more normal than not

Sometimes, when you talk to people about really mundane things, like refurbishing a shovel or why some tool has merit over another tool, you can see their eyes glaze over and you can feel any interest or enthusiasm leave their bodies while you’re talking to them.

That’s kind of fun in a really perverse way.

Kind of like a really mild form of waterboarding…tortuous.

And then sometimes, you find someone who shares your enthusiasm for tools and quality construction.

This guy is good…lots of practical videos on YouTube.

His thoughts about tools and keeping things running right…refurbishing good tools instead of replacing them with something substandard…are true and good.

“…keeping things squared away…”

I could learn a thing or two from this guy.

I love running at night.

Actually, I run in the very early morning.  It’s the tail end of night.

I love it when it’s dark and the sky is perfectly clear and every star that I can see is shining brightly.

It makes me feel so small.

It gives me a glimpse of how big everything is.

When I run in the morning, except for the passing cars, I am the biggest thing on the road, though.

At least I tell myself that as I move slowly past unseen deer and bear off in the shadowy fields and woods.

It is a comfort to try and make myself feel as powerful and big as I can when I’m plodding along.

I know that’s not the truth…but it comforts me to think that.

Seeing all the stars this morning made me also think about perspective and my place in the world.

I am small.

That’s always interesting to remember that.  What quiet ego I have would attempt to make me feel otherwise…but I know how small I really am.

I am one amongst many…another body moving through air…just another.

Just another.

At the same time, I am huge.

My spirit is boundless…untapped and untried..and willing.

Maybe not able yet….but willing.

I’ve heard people talk about “simplifying your life”.

Usually, they talk about getting rid of clutter.  That’s pretty simple…and I guess pretty hard, too.

My wife would say that it’s pretty hard to get rid of my clutter.

Really simplifying your life is hard.

I know guys who if I said that we’re really pretty small in the big picture would argue with me.

“SMALL?  I’M A BIG DUDE!!!  I’VE GOT THE BIGGEST ONE TON TRUCK DODGE MAKES!!!  I’VE GOT A WHOLE CASE OF CIGARETTES UP HERE ON THE SEAT NEXT TO ME…AND THEY’RE SUPER KINGS!!  THAT’S THE BIGGEST CIGARETTE THEY MAKE!!! WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT…SMALL?!!!  I’M HUGE!!! HECK, EVEN MY CHAINSAW HAS A FOUR FOOT BAR ON IT!!! WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, SMALL?!!!”

I don’t know about any clutter back at the trailer…but these dudes have simplified their lives as much as anybody collecting books about how to get rid of stuff has simplified their life.

It’s a pretty simple existence…truck, cigarettes, job, satellite dish, and that complete collection of the works of Charles Dickens that they keep above the gun rack.

Just kidding about the last part.

I think that when you make your life small and closed in, you don’t have to worry about blowing your mind with thoughts of the cosmos and our place in it.

You just have to worry about nobody bumping into you on your way into the country store….or getting caught poaching bear so that you can send the liver to some black market in China.

I guess misperception is still a rock solid world view…even if it’s not really the truth, it’s the truth for whoever lives it.

We’re all pretty small in the big picture.

That should take the heat off…we should enjoy each other, help each other…but it just seems to make us scurry in the ant hill a little bit harder, desperate to get another little piece of our little place in the world.

Our triumphs matter…but they’re small given the scale of place and history.

So one runner in the dark…underneath the clear sky and the bright stars in it…gets to feel the gift of smallness along with everyone else looking up and wondering the same thing at the same time.

Maybe that’s the only thing that really makes us big?

Maybe it’s only when we all recognize how small we really are as a group…maybe it’s only the “togetherness” that ever lets us live large?

 

My youngest son went to preschool for his first day yesterday.

Jenny said that they split the day up into 15 minute activities, so I think he covered a lot of ground in the 3 hours he was there.

From what I understand, he had a great time at school.

After Jenny picked him up, they went shopping for some groceries.

Apparently, they have the pharmacy area right next to the self-check line.

Apparently, at the pharmacy they have a rack of reading glasses that spins.

Whether it spins fast or slow is up to the operator.

It’s possible for the rack to spin very fast.

I’m not sure if Nate was acting out a little after getting “left behind” for the first time or what was going on…but he found that if he spinned the eyeglass rack very fast, the glasses would all fall victim to centrifugal force and exit the rack at terminal velocity.

There were glasses everywhere.

It was kind of like a non-threatening gatling gun…the only pain it really caused was the pain in the a** Jenny must have felt Nate was being.

She’d describe the situation more tactfully…something like, “Nate was a real handful after preschool today.”  That’s nicer than “pain in the a**”.

Anyway, there she was, trying to finish checking out with her groceries, and the entire area around her is littered with cheap reading glasses, like manna from heaven for all the myopic old people surrounding her.

She said that she’d never seen more old people needing to try on reading glasses at that exact moment.

(I’ve seen them flock like crows around a thrown handful of corn…it must have been quite the scene.)

One old biddy…um, one older woman of advanced age and maturity who probably commanded respect because of her advanced age and maturity….nah….one old biddy…told her, “YOU NEED TO PICK THOSE UP!  HE’S GOING TO STEP ON THEM!”

Jenny looked at her and told her that she’d get them when she finished checking out.

( I imagine her using her best Clint Eastwood voice when she did it…like the “you feeling lucky, punk?  Well…are you?” voice.  That would have been cool…”I’ll pick them up when I’m ready, old punk…”.  Actually, she doesn’t have a Clint voice…but it would have been neat to shut down the old biddy like that.)

Things get more exciting than they should sometimes.

But what power does Nate have other than spinning racks of eyeglasses and yelling at the top of his lungs?

