The Blind Side

After this long blogging silence, the first thing I write about when I finally return is . . . Sandra Bullock?

A few months ago, I officially decided I couldn't stand her anymore. (Not that I was that much of an active fan to begin with.) What had started to get to me was that -- at age 45, with no biological children, and likely on the cusp of that unfortunate stage in a Hollywood actress's career when she's no longer "marketable" as a leading lady -- she was making a bit too much of a deal about how she really, really was maternal after all.

She seemed to bring it up in just about every story I saw about her. It came to a head for me in an article in Parade last November, in which she said that before she met her husband (the bandit Jesse James) and started helping raise his five-year-old daughter, "I was too selfish to have kids."

Yes, the old No Children = Selfish equation. What a fresh idea. Thanks for that, Sandy.

But that wasn't enough. She went on: "If you don’t have kids and animals, you don’t truly know what real life is about."

Okay, I have an animal (and have had animals plural), and I now find it hard to imagine living without them. But for many years I didn't have animals in my life (34 years, to be exact), and I'd never be so judgmental and presumptuous to declare that those without them don't know what life is about.

Life is about your life and what you make of it, period.

Sandy, I thought, you're just an insecure clod.

Now, as everyone knows, mere weeks after her genuinely moving triumph of winning an Oscar, she has been publicly humiliated by allegations that her husband serially cheated on her.

And I've felt for her.

In her Golden Globe acceptance speech earlier this year, she said that before she met her husband, "I never knew what it felt like to have someone have my back."
Lord, all of those quotes that have come back to haunt her.

I've been there myself. Do I think he could be seeing someone else? No. No way.I remember seeing a 20/20 segment in the '80s about people who couldn't get over the death of their pets. Who were in grieving support groups, who couldn't stop crying. Get a life, I thought. Anyone who's that attached to animals doesn't know how to deal with people.
Next Wednesday is the second anniversary of my beagle Charlie's death. I still pray for his soul sometimes.

It's probably best not to make sweeping declarations about what constitutes life -- yours or anyone else's. All you'll end up with is reminder of how human you really are.

Not such a bad thing, I suppose.