Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

“Enough is as good as a feast.” Sir Thomas Mallory in “Le Morte d’Arthur”

Welp, here we are on the last day of the Thanksgiving weekend, my favorite holiday of the year, careening toward Christmas, the polar opposite of holidays. Giving and receiving; wanting and needing. The season that epitomizes the mantra “the only thing better than enough is more.” More lights, a bigger tree, another dinglehopper for your collection. More that seems to beget, well, more. I sit here chuckling over my keyboard as I prepare to extol the opposite of more.

I’ve just spent more than an hour scrolling myself deeper and deeper into the rabbit’s hole of “Best Gifts for…” shopping lists.

Still, I think it bears stating that “enough”, at least here in the Western World, is a meaningful concept for contemplation in this, our most covetous of seasons. Let me stipulate at the outset that “enough” does not apply to everyone in the U.S. (or in the countries of the couple of you reading my drivel x-U.S.), but if you are reading my stuff it most likely applies to you. We could do worse than to return to the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence in which the forefathers of our nation declared the “inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The needs of a free people are encompassed in the first two of those, liberty and life. To be free of the tyranny of forced servitude. Access to food, shelter, clothing, and in our modern world access to some (albeit difficult to define) baseline level of healthcare. These I think we can reasonably agree are “needs”.

It is in the “pursuit of happiness” that we come acropper, both for ourselves and on behalf of others. We could call this column “wants”, those things that we desire, sometimes painfully so, that do not rise to the level of need. If we examine this through the lens of the food need, I believe that we can agree as an example that we need to consume protein. By and large the source of that protein is not a significant factor; we simply need protein to survive. The beef in a standard McDonald’s double cheeseburger is nutritionally no different from that to be found in Beef Bourguignon at your local French Bistro. We need protein; no one needs to have it come packaged by a Michelin-starred chef. Similar thought exercises exist for clothing and shelter. While considerably more complex, and beyond the scope of today’s “musings…”, the same applies to healthcare.

Which brings me back to “enough”. When you have enough, when your needs have been effectively covered, and a significant number of your wants likely handled as well, it becomes easy to see the brilliance of Mallory’s allegory. I imagine awakening to each morning, rising from my bed and beginning the new day as full as I was when I somehow managed to lift myself out of my chair after the Thanksgiving feast. I move into my day, and when I’m on my game I do a little bit of level setting on the want/need continuum. I admit that I can covet as well as the next guy, and that this is sometimes harder than other, but here’s what I learned once upon a time that helps:

Want what you have.

Really, I’m just everyone else, especially at this time of year. 60+ years of Christmas conditioning, both on the giving and receiving ends of the season. For example, I’ve been completely sure, totally and utterly convinced, that Beth and I need new phones and new laptops. Dead certain. Need. And so in preparation for those purchases, in order to “survive” until I ordered the new additions for my already Apple-cluttered universe, we updated all of the software and operating systems on our existing iPhones and MacBooks. Lo and behold, we were already in possession of “new” stuff. Sharper screens, faster processing, and battery storage all miraculously and dramatically better. Maybe not new stuff better, but way more than either one of us needs at this time.

Which leaves me quite content wanting what I have, and therefore on to the last of my three core beliefs about enough. This one a true core belief in general. One that has stood me well over the decades that have passed since I first found it and adopted it as my own from “The Tao Te Ching” and Lao Tse: the man who knows when enough is enough will always have enough. Think about it for a minute. You’ve figured out how much is enough. Every minute of every day is like having a seat at the banquet table. Each breath as filled with enough as Mallory’s feast. Sure, for all the work that you do wanting what you have, you can still have room for a bit of “want”. Kinda like an two scoops of ice cream or maybe a slice of apple AND pumpkin pie after the feast.

It’s OK. You know you don’t need it. You know you have enough.

Giving yourself the gift of enough, of knowing that you have enough, is perhaps the loveliest gift you can give not only to yourself but to those you love and who love you. Enough leaves you room for joy. Joy for you and for others. Enough gives you space to be grateful. Enough for you allows you so see first whether those you love have enough, and if they do it allows you to think of what they may want more than what you may want. You’re covered. You’re good. Enough is what let’s me pivot from the joy of family and friendship that I love so much about Thanksgiving to the joy that comes from the giving of the next holiday. Indeed, that particular joy may be the one thing outside of love that is the exception to all of what I think of when I think of “enough”. Thinking about that is why I’m still bathing the the glow of Thanksgiving on Sunday.

That, and the complete certainty that I have had enough pie.

I’ll see you next week…

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Has been forever. Food, family, and football. Each family had its own, unique take on the traditions of the day. Some had been passed down for generations, while others were seemingly created on the spot to mark generational change. Still, the constant was family. My beloved crowded tables in every house, everywhere. For decades change simply meant more loved ones around the table. All of the old traditions and rituals grew and embraced the newcomers, making room for whatever wonders they would add to the majesty of Thanksgiving.