Probably not much power other than that.

I guess that’s what they call “paying your dues”.

You just have weird experiences that you have to work your way through.

That goes for the parents, too.

Children cure you of shyness.  It’s a self-preservation, knee-jerk kind of thing…you just react in the animal logic moment, scrambling to do some damage control while your world goes spinning out of whack around you…glasses flying everywhere and the geriatric audience looking on disapprovingly.

It’s horrible…but you don’t have time to be too self-conscious.

I guess you just have to enjoy the times in-between the spinning.

You have to enjoy the “even keel”… if it ever comes.

Last night, my wife and I heard a noise outside.

“Is it something getting the rooster?” she asked at 2:30 in the morning.

“No…” I answered. “I think it was something behind the house…it was coming from a different direction than the porch.”

We have a rooster that …well, roosts on our porch at night.

He crows at 5:30.  I’m usually up so I throw him off the porch when I hear him start crowing so that our 4-year-old can sleep a little later.

We listened for the noise for a while…and then Jenny had another question for me.

“Do sharks have live births?  Or do they lay a bunch of eggs?”

I told her we’d have to look it up in the morning…along with whales and dolphins.  I didn’t know what sharks did about babies.

(It turns out that most of them lay eggs…but sometimes they hatch inside the female so it’s a live birth…but sometimes it’s eggs, so…..but I guess sometimes it’s a live birth, too.  It sounds like sharks are kind of confusing.  I guess that whales and dolphins have live births because they’re mammals….)

When things got quiet and we were going back to sleep, I started thinking about where all these words came from.

Not where all the questions we had at 2:45 came from…where all the words we use came from.  And not some professorial “well, of course you understand that this or that word was derived from the French word ‘terre’..so ‘le pom de terre’ means quite literally ‘apple of the earth’ ”  ( I don’t know if that’s really correct…from what I remember, French was the only class I ever failed in school).

I don’t need the explanation for the origins of specific words or phrases.

What I wondered about last night was how did we get to the point where we have so many ways of describing things?

That’s pretty darn amazing.

They say that the Eskimo has a lot of different words for snow.

A whole bunch of words for “snow”.

Imagine that.

What is it about our makeup that demands we work that hard at describing things?

Is it that our spirits are so expansive and BIG that we struggle to express the wonder of everything around us?  And a kazillion words is the best we can do.

And a kazillion words…in spite of all our efforts…always fall short of expressing the wonder of the opportunity we’ve been given?  The opportunity to be alive and to be aware of the wonder of it all?

There are precise ways of using words…and punctuation…and some of them are cultural and set by geography, some seem kind of haphazard and random.

Words are easy to misuse.

But I do wonder this morning if all our words aren’t just a mask for our inability to really express how amazed we should be at the gifts we’re given.

Maybe if we say enough…and say it all fast enough…no one will notice that we really can’t express the thing we need to express the most.

We will always fall short of expressing that we have begun to understand the blessings.

We will always fall short with our words…but we try.

Maybe that’s almost enough.

I know people whose biggest regret in life is something along the lines of dropping the final pass in the high school championship or not getting the promotion that they’d hoped for.

It’s some shortcoming or mistake that they can’t shake…some opportunity where they just couldn’t rise to the challenge.

It’s a benchmark that wasn’t reached that they use to measure everything that comes after it.

This morning, the thing that was swirling around in my head was that I wish that I’d been kinder.

The guy that dropped the pass can’t back up.  There aren’t any do overs…you can’t repeat events and fix mistakes.

I can’t back up and fix things, either.

Mostly, I was thinking about my mother.

My mother used a wheelchair the last 15 or so years of her life.  Sometimes I hear people say that someone they know is “in a wheelchair” like that’s all the definition you’d ever need to understand them.  My mother ( and everyone else who uses a wheelchair…for whatever reason) wasn’t defined by that chair.

Anyway, she had a hard time getting around without assistance.

I can’t imagine how hard that must have been for her.

She worked really hard to try and make our lives as easy as she could in a hard situation.

I remember what a pleasure it was for us to take a warm washcloth and gently wash her face…(I just realized that I typed “us” in that sentence when I probably meant that it was a pleasure for “her”…but I suppose it was a pleasure for us, too…).

That was such a simple thing to do.  It didn’t take a lot of time or special preparations, the “tools” we needed were minimal, we didn’t make it into a big deal.  It wasn’t a hard thing to do.

I wish I’d done more of that kind of thing for her.

Of course, you can spend a lifetime beating yourself up for the things that you didn’t do.  In hindsight, it “doesn’t cost a dime” to make conjecture about how you could have been kinder.

That’s not a hard thing to do, either.

The hard part is probably exercising kindness in the moment.  It’s harder to see each opportunity and take advantage of it as the moment arises.

We are a self-absorbed species.  What species isn’t?

The fact that I’m writing this blog supports my self-absorption. Sometimes I can’t get enough of me…and I spend a lot of time with myself.  You would think that I’d be over it by now….but I really am pretty fascinating.

The thing that really does keep me awake at night sometimes is that I really wish that I’d been kinder in so many situations.

I wish I’d been better at getting the washrag ready…or brushing her hair…or just really paying attention every single minute that I had a chance to pay attention to her.

Maybe resilience isn’t learning how to forget past mistakes…maybe it’s learning how to really remember them so completely and so strongly that you gain enough knowledge and sensitivity from the remembering to change in the future?

I don’t really know.

My sister and I love our parents. We helped take care of our mother as well as we could in the moments we had with her…and she returned the favor. Sometimes, I helped her wash her face. Sometimes, I helped to try and make her life better.

I just wish I could have been kinder.