U is for Ukraine

I didn’t want to take up blogging. Facebook was traumatic enough for me. When I first started with it, I felt insecure. No. Worse than that. Threatened. I felt like I was giving access to my house, my private safe place, ultimately to me, to people I knew but would never have invited into my home. More than that. And worse. Hundreds of thousands, a world full of people I didn’t even know.

With a little help from my tech savvy daughter I learned enough about Facebook to feel like I have some control over who has access to me.

Then I wrote a book.

And people who knew what they were talking about said I would have to use ‘platforms’ to sell my book. To my horror, they meant Blogging and Twitter and Instagram and goodness knows what other invasive technology. All I wanted to do was write a book.

And have people read the book and enjoy it. To do that a writer has to sell the book.

I used to be a reporter for a small town daily newspaper so the concept of having strangers read what I write felt familiar to me. And I wouldn’t have to talk about me like posting my status on Facebook. I could maintain some sense of privacy.

I could write about writing and reading and other people’s books and movies and current events and . . . . Well you see. And it would feel quite normal that strangers would read my blog. It goes right along with people reading my book. I don’t need to know them either.

So . . . .

I chose Google’s blogspot to blog. Not because I knew what I was doing when I made the choice. I didn’t weigh my options because I didn’t know what options were available. I was using Google as my browser, my default research librarian, my street navigator. You get the picture.

Blogspot displays a curious set of information. (Actually a whole bunch of enigmatic sets of information that I have not yet had the courage to explore.) It’s “Stats.”

Stats includes something identified as Pageviews by Countries. I’m still not sure exactly what constitutes a pageview, but I understand the concept of countries. And one of the countries that began to show up on a somewhat regular basis was the Ukraine.

Of course I can’t tell if the person or persons are Ukrainian who are interested in practicing their English by reading a basically anonymous American’s writings. He, she, or they could be Americans currently in the Ukraine and missing home. They could be terrorist spies redirecting their internet connections through the UK to Germany to Japan to Indonesia and finally through the Ukraine.

But somehow, he or she or they felt like real people to me. I know nothing about the geography of the Ukraine, so it wouldn’t mean anything to know which city they live in. But I do know that the Ukraine is a battle ground where competing governments are putting people in harm’s way. And when those ‘stats’ from the Ukraine stopped showing up I worried.

I worried that they were ill and unable to surf the internet. Or that they were without power and I knew it could be cold there in winter. Or that the war had come to them.

I tried to remind myself that they could be on vacation in some nice warm country with good wine and rich food. Or that their own writing was going so well that they hadn’t time to bother with mine. Or worse scenario for me, that they’d gotten bored with what I was writing.

The good news is that they’re back.

Hello Ukraine. I’m so glad to see you.