THINGS YOU WILL NEVER KNOW

I was driving down a stretch of highway I hadn't taken for awhile

on my way to bring rare blood to a rural hospital.

I spied a billboard.

It was the one you see in the picture :

ERIN, WILL YOU MARRY ME?

I sped by, thinking I would never know who this Erin was, or who was doing this unique proposal, or if she said yes.

Being a writer, I did some research and here is the link to the answer :

http://www.nbc33tv.com/news/local-news/man-proposes-via-billboard

I arrived to the hospital to see, that in a week's time, the TACO BELL had been leveled to the ground.

Within a week.

Being a writer, I asked around at the hospital. TACO BELL was being re-built from the ground up. But what happened to the poor people depending on those paychecks to survive?

Being a writer and observer of the folks around me, I knew most of the people displaced. They were not faceless statistics. They were single mothers and struggling teens who would be devastated.

And I would never know what happened to them.


As I drove back, I thought there were other things you and I will never know :

Why do people scream at each other in an argument?

Do they instinctively know that the other person has long since stopped listening?

Where does the love go in so many marriages?

Is it evaporated under the heat of life's day-to-day burdens?

Or is it strangled by neglect, by meant-to gestures of caring forgotten in the rush of the rat race, and the poison of familiarity?

How does the brain produce consciousness?

It can't be data storage, or a computer would be conscious. Is it that something science scoffs at? The soul?

How can observation affect the outcome of an experiment?

Don't ask a mother this. You can see for yourself when she walks into her son's room unexpectedly.

But a mother will never know what impact her life of love, her words of wisdom will have on her children when she is dead.

Perhaps sometimes you just have to trust in love to stick when all else drops by the wayside.
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