by Kevin Burton
You are reading this post. That makes you a miracle to me.
Please know that I mean it when I say, thank you!
Tomorrow is a birthday of sorts, as July 20 is the anniversary of my first post on Page 7. I hinted at this Friday in the midst of some lunar lunacy (“Alone In The Universe, Or Just Ignored” July 17).
A birthday is a time to celebrate and to assess how things are going.
Actually there will be two birthdays for this blog. There is the date of my first post, but also the date, April 14, 2020, when I finally scraped up enough discipline to put in place the current pattern of posting three times a week, on Tuesday, Friday and Sunday.
If you look at it that way, April 14 is the day Page 7 was truly born. It’s also my wedding anniversary, so no way I’ll forget that day, right?
Mexico has two celebrations. There is May 5, Cinco de Mayo, that commemorates the 1862 Battle of Puebla, when an outmanned Mexican army routed French invaders. Then there is the true Independence Day, Sept. 16, the day in 1810 when Miguel Hidalgo first called on the Mexican people to rise up against Spanish forces.
So I’ll have two celebrations too. Two days of reflection.
The name of the blog, Page 7, indicates that I know my stuff is not page-one material. Seven is also the number I wore for most of my 20-plus-year beep baseball career.
The blog is designed to be like an old-school newspaper column, with multiple topics. The best papers had a featured columnist with space on the front page of the local section usually. This is the good columnist, the one people talked about at the water cooler at work, “Did you read so and so….”
That’s one level of what I am going for.
In my introductory post I said I wanted to “challenge and be challenged, inform and entertain.” That is still very much true.
I think of a reader as a consumer. I get a picture of you in front of a grocery store shelf. So many choices.
So many choices for you likewise as a consumer of entertainment. I keep these posts between 600 and 700 words. So it doesn’t take long to read.
But if it takes five minutes, I greatly appreciate that time and try as hard as I can to make it worthwhile for you.
In the old virus-free world, my wife and I had this conversation multiple times. She would say “Do you want to go see a movie?” I would ask, “What’s playing?”
“I don’t know,” she would say, sometimes exasperated, because to her the outing, the event, was as important as which movie we saw.
But I invariably would say to her “If I don’t know what’s playing, how do I know if I want to go? I’m trading two hours of my life for this movie, blah, blah, blah.”
So whatever few minutes of your life that you use to read Page 7 I greatly appreciate and will never take for granted.
If this blog lasts another year, or even until mid-April next year, it will look different. I already have some ideas for changes to the site. I was not able to get them ready for the one-year anniversary.
If you have suggestions for improvements, please let me know. I am listening and again, I thank you.
I will leave you with one more July 20 anniversary, one that I omitted from the Friday post. On that day in 1976 the Viking 1 became the first craft to successfully land on Mars.
That one comes free of charge kids! It’s just my way of providing an out-of-this-world experience for you, the reader, my miracle.
Page 7 
Well, you make a good point with your movie question. You could get there and discover that none of the options appeal to you. I read these posts because you wrote them. You are someone I care about and I am interested in what you have to say. If someone I never heard of wrote them, I’d likely not take the time to find out what was written. If I were to adamantly disagree with you all the time, I’d likely grow tired of reading what you post. As it turns out, I read because it is you and because I find what you say to be interesting. You often tell me things I didn’t know or give me points to ponder. Thank you for doing what you do.
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