It was so easy to think that it would last just like this forever.

And then, one day, you put down your glass and look up over the last of the pies made just like they’ve been made since forever, and you see it. An empty seat at your crowded table. When did THAT happen? How did that happen? Where did they go? It’s jarring, isn’t it? There are all kinds of things that leave a chair empty at Thanksgiving. Some of them are common, expected. Grandparents depart almost on schedule, usually just about the same time that you start to collect young in-laws. Sometimes this change is more like musical chairs than emptying chairs. For sure you miss the super-elders, even if you didn’t really prepare for missing them. The last one always seems the hardest, though; every White family table will see the empty chair left behind when my Mom passed in June.

It’s the ones we don’t really expect, the ones we didn’t really see coming that you just can’t not see. Family members misplaced or lost with or without warning, seats unexpectedly emptied. These you see, and depending on the why you might see them not just that first time but for something that feels like it might be forever. If you are very lucky your table continues to welcome newcomers, continues to grow. A child is born. A nephew or a niece have a new special +1 who comes along, choosing to join you at your special table. If you are very lucky this part of the table’s story continues for a very long time.

Still, for many of us, there is an empty seat across the table that we see each time we put down our glass.

What to do, then, at this time of joy? Of family and friends and the warmth of gratitude for both? How do we leave room for the love we have for whoever it was who sat in that seat for so long, who we miss so much, without letting our love or our loss dim the glow coming from all of the other seats that are still filled with love? Like pretty much anyone my age I now have my share of empty seats around my crowded table, at least of couple of which I still see. How do we feel all of the joy and as little sorrow as possible? I’ve been accused on occasion of being a bit, oh, preachy I guess, so rather than offering any suggestions why don’t I just tell you what I’m doing this year.

It’s all too easy to say don’t think about the empty seats, or the people I wish were still sitting in them, but to be honest I really WANT to think about them, and I do really wish that they were here. I miss them, and there is an emptiness that I feel inside that is just as real as the emptiness of their seats. And so I give myself permission to feel that, all alone while I take my morning shower. I think of them, think of how much I love or loved them, and allow myself to be sad that they are not here. All alone except for the memories I allow myself to grieve. Sometimes I cry, the sobs that wrack my body drowned out by the sound of the shower as I let the water wash away the tears.

And when I’m done, when I’m all cried out, all of my sorrow and all of my hurt washed away, I emerge ready for the love that awaits me at my still crowded table. I leave behind whatever sadness I felt and start my day being truly grateful that once upon a time those seats were filled. That the people who filled those seats meant something to me. Mean something to me. And I walk toward my table deeply thankful for each of them. That they had once upon a time filled one of the seats around my crowded table, and that we were happy together. I silently thank each one of them as I step into the embrace that Thanksgiving has brought once again.

May you feel the love that once filled any empty seats that might be there today. May your table be overflowing with love from each of the seats that that are full of those who’ve come to share your crowded table. May you be bathed in this love today, and every day.

And may you have sweet, sticky, peanut butter-filled dates covered in sugar!

I am grateful for each and every one of you who have ever spent a moment with me, here, in my Restless Mind. I’ll see you on Sunday…

1 Gulp. As in Big Gulp, the semi-famous brain freezing concoction sold at 7-Elevens nationwide. Did you know that they sold 153 million Big Gulps in 2023?

Not sure what to think about that, honestly.

2 Battitori. Name for the people in Italy who traipse through fields of Juniper beating the bushes with sticks to knock loose the berries used to flavor Gin.

Don’t know how you feel about this, but for Martini lovers world wide Battitori might as well be Italian for Hero.

3 Yiddish. Schlemiel: a klutz who trips and falls into a shrub, scaring a bird.

Schlimazel: the person the scared bird shits on.

Is there another language that does this, describes things like this in such a picture perfect way? Long live Yiddish.

4 Sequel. There is talk about a fourth season of Ted Lasso. Maybe even a movie. I’m more than a bit conflicted by this news. I openly admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Ted Lasso. All of it. In fact, I plan to make the Season 2 Christmas episode a part of my Holiday Season viewing rotation, tucked in there with Charlie Brown and Rudolph. Ted Lasso was a phenomenon. No one I’ve ever talked with was done with Ted when he left AFC Richmond to return to Kansas. Nick Mohammed, the actor who plays coach Nathan Shelley, is as pained as the rest of us: “I feel there are so many stories left to tell.”

Perhaps.

There were so many lovely moments over the 3 seasons of Ted Lasso. None was lovelier than the ending, though. After so very many beloved shows that ended with a fizzle, story lines dangling, adoring audiences left hanging as favorite characters were still adrift, the writers of Ted Lasso gifted us with closure. Almost across the board closure. And happiness, or at least happiness where happiness made sense. Where it belonged. Like the gift the show had been for all three seasons, all wrapped up and left for us with a bow.

