Time flies when you’re having fun. The longer you persevere, the faster it flies. Memory serves me well, when I was in high school nothing was more demeaning than riding to school on the bus. You had to sit near if not with junior high twerps and classmates who shared your own misfortune. In good weather if I had no other option I would leave early and walk. It was just over a mile, straight up the road. Often other students who had cars, they might be charitable and give me a ride. It would not be cool to attract attention or appear to be begging but I was begging, just in a subtle sort of way. There I was walking, they recognized me and they had a vacant seat. If a friend passed you by it could have any number of implications. Maybe they weren’t paying attention, or they had a girl with them, or they were tired of my passive-aggressive hitch-hiking. In any case, I never, ever questioned their bypass. That would be not-cool even more than trying to flag them down. There were times when my girlfriend missed her bus, her mother drove her to school and they would give me a ride. I accepted the ride with mock cool but the unspoken question was always there; why didn’t you ride the bus? That was 1956, 64 years ago and I remember details like it was only a few years ago. My buddy Carl had a mustard yellow, 53 Chevy convertible. He picked up his girlfriend on the way but she lived the other side of school and I hopped out before that. Halfway to school I had to pass another buddy’s house. Eddie had a two tone blue, ’52 Ford. If we spontaneously converged I had a ride but most days he was still getting up when I walked by. Occasionally Norman drove his dad’s car, an old four door Chevy. If it was just Norm and his brother they picked me up. But he was one of 2 or 3 top dogs in our class and I was way down with the middle dogs. If he was with anybody else, they didn’t slow down.
Today is my birthday, August 4. I will get phone calls and cards in the mail but no party this year. Last summer we celebrated 80 years with a long, 5 day weekend on Lake Michigan. My backstory has lots of episodes, from hitching a ride to school to being the reason for a family reunion. At 99, George Burns said, “Age, it’s just a number.” So 81 is just a number too but it’s that and a little more. Life as I’m told, sets us up with lessons. If the lesson goes unlearned, life repackages that lesson into a different set of circumstances and puts it back on your plate. If you never learn the lesson it keeps recycling, over and over, again and again. I’ve learned; my culture is a dichotomy, it allows for amazing success stories and high minded, noble deeds. It also abides with the evils of racism, classism and gender bias. It allows avarice to pass itself off as ambition and thus a virtue. But that is how people work. Seen through the lens of 80 years, we are neither as wonderful nor as wretched as you might believe. I would concur with Epictetus, the Greek philosopher who observed, “There is neither good nor evil but believing makes it so.” Just sayin’: We do in fact make up our own truth and then deem it righteous.
It is my birthday, a day to reflect on myself. If I were the praying type I would pray a thankful prayer. On Christmas night, 1961 I went skydiving. My landing was in deep, crusted snow and I twisted my ankle so badly they put me in a walking cast. My job was on the assembly line at the General Motors plant, I couldn’t work in a cast. The union couldn’t protect my job during the first three months of probation and they let me go, I was unemployed. For that blessing I give thanks. It put my journey on a different trajectory. I give thanks for all of the failures and mishaps that have led me to this particular place in time, here & now. Without those faux pas, who knows how my life would have spun off. I like my backstory the way it reads; don’t want to swap it out for something else, maybe better but I doubt it.
After being thankful, I would beseech the Great Mystery, that force which I can not comprehend. My wandering has been marked with unfathomable experiences, baffling but also very real. To dismiss them out of unbelief would only expose a case of prideful arrogance. I am just a puzzle piece, not a puzzle master. I would implore that inexplicable Mystery for a good night’s sleep and to keep my people safe.
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