originally posted here on May 10, 2013

“Yeah, I read your blog every time,” the younger woman sitting next to me said.  “Sometimes it’s good stuff and I print a copy of it and save it.  Other times, it’s just babbling.”

I burst into laughter when she said that, but she wasn’t finished.  “What’s with all this country music?  Don’t you ever listen to anything other than country?  You need to branch out.”

At this I protested, but she had another comment.  “I can tell with the first sentence if it’s a good day or if you’re out there rambling around in outer space.”

Carmen is a beta follower for this blog, but of course I have no way of tracking whether she reads the entries or doesn’t so I was really pleased to hear that she does.  Carmen is the granddaughter of one of the four most important women in my life, Willie Flora, and I’ve known her since she was a little girl in elementary school.  I had her email address and invited her to follow along with me when I sent the original invitations.  She accepted and now here we were almost two years later chatting and eating brisket in a booth at Dozier’s Barbecue in Fulshear, Texas in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

She is a Reader.  A Follower.  And she had no reluctance to call it like she sees it.  I’d love to take credit for some of that bravado but I’m afraid she learned at the tables of two masters, her mother Leora and her grandmother Willie.  I’ve had a few lessons at those tables myself.

Good stuff or babbling?   A new bar is raised.  To publish or not to publish?  That’s the question. I’ll let my readers, my followers decide whether I’ve made the right call.

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The Short Side of Time, a collection of my favorite blogs, was published in 2015. The above piece on good stuff or babbling continues to be a question looming over every post ten years after I first shared.