Blog
Read more about movies, writing books and self-improvement by fantasy/sci-fi author Ron Vitale.
I'm writing this to you right after the Harvey Weinstein news has broken and women from all around the world are sharing their #MeToo stories. On a personal level, I logged into my Facebook account and was flooded with women sharing their stories of being sexually harassed and assaulted. The number of women I knew who had spoken up shocked me. And that's a good thing.
I've watched the news reports and I can't imagine the amount of rain that people in Texas and Louisiana have received from Hurricane Harvey. Back in 2011, my wife and I planned to take our kids to visit her cousins on the west coast. It was going to be our first big trip with the kids and we had saved up so that we could go. Several days before our trip Hurricane Irene reared its way toward us, and by the day we were supposed to leave, all flights were cancelled. I live more than 80 miles inland from the Atlantic ocean, but we were hit hard from the storm. We lost power for nearly three days, our basement was flooded and we had to rip up all the rugs, drag up the water logged rugs and eventually needed to rip out parts of the walls to treat the studs for mold, get french drains and go through rebuilding our basement. We only had a few inches of water in our basement.
My wife handed me the phone and a wave of fear washed over me. My doctor was calling me back with the results of some blood tests. But it was Sunday night after 7 p.m. and I thought my doctor's calling me so late on a weekend couldn't be good. I went to take the phone from my wife and my head started spinning. What if I received bad news? I couldn't stop my racing thoughts and then my 10-year old daughter ran up to me to tell me something just as I said hello to my doctor. I shooed my daughter away and rushed into the downstairs bathroom to be able to hear my doctor.
Today marks the 20th anniversary that my wife and I met. I wanted to celebrate these twenty years with a little retrospective and a "how to guide" on relationships. I'll start off by saying that being together for such a long time is hard. Really hard. Back then I knew my limitations, quirks and faults, but multiple that over time, mix it up with another person's baggage and then add in kids, financial problems, deaths, illnesses and the rest of life and, wow, I didn't know what the hell I was getting into.
Last night I took my family to see the Temple University family holiday concert and we had a blast. We were listening to the songs being played and there was this tender and most intimate of moments. A pregnant black woman sat next to me and her husband next to her with his hand on her belly. While the drums were playing and the jazz band was just knocking it out of the park, the woman was taking her husband's hand so that she could have him feel their baby kicking.
