Life is a Gift

Life is a gift, enjoy each day

Life is a Gift

Life is a gift enjoy each day,
Find something nice to say;
Find someone troubled by sorrow,
Lighten a burden, brighten tomorrow.

Remember those who have less
Try to be generous and do your best;
Do a kindness now and then
And joy will fill your heart again.

I've got just the thing

What follows is a snippet of dialogue from the movie Chocolat.

The movie opens with a shot of a small French village in Burgundy. It is February, the sky is grey,  and a cold north wind blows leaves down a deserted cobble stone street. All the doors are closed, the windows shuttered.

A stranger, a dark haired woman, and her daughter arrive. Vianne Rocher, is the stranger. She proceeds to set up shop as a chocolatier. A chocolatier is not just a chocolate maker, but an artiste, one who makes chocolate seem a most beautiful piece of art. And Vianne makes the most extraordinary confectionaries. Each chocolat is special, each chocolat has its own qualities, each chocolat has a story.

Her timing could not be worse, for it is the season of lent in this most traditional of French villages. Vianne works hard to open the shop. Meanwhile, a parade of curious town characters come to inspect her delicacies. Each of them have a story to tell.

Vianne and a Cranky Old Woman 
[An old woman enters the shop and inspects Vianne's chocolats]


Vianne Rocher: What do you see?
Armande Voizin: Not a damned thing.

Vianne Rocher: Come on, it's a game. What do you see?

Armande Voizin: I see a cranky old woman too tired to play games.

Vianne Rocher: Oh. I've got just the thing for you.

Questions and Answers

Read it in a book recently - The answer doesn't matter if you don't ask the right question. So true.

Tobie, doing what he loves to do.

I am fed up with political debates where the questions and answers never seem to match. So, the Old Man took the two dogs Sammy and Tobie to the park where the only question that mattered was whether we would see any deer. Sad to say, it was too windy.

"This too shall pass"

"This too shall pass," a proverb that I have heard repeated at various times in my life.

The proverb applies to many things in life, to success as well as travail. Simply understood, it suggests that we bear both success and difficulty with humility and patience. The proverb concerns a great king who is humbled by the simple words. The poet Shelley constructed a poem, Ozymandius, whose theme is about the temporal state of all things. The poem is short and worth repeating:


Ozymandius, by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

 And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Everything has its place and time. And, each of us struggles with challenges in life. These difficulties may seem insurmountable and unbearable, but with time become bearable. "Do you wish to rise," St. Augustine asked. Then, "Begin by descending."

Humility has its place.

Lost in Middle America, Day Two

Lately, I have felt that my life was turning into an endless series of dead ends. Each day I would get up - listen to my son argue about going to school on time; go to work - listen to everyone complain about this or that, it really didn't matter what the argument was about, it was just to complain; then go work out - only to find that my old injury, a bad hip caused by years of running, was not getting any better - I tell anyone now that my leg hurts so bad, that if I was a horse they would shoot me. So it is no surprise that I am beginning to feel and sound like a cranky old man even to myself.

This feeling of a death spiral into a miasma of sameness is a big part of why I took this car trip to Asheville, North Carolina. Sure, there is an Arts and Crafts fair at the end of the trip, located at the Grove Park Inn that provides the raison d'etre for leaving Wichita. But surely there is more to it than mica lamps, copper house numbers, and pottery. There is universal need to get away, to recharge the batteries, to reflect a little, and look at life through a different set of eyes.

Traveling by car provides that means of self-examination. A lot of writers have done it. Famously, in Travels with Charley: In Search of America,  John Steinbeck, with death literally knocking on his door, traveled with his dog Charlie in a motor home looking one last time for America and not liking what he found.

Then there was that great series of reports by Charles Kuralt whose On the Road segments for CBS News Sunday Morning show always struck a heartwarming chord. Kuralt hit the road in a motor home for 15 years before parking pen and home for the last time. Sadly neither Steinbeck nor Kuralt are with us any more, and so it is hard to know where to turn to when one wants to find real stories of real Americans in small towns.

I find that the first thing you discover when you travel is serenity. There sitting in the car with over a thousand miles of road ahead of you, you take a deep breath and count to ten before you exhale. The car wasn't a motor home, but it was a GMC Yukon with a front seat like a barcolounger, and a back that in a pinch was big enough to nap. Seated comfortably in my Yukon, all those petty squabbles pop and disappear like soap bubbles. And the routine of life's boredom is broken - drive where you want, stop when you are tired, get up when you want. This reminds me of Rousseau's famous saying, "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." Travelling breaks those chains and frees the traveller from any responsibilities. Of course Rousseau was speaking of class distinctions and social conventions, but the idea is the same.

Of course life is not perfect on the road. If it was everyone would hop in a cars and hit the road. No the reality of life creeps back in as you travel. John Steinbeck observed that the isolation of travel is the greatest burden to bear. Charles Kerault was lucky enough to get paid for travelling and every Sunday, he put all of his thoughts together in a broadcast to an audience that only wished that it could do for a living what Charles did.

The other great rediscovery that one makes travelling is that life is not an endless highway of beauty. Mixed into the scenic mountains, lakes, towns, and forrests are the blemishes that like real life remind one that you have to take the bad with the good.

