SUSAN BOYLE

I am so completely off the grid with so many things, it is almost like I live in the deepest, darkest section of the Amazon.

With Internet access somehow.

I have barely discovered YouTube. I am not in the least bit worried about H1N1 although I live literally three miles from Mexico. And I had no idea who Susan Boyle was/is.

Now I do.

I did follow one season of "America's Got Talent" when I was at my oldest daughter's with my son-in-law - shows like that are absolutely no fun to watch unless you are with someone.

And I admit I had hear something about the 'amazing' singer on the British version of "America's Got Talent"... or is the American show a version of "Britain's Got Talent"...

However, I had never watched it.

Tonight, in our local newspaper, there was a column by a Frena Gray-Davidson talking about a woman who had taken care of both her aging parents.

The author puts it so movingly; "So of course (as the youngest) it was right that she should be the one taking care of the parents... She looked after both her (parents) while slowly her own chances at life drained away.

"The rest of the family, meanwhile, had gone on living. She, however, went on living a small limited life... in that subsidized housing in which she's been raised. Well, her and a cat.

"She was lonely and purposeless. No husband and children in her life and now it was too late."

I began to cry.

Now, admittedly, it doesn't take much to make me cry sometimes.

I cry at television commercials. I used to cry the entire drive home from work every evening (before I began taking anti-depressants). I cry in almost every Disney film every made.

But as someone who has taken care of both her parents, one for the last eight years of her life, and my dad for the last three of his...

Thankfully, I was able to have a family. But especially that part about living in low-income housing alone with a cat...

Then I watched the YouTube of Susan Boyle's first appearance.

And that made me cry even more.

Not because of her incredible, beautiful voice. Which is beyond remarkable.

But I cried because the initial dismayed looks of the judges, the not-quite-but-almost disgusted stares from the audience - this middle-aged, stout little woman, dressed very conservatively and perched a little uncomfortably on her high heels.

Before she began to sing.

How can we be so shallow?

Continually?