” I’d like to see that tree you wrote about sometime.”

My wife was talking to me about a tree that I’d written a blog post about a couple of days earlier.

I’d made a big deal out of this one misshapen tree that I’d noticed in the forest.  I was sure I’d not only be able to find it again anytime I wanted to, but that someday it might even have some sort of marker or plaque commemorating what I had done…

“THE BLOG TREE”

That would have made all the sense in the world…that my words would someday spark a giant outpouring of nostalgia…”remember when he wrote about lego impotence?  Those were the days, huh?”  There would be plaques on most everything I had come in contact with or written about.

The reality of the situation was that when I went back to where I thought the tree was…I couldn’t find it.  It was a memorable tree but in all the new green, it just didn’t stand out like the first day I saw it.

That tree…the oddest of trees…just blended in with the other trees.  For the life of me, I couldn’t see it anymore.

We are the hub of our own universes.

Astronomers would be confused…”I thought we already settled that sun/earth issue….it’s the SUN that everything revolves around, remember?”

We are the center of it all…at least in some of our minds.

We are the tree that every other tree in the forest had the good or bad fortune to spring up around.

We can’t get over our selves.  Even if we work at practicing humility…and discount our own importance in the big picture….we can’t escape being us.

We can’t escape it…but we can’t understand it, either.  Try as we might, understanding ourselves is a tough nut to crack.

Not being able to find this one odd tree made me think about how people just don’t have the time to sustain an obsession with our differences or faults.  They are so busy being the hubs that to give up too much attention to someone elses problems takes too much energy.

They may notice some quirky (or major…it could be something earth shakingly major) difference…but they can’t get over themselves long enough to give it a second thought again and again and again.

Probably one of the major reasons we have to pay attention to other people is that it takes some of the heat off of trying to figure out our own problems.  We get to focus on something outside for a while ….and it feels good to leave the self obsession behind momentarily.

Not being able to find this WEIRDO TREE again was a big loss.  I thought that I’d always have it to point to as an example of nature gone wrong…always be able to compare the GOOD, NORMAL TREES to it.  It was bent and “growed back wrong”….why wouldn’t I remember it always? But, try as I may, I can’t see this tree anymore.

When someone else notices something about us that’s not flattering, in our minds it becomes a forever thing.  We obsess over it…water and nurture it until it becomes just another tree in the forest that “growed up wrong”.

The people that made the comment have probably moved on…unless they’re so desperate to escape their own pitiful version of “ME”  that they’ve set up a tent at the base of our trees so they can pick at us and forget themselves for a while.

They don’t have the interest in “outside things” to keep up the attack.

I’m glad I couldn’t find that tree again…it meant more hidden among the others than it ever meant standing out in the forest.

In 1967 my father drove into our driveway in California with a new car.

It was a yellow Ford Fairlane station wagon with an automatic transmission and a 289 under the hood.

As a seven-year old, of course I didn’t understand anything about any of that description…all I knew was that we had a big new car and it was yellow.

I remember my mother talking about wanting to put vinyl flower stickers all over it (it was 1967). 

She never did…and that was a good thing.  I guess she was just pondering letting her “inner hippy” out a little.

Sometime, a little while after we’d gotten the car, a political candidate named Savage asked if he could put a bumper sticker announcing his candidacy on the back window.  We were at the beach and feeling benevolent…so my Dad agreed that it would be OK…and from then on the Fairlane became known as the “yellow savage”.

It’s funny how tradition gets set in motion by random events.

When I was learning to drive and just starting to get some confidence, we were on our way to downtown Marietta and Dad said, “you’re going to need to stop up here”.

“I know….I see it..”  The stop light up ahead was turning yellow….I knew the red was coming.  Red means STOP.

My father was a pretty quiet and patient man.  He said, again “you’re going to need to stop up here…you see the light?”

“I know…I see…”

All of a sudden, my father found his loud, excited voice…“STOP!!!!!!”

The rest of it was a blur…all adrenaline and hyper awareness as I locked down the brakes and went fish tailing between two rows of stopped cars on either side of me.

A 1967 Fairlane is a pretty big mass of metal.  It takes a little while to skid to a stop no matter how hard you mash down on the brake pedal.

When our forward trajectory came to a close, after managing to not hit any of the other cars or skid into the oncoming cross traffic, my father said (amazingly, he was reasonably calm)…“Didn’t you see the light?”

I’d been looking at the light that was one beyond the light…the one that was already red.

“I meant this light” my father said.

In this life, I’m just starting to figure out that …even though people expect you to have plans and ideas about what your future is supposed to hold…if you focus so intently on what is going to happen later, somehow or another you’re going to miss the “now” and really screw yourself up.

One of the most bothersome and obnoxious questions I’ve ever been asked is, “So…what are you going to do with your life?”.

Maaaannn….I hate that question.  I wouldn’t want to tell the people asking it any of my grand life scheme…even if I had some interesting and grand scheme to report.

“NUNYA”, I feel like saying….”nunya”.

I don’t know what to say to them.

So…we had this car…a big yellow station wagon that took us to the beach and up the coast and across the country. We drove it in rain and snow and heavy wind and all kinds of weather in a lot of different places around the country.  I drove it to first jobs and to get firewood ( a truck works better)….used it for a lot of things that a teenage boy uses a big old car for.  We lived with that car for a long time.  It had an interesting life a day at a time.

When my father drove it home that first day we owned it, the car didn’t have a lot of miles on it.  I don’t think that he had a big itinerary for it for the next 15 or 20 years…we were just going to use and enjoy it everyday.

You have to wonder if the life doesn’t happen around the plan, anyway.  We can steer…but we have to remember to pay attention to all the lights going off around us.