Writing for Rainer

I'm wandering around the house today, from room to room, the sole of one slipper  torn and flopping around.

A cat keeps following - winding around my feet in an effort to try to trip me up and kill me.

I don't know where to go, anywhere away from the windows, I guess.

There are landscapers outside trimming all the bushes and I don't want them to see me.
 Of course they will look into the windows - how can you not look into a window?

I'm wearing a faded pink nightgown and over that a man's long-sleeved undershirt. I know I have to write for Rainer but the table I write on is near the patio doors - right where the arbor vidae needs trimming.

"Why don't you write on your blog?" he harps at me day and night from his Bavarian castle somewhere in Germany. I have never met him but have known him for years so I can imagine things about him: he wears old-man sweaters and likes to chop wood. His hair is unkempt  and he broods about quantum physics and the state of the European union. At night his pipe tobacco smells like oak trees after it rains.

I learned to hide from the outside world when I was little, inside a closet or crouched in the front hall. Those were the days when salesmen would knock on the door selling sets of encyclopedias, vacuum cleaners, steak knives, Fuller brushes, Stanley products.

My mom taught us to hide in the house until they went away. I can still feel all the shoes beneath me as I squat down behind the coats.

My sister and I still have that in us - the ability to pull the curtains and shut the world away. It's easy to do with social media, we pretend to be friends with so many people but we don't really see them. Ever.

Rainer hates Facebook and agrees with the European Commission's plan to stop the way the website "eavesdrops" on its users to gather information about what they purchase, their political opinions, sexuality, religious beliefs – and even their whereabouts.

Facebook harvests information from people's activities on the social networking site – whatever their individual privacy settings – and makes it available to advertisers.

He doesn't understand how Americans don't care about giving it all away.

They don't even think much about you Rainer or Europe in general except maybe a planned  two week-tour to some of the major cities after retirement.

 They do think about Africa however, traveling there with church groups in perpetual pilgrimages to fight starvation. 

I feel like smoking a cigarette after this - I'm so tired and not used to writing more than one Facebook sentence expounding on how I feel or what I like or what I watched on television last night.

I quit smoking years ago but I still want one every day and will cross the street to be near someone who is smoking so I can breath it in - let it waft over and around me like some sacred cleansing.

I hope you are happy now Rainer.