Sequels and encores have historically been fraught. Some things are one-offs, especially when they are really, really good. For every Godfather 2 there’s been another lackluster Rocky 4 or Rocky 11. Spin-offs are problematic, too. I suppose Creed was a pretty good Rocky offspring as they go, but come on, does anyone think we needed more than one? Some shows simply shouldn’t be extended or have a reboot. Heck, some we all probably loved hung around a bit longer than they should have, no? I mean, can anybody say that Grey’s Anatomy has been as good since Meredith lost Christina to Sandra Oh’s ennui? Graceful exits (see what I did there?) and logical conclusions burnish not only the critical acclaim of these shows but also keep bright their shine in our memories. Could you ever imagine a new season, heck even a single episode of M*A*SH after watching Hawkeye fly over B.J. Honeycutt astride his motorcycle? j

Admit it, even your memory of “Goodbye” from the air above the 4077th is blurred by the tears that streamed down your cheeks.

Ted Lasso was as nearly perfect as a TV show could have been. As much as I miss it, I’ll miss it so much more if extending its run dulls the glow we all felt, that we all see when we look back over those three precious seasons. When we can still see that handmade sign over the door. And that one, perfect, ending.

We, too, Believe.

Fare thee well, Ted.

I’ll see you in a few days on Thanksgiving…

“I’m in the twilight of my beauty. In a decade I’m going to need a lot of proof.” –Sarah Nicole Prickett

“I’m taking notes, Dr. White. Honest. I’m not just texting.” –Random Sales Rep

The question arises with some frequency: where do I find the topics on which I muse? In truth, most of the time “musings” arises from something that is either on my mind or in front of me just before I sit down to type. Oh sure, I occasionally have the foresight to jot down an idea or thought during the week, but as often as not I misplace a note as reliably as I misplace the memory of a really good idea.

If memory only did serve.

Last night was spent mostly in the company of a friend, The Dude, with whom I also do business. Sitting across from one another in a quite lovely restaurant we did just enough business to count, but mostly we just talked about our lives. I remember saying a couple of things that made me go:”Oh, that’ll make a great topic for ‘Musings'”; my friend made a point of identifying a couple for me. There’s this sense, this feeling, a kind of dim light in the mist of my morning mind that alerts me to the apparently fleeting existence of ideas I’m sure would have been brilliant once I’d committed them to electrons here, were they to have survived the night.

Alas, they did not.

I’m told that this need not be the case. Even as I hurtle through middle age, careening between the crevasses that keep cropping up in what was once solid (memory, muscle, et al), I’m told that I can remember everything if I want! Ms. Prickett would counsel judicious (one would hope) use of the “selfie”, the ubiquitous cellphone portrait or landscape that forever marks a visual memory. From there it would find it’s way to any number of memories. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, wherever. Evidence freely shared that, alas, the twilight of my beauty has long since passed. If, that is, the sun ever shined there at all.

Random Sales Rep would show me his Evernote app, or some other portal to a virtual urn that I could fill with ideas that heretofore required either a more effective neural network or a more easily located notepad to ensure their survival. Once there I need only curate my little corner of the cloud. Just think of what Sunday musings could be if I could always remember everything.

Hmmm. About that.

You see, what I DO remember of last night is how I felt. How often and how easily both The Dude and I smiled. The mist that is so effectively hiding the more granular memories is actually emitting a rather warm glow. It’s much like the memories evoked as Mrs. bingo and I have unearthed the Kodachromes of our personal antiquity. They’ve faded, both the photos on paper and the finer details of that time the photo has frozen, but they, too, seem to evoke a glow within that is warmer for their lack of detail.

I think this is better. At least for me. What I might gain from the “selfie” or the endless shelf space of the cloud I fear I might lose in the feeling. You see, for all of the cracks that have appeared over time in my memory, it seems that I have retained a rather amazing capacity to remember feelings. Indeed, it almost seems as if my ability to recall emotion is enhanced by relying solely on what memory may lie only between my ears. What I remember of last night, without the aid of Evernote or Instagram, is that The Dude and I were really quite happy.

Give it a try.

I think about friendship a lot. Over the past couple of months I’ve experienced a huge slice of what we could think of as the contents of a desktop folder marked “friendship”. Good friends close by. Close friends a goodly distance away. Old friendships rekindled and newer ones revisited. And both, not, as well. Friends lost along the way glimpsed ever so slightly, reminding me that they, too, were once in at least one of my many circles of friendship. Perhaps the only classic friendship experience I’ve not had recently is the tragedy of losing a friend for whatever reason and by whatever route.

Big sigh of relief about that.

