Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1. Home, alone, accompanied by sleeping dogs. I am letting them lie.

2. Newman. “You have to learn to be yourself.” “Fast Eddie” Falcon, The Color of Money.

Some of us get here pretty quickly. At least learning the core part of yourself. For me it came early, in junior high school. While I was like pretty much everyone else, wanting to fit in, or at least not stand out (like the proverbial nail in the Japanese saying about getting hammered for standing out), I discovered that my normal “fit in” desires had limits. I’ve probably told the story before so I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that the basic framework was up early, and I learned to fill in the spaces over time.

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Purportedly Mark Twain.

This is the harder part of the process, at least in the earlier years of your “education”. How does one determine what “yourself” means without looking outward at others? Maybe trying on a little bit of, I dunno, your grandfather, the local football star or your family doctor? Still, at some point, once you have learned who it is that you believe you are, then it’s time to simply go about the business of being just that.

After that, without trying very hard at all, anyone who matters will come to know the same you that you’ve come to know.

3. Mulligan is a golf term. Essentially a “do-over”. While not to be found anywhere in the rules of golf (and therefore not allowed in competition), one not infrequently comes across the Mulligan in friendly rounds. It is especially common on the first tee, particularly if it was not possible to hit the driving range to warm up. See also: breakfast ball.

Beth and I watched a fun little movie a month or so ago; I might have mentioned it here. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. “About Time” tells the story of a family in which the men can go back in time and essentially get a Mulligan on a moment. It takes some care, of course, because anything that they change will remain changed when they return to the present. The moments when the son learns this is quite striking: he goes back in time to fix a mistake, but goes back prior to the birth of his beloved daughter. When he returns she was never born. This being fantasy he has unlimited Mulligans at his disposal, allowing him to both fix his mistake and do so without erasing his daughter’s timeline.

It’s really a lovely little story, with two of the sweetest father/son scenes I’ve ever encountered in a book or a movie. In both of the scenes father and son come together alone, and each is quick to realize that they are in time travel mode. They are careful–so very careful–not to alter anything around them, lest they erase the downstream lives of everyone and everything that brought them together, back in time. It’s not clear to me exactly where in time they’d left to go back. What they were, and what they were to each other in that present time. Only that each of them chose to go back to a time when all they knew of each other was love.

We never see them together again when we return to the story in the present. The father has died, and with his death his timeline is no longer there to be visited. We slowly realize that father and son had traveled back to that time of love to say their goodbyes. No one else was changed, but one is left to wonder if, in the choosing to experience that love again, so tender with one another in knowing what was to come, if they themselves were changed.

Alas, there is no time travel for the men or the women of any family, however careful those who might possess this power might be. Still, there are Mulligans to be had. Every new day is a kind of Mulligan. Each dawn the gift-wrap for a breakfast ball. We cannot return to an earlier time, but each day brings us a chance to return, again and again to how we felt in that time. To choose that. And if we are lucky, to choose that together.

Until one day, like the father and son in “About Time”, we run out of Mulligans, and only the memories remain.

I’ll see you next week…