Saving the Blind Ethiopian Goats

Edna was a very busy person.  And a very important one.  The two so often go hand in hand.

Every day her mail box was full of brochures and envelopes.  Each one informed her of new problems in the world.  Problems that only she could help solve.  There were blind people.  And deaf people.
There were refugees.  It seemed as if every disease needed more money to control...cancer, malaria, AIDS.  There were abandoned dogs.  And cats.  And horses.

Sometimes problems just seemed to be multiplying and combining.  There were refugees with cancer. There were blind horses.

So much trouble, oh, so very much trouble.

Every day she sorted the stacks of mail, trying to remember which ones she had donated to lately.  It was hard.  Some days she got 40 or 50 appeals.  They all looked official, some of them resembled bills. The problems were heart breaking.

Edna remembered when the world was a simpler place, a place where what problems there were could be taken care of by the local church.  Or perhaps by Unicef.

Edna's son tried to get her to be a little less generous.  "Think of your own future too Mom", he would say.  But Edna had five or six bank accounts with lots of money in them.  "I can afford it", she would say, and write another handful of checks.

The trip to the mail box became a central part of her day.  Each morning she would shuffle down with a bunch of envelopes, each containing her small effort to right the many wrongs of the world.  On the trip back she was hunched over, laden with another armful of troubles.  She had a tote bag to haul them in.

It took Edna a while to notice the changes.  Little things often got by her lately.  But it seemed as if the appeals were getting more urgent, more complicated.  The pictures were more vivid and troubling. Who knew that there were goats who were victims of land mines in Ethiopia?  And that plan to match up blind orphans with abandoned dogs, well it was just such a fine idea!

Many of these new appeals were so very eye catching and all had as their mailing address a post office box in New Haven Connecticut.  That must be where all the really important charities were headquartered these days.  Why, wasn't that the same city where her clever grand daughter was studying graphics design?  Yes, she was very sure that it was.  For a moment, until other things captured her attention, she resolved to write Cathy a letter and suggest she go to work for one of these fine organizations.

But the moment passed and Cathy was forgotten.  Edna was a very busy and important person and small details sometimes got away from her.

So she never noticed that for every donation she wrote to one of these important new charities an equivalent deposit appeared in one of her five, or was it seven?, bank accounts.

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A stylistic tip of the hat to the authoress who resides at A TERMINAL CASE OF WHIMSY.  Wish you were still in our real world neighborhood J!