I hope that you enjoy reading this post on the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where eleven of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by Will. The ten other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Maxi, Maria SF, Padmum, Paul, Shackman, The Old Fossil and Will. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!
“Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to ‘look before we leap’ promptly warns us that ‘if we hesitate we are lost’; that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’, but ‘out of sight, out of mind’.”
~ Leo Rosten
Something that has always occurred to me whenever this saying was quoted to me was to ask, “What about those who are born without sight? Don’t they have minds?” In most cases, to be polite, I never did.
And I should really rest my case with that pithy observation but, it is such a corny statement that I can’t resist the temptation to add my personal experience on it.
It has been more than four years since my partner of forty plus years went out of sight. She disappeared in a haze of smoke leaving behind a small urn full of ash. You think that she is out of my mind? No way dear reader. There is not a day that something or the other does not remind me and our son of her. She is out of our sights but most certainly not out of our minds.
When she was alive, and mind you during days when making telephone calls were not as easy as it is today, I used to travel a great deal and she and our son would be out of sight for me for an average of three weeks a month. Do you think that they were ever out of my mind or I out of theirs?
Having had that little rant, that proverb has its uses and so let me conclude this post with another – “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” As if anyone in their right mind would, unless of course the baby is out of sight.
