Hang in there, Linda Odum

I've enjoyed reading your columns on separating from your husband.  You don't whine or blame the immature SOB.  Thats what allows you to write intimate columns about your real life.  Your writing is not sentimental or self-pitying.  Sentiment is good for a writer; sentimenality is bad.  The classic example are these different images of home.  Robert Frost said, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."  Edgar Guest, a very popular, slighly older version of Robert Frost wrote, "Home is where the heart is."  If you gotta ask what's the difference, you ain't never gonna know.

When I'm tempted to write sentimentally, I either lie down on the sofa till the mood passes, or I'll put on a mask to distance myself from the feelings, hopefully without denying them.  It led to a lot of tasteless jokes.  I outgrew that in newspaper days one night when our police reporter, Jim Patton, the most ignorant guy I ever met in newswpapers, was listening to the scanner, and the people at the other end started sqawking about a woman threatening  to jump off a bridge into the river. 

"JUMP!" Jim said.  Because I didn't laugh, he said it three more times.

"Jim, you're laughing at searing emotional pain.  She feels so hopeless that she thinks the world would be better off without her."

"Didn't you know I was joking?" he said.

"Not in my presence," I answere.  "Not in my presence.  You don't laugh at a blind person who trips on a curb or a stair.  He didn't choose to be blind, and she didn't choose to be suicidal.  That woman has as much choice right now as the blind man.  So don't laugh at people's pain in my presence."

Sometimes, you have to decide whether to go along with the tastess, crude jokes or speak up.  Speaking up risks putting everybody uptight and spoiling the party, but every time I spoke up, I felt good.  Every time I let it go by, I felt lousy.