Beth and I are fairly well known as people who never consciously leave a friend or a friendship behind. It always makes us feel good when someone mentions that about us. As an aside, it’s always nice when folks you like think about you, or the version of you, that you like best, the same way that you do. Autumn is travel season for me. It seems as though we always find a reason to go somewhere or do something fun around this time. This year brought an epic family wedding in Maine; we are quite good friends with my siblings and their spouses. We would hang out with them all the time if we lived in the same area. It’s also the busiest time on my professional calendar. My biggest annual meeting was in Chicago this year. A couple dozen of my professional friends would be my very closest friends if only we lived closer to one another.

Unlike most times when I sit down to muse, especially if I’ve settle on a topic, I’m kinda all over the map on this one today. There’s so much to the topic, you know? Do I go back to the well on friendship levels? How important it is to have close friends close by as you get older, especially if you are a male? How about the important logistical details of a friendship and the mechanics of keeping it alive? All deeply important sub-topics for me, ones that I really enjoy exploring. I think I’ll fall back on my time-tested “Sunday musings…” strategy and ride the thought train that pulled into the station–my dining room table, that is–along with the weekend newspapers, courtesy of the columnist Rich Cohen:

How do you make a friend in the first place? How do you make a BEST friend?

Cohen’s article is titled “Luck of the Draw”. Sometimes you get born lucky. My folks presented me with a best friend when my brother Randy arrived, eventually to become my roommate for some 20 or so years. Cohen is thinking outside the family home as he compares and contrasts his experience as a freshman at Tulane with that of his son. Cohen senior had what anyone older than 40 would recognize as move in day as a college freshman: you discover who your freshman roommate is when the two of you walk into your room for the first time. “Hi, I’m Rich.” Contrast this with his son Nate who used social media to “curate” the process of “discovering” that freshman roommate: “Hey, I’m @Nate and I see you’re going to Faber, too.”

Cohen the Dad ended up with a close friend he seemingly found inconceivable in retrospect, so different were they in so many ways, while Cohen the son has chosen, and been chosen by, a carefully vetted doppelgänger. Rich had experiences with his roommate and the roommate’s buddies that he, Cohen, found unimaginable in retrospect. Will Nate’s experience be similar?

I guess lesson number one in Making a Friend 101 might be something along the line of “take a chance”. If you are in the middle of an experience that we could think of as uncurated, take a chance on the person who says “hi” back. Beth and I started a conversation with the couple who set up their beach chairs next to us on the first full day of our honeymoon, launching us on an epic week at “Camp for big Kids” in Jamaica. We are close friends with Dave and Suzi to this day. This winter we pulled off a pretty spontaneous weekend together on a beach far south of either of our homes. Our only regret is that none of us remember the rugby songs we sang in the swim up pool bar in Jamaica.

Outside of my family my very best friends arrived in similar, unplanned circumstances. Rob was introduced to me 2 weeks before we headed off to preseason football camp. Sadly, we weren’t roommates. Heck, we weren’t even in the same part of campus, let alone the same dorm. In a similar vein, Bill and Nancy are the couple version of our best friends. We have that wonderful friendship where husbands and wives like both husbands and wives. Beth and I met Bill and Nancy in graduate school, and as is the pattern in our particular world we went our separate ways for post-grad positions. It was the luck of the draw that landed us both in the same city some 30 years ago, a totally unplanned opportunity dropped in our laps and just sitting there waiting for us to take the reigns.

And there lies the second secret to making a friend: when a new friendship shows up, like a perfect horse all tacked up and ready to go, for goodness sake hop in the saddle! Take that friendship out for a ride. See where it takes you. Where you’d like to take it. Not every friendship can, or should, become a best friend or even a close friend, but who among us doesn’t have room for a new good friend or two. Or three. Some friendships are pretty easy, at least in the beginning. Kinda like a well-trained horse that doesn’t need a whole lot of riding, guidance, to give you a nice ride when you meet. But the best rides, like the best friendships, come from the effort you make to learn what kind of friend you can be. Where is the commonality, those areas where everything is in sync? What do you need to work on to keep the friendship growing?

I guess that’s it then. Sometimes I just need to sit down and start writing and what I was really thinking about just sort of finds its way onto the page. Friendship is equal parts serendipity and recognition that, you know, you’ve got a chance. Taking that chance, risking the possibility that you simply met an acquaintance but taking a chance and seeing if you’d both like to ride along in the same direction for a bit. Doing the stuff it takes to learn about your new friend and letting them learn about you. After that, who knows?

It’s been a busy Fall, like usual. I’ve spent time with friends older and newer, at home and away, and it’s been simply wonderful. What’s in store for me and my friends? For me and for Beth and the friends we have together? We are young yet. Might we be fortunate enough to expand our circles of friends? Heck if I know. We never let go of a friendship. Never leave a friend behind. Still, why not “take a chance”? You know, the luck of the draw. Perhaps a new friend.

You can never have too many friends.

I’ll see you next week…

1. Ideopolise. Post-industrial city wherein lives a populace driven only by ideas and feelings. Postulated as the home of cultural “elites” by Ruy Teixeira.

