not on the same wavelength

The Zits cartoon below reminded me of the end of my sophomore year in high school when we were passing yearbooks back and forth.

I was very much involved in the speech program at Hemet High School. I was in the forensics class, which was the advanced public speaking class. We had our speech club, and we attended speech tournaments across Riverside County. However, for reasons not entirely clear, but perhaps related to budget, our teacher, Miss Palvadore, was not brought back for the next year. We were all very upset, and were concerned about the survival of the speech program for the next year.

One member of the speech group was a young woman named Paulette. When she gave me her yearbook to sign, I wrote in earnest about the future of the program, quoting a Top 40 song of the day:

United we stand,
Divided we fall,
and if our backs are ever up against the wall,
we’ll stand together.

When Paulette handed me back my yearbook I was crushed to read:

You are a nice boy.
You have a good summer.

Really? That’s it? I suppose I don’t need to say that the speech program the next year, taken over by the drama instructor, was not the same robust entity it was my sophomore year.

I still have that yearbook. It’s in our great room, just outside my office where I write this. I can’t, however, bring myself to open it up and find Paulette’s words. I’m not willing to open that Pandora’s box.

Some memories are better left undisturbed.

keeping calm and carrying on

Those of you who have been on Facebook for a while will remember a time when the meme, “Keep Calm and Carry On” or some variation thereof appeared with annoying regularity. It was supposedly originally a message to the British people from their government in the run-up to World War II.

I have never been big on sharing memes on Facebook, but recently one caught my attention in such a way that I had to share. It read:

The less you give a damn the happier you will be.

It seems to have struck a chord, as it received multiple likes. That is worth noting in that many of my Facebook posts receive no likes at all.

Interestingly, that same evening there was a quote from venerable Ram Dass on Instagram which said the same thing in a different way:

The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.

My cousin Keith posted a saying from the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who reigned from the years 161 to 180 in the Common Era. Despite its antiquity it struck me as being particularly appropriate for those of us who are nauseated by the words and actions of the current administration in Washington. It reads:

You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.

All different ways of saying the same thing. The final word goes to Dame Julian Of Norwich, who was born in 1342 and whom the Episcopal Church honors on May 8. A vision told her that whatever God does is done in love, and therefore:

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

In other words, keep calm and carry on.

AARP and the Summer of Love

When the latest issue of the AARP magazine arrived I did a double-take. I took a picture of the cover and posted it to Instagram. I wrote, “This is So Very Wrong. (Or maybe it’s just depressing…)”

My friend Fran responded, “Both/And.”

Exactly, Fran, exactly.

decades

I saw a mention recently that Star Wars celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year. How can that be?

It shouldn’t surprise me. Two years ago I missed attending the Pitzer College alumni weekend which included those of us celebrating our forty-year reunion as Terry and I were in the process of moving here to Hemet from Gilroy.

So yes, two years later would be the fortieth anniversary of Star Wars. I missed that event, 25 May 1977, and was only vaguely aware of it. I was in the process of moving then as well. I was leaving my beloved Claremont for the unknown world of Laredo, Texas where I was opening a new B. Dalton Bookseller store. Later that summer a new section of the mall opened up that included a multiplex. Star Wars was one of the movies showing when the theater opened. I lost count as to how many times I watched it.

I also received notice recently that the twenty-year life insurance policies that Terry and I took out when we bought our house in Gilroy are coming to term this summer. Has it really been twenty years? It has. It was 1997 when we said goodbye to our landlord, gleefully telling him that our new mortgage payment, PMI, and taxes combined were less than the rent he wanted to charge us under his proposed new lease.

It’s all hard to believe, but then our nephew Race, whom I knew as an infant when Terry and I first got (back) together, is now married and has his own son who will be two in November. My brother Brian’s adopted son, Eric, was an unhappy ten-year-old when Brian married his mother Bobbie. Eric turns forty on Friday and his daughter turns sixteen in September.

Sigh.

Issac Watts was indeed right when he wrote about time as “an ever-flowing stream.”

habits that stick with us

I was looking at my shopping list the other day and I thought about how habits we acquired long ago continue to stick with us. In particular, I noticed the cross-hatch on my z’s. I thought about where that habit came from.

It came from seventh grade math. Mrs. Proctor was the teacher. We were doing some basic algebra and so our problems included letters as well as numbers. She asked us to cross-hatch our letter z so as to clearly distinguish it from the number 2. I’ve been doing it ever since.

It’s interesting where we pick up these things.