ANSWER THE BELL

When your Sunday night melts into sleepy regret, you can address the new day with courage and resolve or you can call in sick. There are a few hunter-gatherer cultures left but for the rest of us, we need a job. Then after years of dedicated industry, we grow weary of it all or the boss realizes that we can be replaced by an inexpensive, young person and you get turned out to pasture. They did that with horses that pulled old-time fire engines. Grass in the summer, grain in the winter and a dry stall, out of the weather; we should have it so good. When the fire alarm went off, old horses would jump up ready to go to the fire. They were old enough, with service enough to be retired but they still felt the need to answer the bell. 

Speaking for myself, I have grass in summer and grain in winter. I have a warm, dry stall and I understand that I’m not the man I used to be. Answering the bell has been redefined. I remember in 1989 when my job was newly created, my official job description was seventeen pages long with over a hundred detailed points. My current job description has plenty of wiggle room and only two points. 

Like the horse, we need purpose. Answering the bell may seem futile but it’s all the horse can do; it's all any of us can do. To be deemed irrelevant; the next step down is to be rendered expendable. The old horse needs a job, even if all it is, is listening for the bell. My job is, on the one hand, to live well; not a measure of material extravagance but of balance and relationships. On the other hand, my job is to ‘Give Back’. There are no ‘Self-made-men’. If you were pulled up by your boot straps, somebody else, lots of somebodies were lifting as well. The fact that you did what you could do doesn’t make you special. You were simply in the right place at the right time and you moved your feet. I feel an inherent need to give back, to be there when I can, when someone needs a lift, or a soft place to fall. If I were to reduce my life experience to a sound bite it would be; ‘What goes around, comes around.’ However old I may grow, I want to have my hands in that, ‘. . . coming back around.’

I go here and there and then I go somewhere else. I don’t call it traveling as that implies some kind of tourist connection. I’m not a good tourist, hate itineraries, not interested in organized tours, don’t want to lounge on the beach or by the pool . So I just go. I meet interesting people, take photographs, tell stories, make music and try to learn something worth remembering. That is my ‘Live Well’ strategy. When I get stuck in one place for too long I tend to internalize, ruminate on things that do not seem to bother anybody else. That’s what this little piece is about. I’ve been in Missouri for too long and I can’t wait to break out.