Should be a word.

2. Cultural Boutique. Safe space in afore-mentioned city. Also Teixeira.

Seems redundant.

3. Interregnum. A period of pause between two periods or eras.

No reason, just a super cool word.

4. Proximity. To greatness that is. What must it be like to spend your life in the presence or proximity of true greatness? I’ve long publicly held that I am not in possession of the genius gene. Rather I seem to have a rather dominant expression of the “Salieri” gene, that certain ability to both identify and promote the genius of another. Unlike the real Salieri I also inherited the gene that prompts me to protect any of those geniuses with whom I may come in contact (Salieri famously was said to have destroyed Mozart the man while promoting, and profiting from, his genius).

To be in the presence of the giants in any field is a privilege. In my day job I have reached a stage (I’m old enough) and have acquired enough status (a few people know who I am) where I occasionally share a stage with the giants upon whose shoulders we all ride. Just today I found myself sitting next to Marguerite McDonald, one of the pioneers in the tiny slice of eye care where I may have made my mark, and staring down at Dick Lindstrom in the audience, sitting in the front row. Not gonna lie, it was hard not to be a little bit starstruck up there.

Which makes me wonder what it must be like to spend your entire career recording the exploits and the thoughts on the same of some of the best “whatever” in the world. More than that, what if in so doing you become one of them, so good at how you let the rest of us into the world of whoevers, athletes or musicians, artists or scientists who are simply the best at what they do. Sometimes the best ever. Hemingway taught us about soldiers and war in his early works. Jimmy Chin and Jon Krakauer have likewise opened the eyes of flatlanders everywhere to what it’s like to stand on the top of the world. There’s really no one quite like that in the world of my day job recording the highlights of the Marguerite McDonald’s and Dick Lindstroms of my work world.

Pity, that.

Sportswriters are classic examples of individuals who spend their days in the presence of varying degrees of excellence. Of genius. Most give us a fair rendering of the facts, sometimes leavened by insight, but an occasional writer stands out among the others through their own sheer excellence. Grantland Rice, Red Smith, and Jim Anderson form a kind of Mt. Rushmore of pioneers. Perhaps Dan Deford and Bob Ryan belong there as well. If you follow athletics at all you have favorites. At some time, though, these men and women either pass from this life or simply pass from writing. My point, then, is a simple one: those who spend their working lives in the presence of other types of genius who are, themselves, the very best at putting together the words that let us, those who are at best a Salieri, see into the world of the best athletes, and should themselves be treasured. Recognized and enjoyed while they ply their gifts on our behalf. Their words, like “A Farewell to Arms”, will live on, but there is something special about reading those words when they are freshly off the pen or the keyboard of the living scribe.

Do yourself a favor. Pick up or surf to Sports Illustrated and read Tim Layden’s piece on Tommie Smith and John Carlos. It’s a story more than 50 years in the making that in the hands of Layden feels as fresh as last week’s news. Yet like so many of Tim’s pieces you know that it will feel just as important 5, or 10, or 50 years hence. Read it and be in the presence of greatness.

I’ll see you next week…

No wonder Sunday’s musings sounded so familiar! Looks like I was thinking the same thoughts 6 years ago, just, you know, thinking them better. Here you go…

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” –George Elliot (HT to my friend Bruce K.)

We in the U.S. have been bombarded of late with missives that declare that we are living in “historic times”, that we have a “historic opportunity” to participate in an election that will “determine our fate as a country in historic ways.” But is that really so? Are we truly at an altogether unique inflection point, one so different from all that have come before that our fate, our daily experiences to come will be affected in ways that we cannot miss or ignore? Or is this particular upcoming election simply the next in an unbroken series of political or governing evolutionary steps that has been unbroken since the end of the Civil War? Is the excitement and the drama simply an extension of the “Techquake” and its always on firehose of information?

Seriously now, if you are one who is on your soapbox (facing in either direction), are you really telling us that Election Day is going to change our nation to a greater degree than the one that brought us 4 years of LBJ and the Great Society?

As a people the citizens of the developed world have been swept along in the great rivers of effluent poured forth from that firehose of information that was spawned by the internet. Have we forgotten the accuracy and truthfulness of Elliot’s words? If so is it because we simply cannot get even a single pupil above the torrent of information to see what he saw? Or is it more that we have lost the ability to paddle even the tiny amount necessary to do so? No matter, the result is the same.

Literary fiction is taught as the study of quiet acts of desperation and the fall-out that follows. Life, on the other hand, is made up of quiet acts made out of sight of nearly everyone. Anonymous acts carried out with neither malice nor benevolence. These are what constitute the reality of life. It seems to me that at least a (very loud) portion of our people have lost the appreciation of this reality. For them each act is either an affront or a tiny step toward canonization. I do not believe they are correct. Elliot is only wrong in that he underestimates his object; that things are not so ill with you and me, is not half but mostly owing to those who lived that faithful life.

