Who Is That Masked Bear?
Five years and four or so months ago, I started this blog with a prayer. " O God, hasten to my aid !" I had never written a blog, and I had no idea what I was going to say. I only knew that I wanted to write and to say something about the process of writing. I knew also that I wanted to think about prayer and hoped that I might find others who also wanted to think about prayer. I had an inkling at the time that I would be writing about fencing, thus the title of the blog, but I needed a persona other than my professional or private self through which to explore whatever it was that I was going to be exploring, thus my Fencing Bear mask. For the first few months, I kept my proper name out of my posts, although almost immediately I realized that I wanted other people to know that I was keeping a blog, even when things started to get, shall we say, a little embarrassing, especially those posts that I wrote that summer at Nationals. By the middle of the summer, when my fa