I'm too busy to write. Traveling, funerals, family, unfamiliar beds.

Big ideas crossing the plains, but too busy to write.

I'm reading books about "anti-Zionism," but too busy to fit the whole story into 700 words.

I'm the oldest of all my living first cousins on the Catholic French-Canadien side of the family. I met the youngest for the very first time at dad's funeral. I guess he'd spent 20 years on the oceans of the world as an oceanographer. He lives in Milwaukee now, closer. to his mother, my Aunt Nancy. I just knew he had a million stories to tell, but I was too busy to hear them all.

In Iron River, MI, Culley Jane and I had dinner at a really nice Italian place where you could pay over $100 for a bottle of vintage wine. I paid $13 for a heaping plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, a salad and a bread bowl. It was good. The waitress had a thick east European accent. "Where you from?" I asked her. "Ukraine," she said. I had a million questions, but we had to eat and run and she was busy too.

I saw the priest I maybe pissed off last month at mom's funeral when I used the F word to describe the wars. But after dad's funeral mass this week, he came up to me and put his arm around shoulder.

I felt like reciting a few lines from the Confiteor, but couldn't remember the Latin words. Besides, he was busy too.

Deadline for my weekly "Our Story" column is fast approaching. Gotta do my job. How to say it all in 700 words?

Then tomorrow, after a funeral for my oldest nephew, we'll start back towards the High Plains. But right now I'm too busy to think about it.