To what, then, is this anonymous majority faithful? This is quite simple, and because this is so it is all the more painful that it must be pointed out: they are faithful to one another. They live lives that are faithful to the belief that it is another person with whom they are living, not an opinion or a belief. This anonymous mass lives lives that are intertwined with other people, not other opinions. When they look to their left or to their right what they see is not a position or a platform, but a person. It is this, the acknowledgement that we are surrounded first by other people, that leads to salvation in this life.

You are surrounded by people who are faithfully living quiet lives, anonymous to all but a handful of others, whose lives will be remembered by even fewer, if at all. Unbeknownst to one another they likely crossed paths with someone with whom they would find little common ground in belief, someone who is close to you, about whom you care very much. Despite this lack of commonality the crossing was uneventful. It was peaceful. On balance it was marked by quiet goodwill, if it was marked at all. It was a moment that will have passed directly into an unvisited “tomb” in the memory of each of these individuals.

And yet it was that quiet faithfulness that behind whatever disagreement might exist between the two there lived much more than another opinion or belief. There lived another person. Another person living a life largely unnoticed, hopefully a quiet one with less desperation than more, on their way to an end noticed by few and mourned by fewer still. Lives that were lived in the faith that there exists much, much more good in others than not.

A faith that we, the living, must endeavor to keep.

I’ll see you next week (which will surely arrive, regardless)…

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” John F. Kennedy

That seems such a long, long time ago, doesn’t it? So long ago both literally and figuratively that I can’t remember the last time I saw that clip played anywhere. Imagine, in our world of ever-available, ever-present video of, well, everything, a signature piece of what we might consider Peak American seems to have vanished. I can neither remember, nor recall reading about a time in our history when the people who propose to lead us have appeared so disconnected from such large swaths of Americans. No matter how wealthy, how “well-bred” or bootstrapped, there always seemed to be a thread that connected our leaders to even those with whom they had a fundamental, philosophical disagreement.

For want of anything better why don’t we call that thread “love of country.”

Now to be sure there have been countless inexplicable travesties carried out under the “love of country” banner. Let’s just stipulate that up front. We can all agree that stuff like the Viet Nam war was more than a bit of a stretch on the “for love of country” foundation. I’m reasonably sure that you have at least a couple of other examples that leap to mind. These, however, represent a failure of leadership rather than a failure of citizenship or residency; I hope to convince you that what we are experiencing now is the same.

Those who choose to bleat end-of-times themes, and who insist on an “edge of the apocalypse” due to “unique and unprecedented” events over the last 2 or 5 or 15 years are comically victims of perhaps the oldest societal commentary I can think of: those who choose to ignore or forget history are doomed to repeat it. I’ve been listening to, and watching archival video of such tumultuous times in America’s history as the ’60’s anti-war protests, rioting associated with racial strife, also in the ’60’s, and the devastation wrought by the drought-driven climate disaster that tragically coincided with the Great Depression. Those, my friends, were some dark times.

There does appear to be one possible difference between those days and the last 20 years or so, on the national level that is. We have been in an era where broadly defined opposing groups have been progressively more aggressive in the act of “othering” their opponents. I, and other writers of more note, have defined “othering” as the act of characterizing an opposing group as so far removed from a “right” manner of acting, or so far removed from possessing or living by a “right” code or morality that its members become viewed as something other than worthy of acceptance as even a member of the species.

Think about this for a moment. Where once people living within the borders of the United States could agree on one simple belief, that each was a part of a group we might call Americans, we now have rhetoric bandied about by our “leaders” on all sides of pretty much any issue that essentially says that to disagree is to declare that one is somehow no longer possessing of anything we might recognize as equality. People with a different opinion are bad, evil, ignorant or unintelligent. This is certainly not a truly new phenomenon; one need only watch tape of Klan meetings in the early and middle of the last century to know that. What is striking is the pervasiveness of it in public discourse.

Again, I feel that this is first and foremost a failure of leadership. We hear this from those at the top of every societal pyramid.

Have you ever watched one of those video studies that begin when a subject in the study is asked to describe some aspect of their worldview for the camera. Individuals with starkly opposed views are then asked to discuss those views with one another. Holders of views on both sides of the issue are asked before meeting folks on the other side what they think of them. While not quite “othering” it is not surprising that position holders on each side hold rather dim views of folks on the other side of the divide. In some cases strikingly negative views.

You know what happens next of course, even if you’ve never watched these exercises: when brought together one-on-one the twosomes manage to find common ground. Indeed, they actually seek it very early in their conversation, even after discovering that their table mate completely disagrees with them on whatever hot button issue was chosen by those who ran the study. Some even move a bit toward a middle ground, if not toward the other side of the issue, but even those who don’t budge even a little bit quite obviously have a clear change in how they view someone who disagrees with them. It’s hard to decide if this transformation is the most striking outcome, or if it is the fact that these transformations in how issue opponents view one another occur in pretty much every encounter.

