"TAKE HEED"

“But take ye heed...” (from Mark 13:23)

I’m posting this on Thursday, but I’m actually writing it on Monday night.  As I write, I’m sitting having coffee at a Dunkin Donuts in the Webster Sq. section of Worcester.  A young lady was jut mopping the floor.  It’s not real late- it’s before 8, but I’m sitting here with my feet up so as to not interfere with the mopping.

On Monday morning as I ate at McDonald’s on Route 30 in Framingham, a construction crew was working there right in the middle of the breakfast hour.  They’re completely redoing the dining area at that McDonald’s.  Breakfast eaters were made to feel like unwanted interlopers.  It was weird.  Solid objects were being removed from the wall with power tools, and the wallpaper was being stripped right off the walls as we ate.  One woman, eating across the aisle from me was irritated and swearing.  I don’t condone the swearing, but I did comment to her, “I wonder if it’s LEGAL to do this!” (i.e. to be doing construction amid diners who are just trying to eat).  Everybody there had to “take heed”.

This week’s big media news has been of a vicious, insulting, and racist statement made by radio host Don Imus.  As Imus apologized on Monday’s show, he suddenly seemed old, feeble, and a “has-been”.  I actually listen to Don Imus quite often and I felt sorry for him, although his racist and insulting statement WAS way out of line.  He didn’t “take heed”.

Twenty-two years ago, I “flipped out” and loudly and angrily yelled at a neighborhood kid in the Walpole yard where I lived at the time.   I was loud, and angry, and making a scene, and because of that, neighbors thought I was some kind of a monster.  I lived in that residence for a total of four and a half years, but I think a number of the neighbors remembered nothing of me but those two angry minutes in the yard.  I moved a year and a half later, but my effectiveness in that neighborhood ended that June day in 1985.  

Bottom line:  that “that heed” stuff is really important.