This is day two of my trip and I am following my presumably inerrant Garmin dirrection finder. I plugged in the destination Grove Park Inn in Asheville, and off I go across eastern Missouri. The trip across Missouri is roughly 6 hours in a straight line using I-70, but driving the southern route on Missouri Highway 60 is a different story. Muntains and stop lights, twists and turns make for a much longer trip. I keep looking at my Garmin and wonder if all the twists and turns can possibly be right. We have to trust the big computer in the sky don't we? After all didn't Watson the computer just beat Ken Jennings and that othe guy who doesn't like to talk much on Jeopardy. I have alsways loved the comfort of having a map in hand and I still stop at each Welcome Center to get a new state map. But is Garmin a sign that Welcome Centers are a thing of the past. Google and iphones after all, like Watson, possess more information than all of the humans manning the collective Welcome Centers of all 50 states.

The Mississippi River beckons me and Garmin points me on, directing me to follow Route 60. Strangely though, at Charleston Missouri, I find that I am down to a two lane road. Off in the distance though I see the tall iron towers of the bridge that spans the Mississippi, and so I drive on, trusting Garmin, and ignoring all the signs that disaster looms.  These signs include one small reference to a detour that I didn't fully read speeding by at 75 miles an hour. Only after I recognize my error do I recall that the houses on this last few miles to the bridge have all become dilapidated, the gas stations all shuttered and closed, the road less travelled and less cared for. No, we are all blinded by our pursuit of success. We single mindedly drive on and ignore all the warnings that, only later, were so apparent.

Image from Wikipedia.

I will bring this story to a quick end. The bridge on Route 60 crossing the Mississippi from Missouri to Cairo, Illinois was closed and shuttered. Garmin the computer in the sky is not infallible after all. Funny, I was travelling to get away from all those dead ends at home and still I find one. The moral, I guess, is that you deal with life as it comes at you. You can't escape life by traveling, you just see it from a different perspective. If I had Garmin to yell at, or a highway worker to complain to I would about the misdirection or lack of signs. No, the only person I have to complain to is myself. And that gets one nowhere, like the place I am at.

Up to the Mountain

It is the best of all possible worlds and couldn't possibly be better.

Voltaire - Candide

I went up to the mountain
Because you asked me to
Up over the clouds
To where the sky was blue
I could see all around me
Everywhere
I could see all around me
Everywhere

...

Some days I look down
Afraid I will fall
And though the sun shines
I see nothing at all
Then I hear your sweet voice, oh
Oh, come and then go, come and then go
Telling me softly
You love me so

Patty Griffin - Up to the Mountains



The Cranky Old Man asked me what Candide's words have to do with the lyrics from Up to the Mountain.

Very little, if you take them at face value. Voltaire's Candide is a satiric view of  life, which Voltaire sees as a cruel struggle for survival where hope and love count for nothing. Candide travels throughout the world while one misfortune is heaped on another, all the while expressing the notion that God has preordained everything and it is for the best. Patty Griffin's Up to the Mountain is a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.'s last speech. In the speech King compares himself to Moses who led his people out of bondage and to the promised land. From the mountaintop Moses viewed the Promised Land, but he was to die before reaching it. The speech was delivered in Memphis, Tennessee on April 3, 1968. The next day King was assassinated. The lyrics are a reaffirmation of the hope that exists in every soul that God's voice does speak to us, telling us softly that he loves us so.

Cranky thinks to himself that if we have to choose, we choose hope over despair.

Running on empty

For at least a month, or more, I have been running on empty. Sure I get up each morning and follow the routine - work, workout, more work, dinner, sleep. Boy is that boring. I need a break. My spiritual and mental gas tank is empty. I am, at this point, going through the motions, finding that everywhere I turn is a dead end. I am - as an old friend once described it - driving on fumes.

I packed my bags, put my bike in the car, loaded up CD's of John Cheever's short stories and Sue Grafton's A is for Alibi, grabbed Sammy my over agressive German Shephard, and headed out. My destination was the Roaring River State Park in southwest Missouri. There was now real reason for my decision. Someone had mentioned it to me in passing.The tour guide at the Missouri  Visitor's Bureau had said that she and her husband were headed there in two weeks. And, it is close to the Lake of the Ozarks.

What I didn't know was that Roaring River is one of five Missouri trout hatcheries. I am not a trout fisherman, I don't even fish. I don't have the patience. But, there are a lot of avid fishermen and women in Missouri and one fifth of them or more were here at Roaring River to take advantage of the thousands of state spawned trout.

 I am not one to waste a trip. So, Sammy and I waded in the Roaring River amongst the fishermen and women who stood along the shore casting their lines like so many synchronized swimmers. The water is cold and it felt invigorating for my legs after a short run through the Mark Twain National Forrest. Like I say, why waste a trip.


The other reason for getting away, other than the physical beauty of a new location, is the opportunity that it give us to think outside the box. Life has become a routine. And, only by gettign away can we see a little more clearly who and what we are. I am staying this eveninbg at the Oakcrest Cabin and RV Park. Just a mile outside Roaring River park on Highway 112. The couple who own the park like my dog, I have had all sorts of compliments on Sammy and so, I conclude, people from Missouri are polite and friendly. The owners of the park have a small girl who can be no older than six. After asking me about the dog, they ask me about my two children, and then relate that they too have two older children, and the daughter who now keeps them company was a surprise, a pleasant one. I stopped at their park because I saw that their sign said free internet. It also said dish TV and pool, but I didn't have kids with me, just the dog.

The cabin is clean. As promised there is internet and dish TV. There are two double beds, one for Sammy and one for me. There is a kitchen with stove and frig, if I were to stay longer.But, the best thing about the cabin is the fresh air and quiet. Thank God, this is not a Super 8, where they always leave the lights on. No, this simple cabin is a throw back to simpler times, good people, and good living. And, in the process of rediscovering the past, I have refilled my gas tank.