They are having a discussion with a person, not an issue. It’s impossible to “other” a person sitting across the table from you.

And so we return to “love of country”. A country can be an idea, of course, but I choose to think of a country, at least the one in which I live, as simply another way to describe a people. In this case Americans. JFK asking what you can do for your country has always sounded to me like what you can do for your countrymen. All of those folks we loosely call Americans, whether they live around the corner, down the block, or on the other side of the Continental Divide. Americans who, hot button issues notwithstanding, have more in common with a super majority of every other American than we do with, say, Italians or Australians. Most of the things most immediately important to us are closer to neighborhood issues than grand global issues. For whatever it’s worth I think this is also true in odd numbered years where most of our ads are for bad nutrition and possibly good medications (with impossibly scary side effects), rather than folks approving an ad telling us that other folks are bad, or evil, or simpletons.

Since the Civil war we’ve somehow made it through each and every period of unrest and upheaval, our nation intact, our institutions standing. We have, as a people, lived quiet lives largely undiscovered by any but our families, our friends and neighbors, and those who pass quietly by as they do the same. The “influencer economy” notwithstanding, almost none of us gets our “15 minutes of fame”. We are all closer to anonymous than any kind of familiar, let alone famous.

What can we do for our country today, next Wednesday and each day after that? We could do much worse than simply seeing each of those other mostly anonymous travelers as much more the same as we are than not. Seeing them not as “other” but as simply the friendly acquaintance we’ve not yet met, only a block away from a conversation over a cup of coffee or a cocktail about all of the things we share, despite whatever there is that we don’t. Seeing each other as a person and not an opinion.

True leaders never ask any of their followers to do something they cannot do. I always felt that JFK had faith in the people he led that they would, indeed, seek the best for not only their country but also for all Americans with whom they shared it. Heaven knows that I am not JFK, but I have the same faith in all of us, that we, too, will rise together next week, and next month, and for all of the nexts that follow. We will see each other not as a position but as a person.

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” –George Elliot (HT to my friend Bruce K.)

For our country. For each other. For ourselves.

Come what may we will all be here next week. I’ll see you then…

How good is that phrase, eh? It comes to us courtesy of “Crankshaft”, the character from the comics. There are all kinds of ways to draw that particular curve. Crankshaft, a bus driver who had a cup of coffee as a minor league pitcher, limits himself to very rare occasions of reminiscing. He wanted more in those days, and he misses them terribly. Yet, in his tortured wisdom, he realizes that he can’t go back, and he can never change either what came before or what came after.

So he visits that time, opens a window to that little room tucked away in his attic rarely and for the briefest of moments, lest his yearning increase.

Times like those, times like Crankshaft’s stint as a pitcher for the Toledo Mudhens, are the classic double-edged sword. When distressed a quick visit can re-set your compass or fill your tank just enough to get through whatever it is that’s got you down. Spend too much time there, in Toledo for example, and nothing in the here and now might measure up. The yearning can overwhelm the living.

Some places and some times were so special that the yearning can become an irresistible force, driving you back in real time to bring your present day self to Toledo. The yearning curve as a boomerang, if you will. My in-laws gave in to this and re-visited Cap Ferrat in Southern France. They yearned to walk the quaint streets of their young marriage, to eat a breakfast of fresh milk and baguettes left in the box outside their tiny apartment while gazing at the impossibly blue waters of a harbor dotted with tiny sailboats. What they got, of course, was the hustle, bustle and hurley-burley of a modern tourist trap en Francais.

The yearning curve is never a circle.

One can also find themselves somewhere along a yearning curve for something that never actually occurred. A wish for a life that turned out very differently from what one was hoping for, for instance. You had hopes for a particular career, and unlike Crankshaft you never really even got as far as Triple A, let alone made it to the majors. Never even got the first job. You yearn for the life you thought you were going to have.

Or maybe you had a vision for how your family would turn out. Courtship and marriage would lead to a lifelong love affair. Children would arrive, grow and thrive, and then return, at least now and again, to your nest. Perhaps they would have their own children along, your grandchildren in tow. You had a young family and you looked ahead and saw your life as it should be. As yours was, if yours was that lovely. Some find themselves on the yearning curve due to tragedy; the life they yearn for was stolen by the death of a child, for instance. Still others, through no fault of their own, find themselves outside the hearth, all of their love there to be given silently, from afar.

All of them find themselves yearning not for the life they once had but for the one they had every reason to think they would have, now left only to share their love silently, from afar.

