slingshots. 

At first I began reading books for the great stories. For the hours of escapism they allowed me as I turned page after page. Then I began to analyze them. And like the Little Red Hen, I discovered something. It is true that if you want something done right, you usually have to do it yourself. From Romeo and Juliet, I learned that a serious ‘love jones’ can be the death of you.

Homer’s Odyssey, to me was one of man’s most poignant sagas, for it was a story about the frailties of life, about a man trying to reclaim his fatherhood status after years of wanderlust. It was about a wife longing for her husband. And finally it was about a son searching for his long, lost father, and in doing so trying to find himself. Homer’s Odyssey gave us our first look at the absent-father syndrome and how if affects those involved.