A very nice bunch of older college buddies, mostly football teammates, included me and a couple of other “youngsters” in an epic email thread dedicated to college memories. It’s been fun reading it these last 10+ years. When we allow ourselves to “remember” we all ran the 40 in 4.5 seconds or less. Everyone maxed his bench press each time we lifted. Each or us had a full head of long flowing hair, and we always got the girl. A magical place and a magical time, indeed. It can be easy to yearn for a place like that. In another place and another time I looked not back but ahead, and looked at a life that was such a normal expectation that it seemed inconceivable that it wouldn’t turn out more, rather than less, exactly that way. For sure that’s how it was in Beth’s family, and in mine as well. That our reality would instead be that the love we had, that we expected to freely share, would become little more than a never-made memory tucked away in a closet, like Crankshaft, there to be glimpsed rarely and sparely, at our own peril, well…

But those college days, like my in-laws’ Cap Ferrat ca. 1975 and Crankshaft’s cup of coffee with the Mud Hens, are no longer there. They only exist in a picture, or an email thread, or behind a door or a window in the attics of our minds, available for a brief visit when the yearning curve peaks. That life we imagined in which we shared love far and wide, openly and often, never actually occurred. It, too, exists now only in an old picture, a Facebook or Instagram post, a yearning for something that should have happened but somehow didn’t.

Like the yearning curve that brings you ever back to Toledo.

I’ll see you next week…

1 Newspaper. While I am certainly not above whining if my morning newspapers arrive in time for dinner, or Heaven forbid are totally AWOL, I do wish to give a virtual (and most assuredly unheard) huzzah to both of the folks who brought my Sunday tomes this AM. Pouring rain. Each paper double wrapped in plastic.

That there’s just nice peopling.

2 Mugwump. Fence-sitter or fence-sitting. British word. I know we Americans speak English, just like the Brits.

Sometimes they just do it with a bit more style, ya know?

3 Anniversary. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve had a chance to sit down on a Sunday and empty out my internal hard drive by musing. Missed writing about my 39th Wedding Anniversary! Beth and I were on the road for my nieces wedding in Bar Harbor Maine. Lovely place, that. Bar Harbor. Despite the fact that we have a number of places that we each wish to see for the first time, I think Beth and I agree that the coast of Maine was unexpectedly spectacular in all respects.

We plan to find a reason to return, for sure.

39 years married. 42 together. What a ride! I know I have written about this in the past, but we get asked all the time if there is a secret to our marriage. To our love. We have two, neither of which is all that complex, and at least for us, neither of which feels or felt all that difficult over the years. Marriage is not a 50/50 proposition, it’s 100/100; both partners make a primary commitment to the marriage. Never stop courting. Beginning when our firstborn was still a baby we have been on at least one date every week. One night at least, when we are simply two people in love, together, doing the stuff that people do when they are in love. Remember, the honeymoon isn’t over until you say it is!

I do so love you, Dollie.

4 Obituary. James R. Hagerty is the obituary writer/editor for the Wall Street Journal. Once upon a time he wrote a moving opinion piece about the value of writing your own obit. I think he may have included his most recent personal effort writing his own, but my memory may be foggy. No matter. Somewhere I wrote up a draft of my own which is long lost by now, although I did choose the picture I’d like included if I should depart in the nearish future.

Hagerty didn’t give any specific instructions on the picture thing, but the one I’m thinking about really reminds me of what I think I look like at this stage in life.

Writing in this week’s Sunday Times Opinion section Kelly McMasters sorta one-ups Hagerty in her piece: “Why I Write My Obituary Every Year”. It’s a gem of a piece, written around a tight prompt and literally brimming with delicious word nuggets that describe her rationale and her process. “Reflecting on your life isn’t as maudlin as it may seem.” Some of her autobiobituaries were little more than an accounting of the life lived, the most recent iteration simply an update of the previous year’s effort. After particularly unimpressive years she admitted to a bit of embellishment, inventing “facts” that would surely occur if only she lived long enough for them to make it into her last final word. It’s a funny little quirk, that: an aspirational obituary. A forward looking, backward glance.

Ms. McMasters quotes the Times reporter Margalit Fox from the documentary “Obit”: Obituaries have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life. McMasters: “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves. Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.”

I really like this. As easy as it is for me to do most of the writing in which I indulge, I found it terrifically difficult to write the obituaries for my Dad and then my Mom, even though I knew exactly what I wanted them to say. The process was equal parts heartbreaking and gut-wrenching, so heavy was the weight carried while writing those final chapters. Perhaps writing my own might ease the pain that a loved one may feel if they were so chosen, even if my effort is just an outline for how my people wish to remember me rather than the last version of how I remembered myself.

Living is so much more than simply being alive. More than just not dying today. I was totally taken by surprise by Ms. McMasters’ piece today, and I’m not nearly well enough prepared to update my obituary in time for “Sunday musings…”, at least not this week. I don’t know exactly when I will do so, or if I will try to do it every year, but reading this piece was one of those times when I totally and completely got the author’s perspective, and felt like she knew I was here and was gently encouraging me to listen, to think about more than staying alive.

“[The] obituary exercise taught me the practice and value of holding death close, so I could remember to live.”

I’ll see you next week…