Sarah Palin's smarts seems to be a favorite topic of her adversaries these days, yet she has plenty enough smarts for me to question the smarts of those who question hers. Ever since her nomination as a vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin has been a lightning rod for good or evil, praise or attack being heaped upon her. The attacks by some internet rumor mills and drained-stream media mites were instant and vicious, often false and outrageous. The possibility of her running on future tickets has evoked similar excitement both for and against her. Debating whether or not she is qualified is mandatory for any candidate, though the facts that she was an excellent governor of a state and that charmer-in-chief had less experience than her should be part of the discussion; but the line, as if by design, that echoes through the chambers of anti-commerce—that she is not smart enough to be president—I find amusing. How did anyone decide that?
Those pointing to a University of Idaho vs. a Harvard education are putting way too much faith in education. I know many Harvard graduates and many Idahoans and see no difference in intellectual capacities.
If public impromptu performance and substantive delivery are the criteria, Palin surpasses most that I’ve seen. I have watched hours of Hillary (Secretary of State), Palin, Pelosi (Speaker of the House), charmer-in-chief, and many others being interviewed. In quickness of mental and lingual agility, Palin performs impressively like a quick bright squirrel and makes the others look like slow lumbering beetles with ideas as aromatic. Palin has by far the quickest mind and the most sensible solutions instantly flowing out of her so rapidly as to make Clinton, Pelosi, and others, including charmer-in-chief, sound like sedated slowbees (though Clinton is much better than Pelosi, with charmer-in-chief wafting somewhere between). Some might suggest that the slower more deliberate delivery is due to more profound thoughts. No, that doesn’t work either. Palin’s ideas and thinking are far superior to those three and compete well enough among the presidential candidates of the last two decades. I’m not saying she is the very best. I consider Newt Gingrich to be the nation’s most brilliant mind for problem-solving and real solutions at national and international levels. Huckabee, Forbes, Romney, Giuliani, and other voices of experience and reason are equally sound (equal to Palin, not necessarily to Gingrich). Yet whether at the very top or not, Palin is in a high enough percentile that saying she is not smart is a lame echo backed by agenda, not facts. Applying her thinking would have us doing much better now than is presently happening.
Some may point to her not knowing the answer to a question or two on nationally televised interviews. Everyone in the world does not know the answers to many, many questions. After ACORN’s fiasco of multiple attempts to help the pimp plan a business using 14-year-old sex-slave prostitutes from South America, charmer-in-chief, who worked for ACORN, was asked about it. He said he didn’t know about that, quickly spinning to: the American people are more concerned about more important things. If he knew (as he must have; it was big news), he seemed not to be telling the truth. If he did not know, it was a much more serious display of ignorance than Palin being stumped by the Bush doctrine, which stumped everyone else too, until clarified. Most crucial is smarts enough to surround oneself with advisers of integrity, brilliance, and depths of experience, in which case a person with principles and reasonable intelligence can do much better than an assumed brainiac brain-washed in ideology too loosely attached to reason and reality. But even a Harvard brainiac (or dubiously dubbed so by some) would know better than to surround himself entirely with swimmers in the same font of false-reality, wouldn’t he? Really? So he’s not smarter than that? Amazing. And then they say Palin is not smart enough?
So someone whose big-government policies are crippling the job-producers (small businesses) in this highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression is smarter? Someone whose far-left financial policies have even Communist China calling us fiscally reckless and irresponsible is smarter? Someone whose spending far exceeds all previous presidents and who has caused the dollar to lose 15% of its value since March is smarter? (This was written in the fall of 2009, a few months after his taking office.) Since charmer-in-chief took office, gold has gone from 850/oz to 1200/oz, silver from 12/oz to 18/oz, and palladium from 225/oz to 380/oz, all increasing about 50%, which suggests your savings and retirement incomes are relatively set to decrease proportionately in the opposite direction, and raises in wages never keep up with inflation either. For every 4% that inflation goes up, you’d be lucky to get a 2% raise. It’s a trick and hidden tax to give the government more money that you pay for in lost relative wages without most people realizing it. Ezra Taft Benson, former presidential cabinet member, called inflation a serious crime, a nation-wide theft. Inflation is caused by government spending (printing) more money than taken in, as is happening now at rates unheard of; thus, indicators suggest the biggest inflation in U.S history is around the corner. Prisoner Bernie Madoff made off with billions, but inflation robs many more people of much more money than Madoff did, so who can we blame to put in prison for the destruction of our fiscal futures? Sarah Palin is smarter than that.
Yard Work
WARNING: this column contains material that may not be suitable for husbands and children (or whoever should be helping with the yard work). Parental (or wifely) discretion is advised. It could ruin a perfectly good yard-worker. Nevertheless, in spite of risking the wrath of readers, I must be true to the writer’s noble tradition of penning an opposing point of view when reason cries out against cultural practices that oppress certain segments of society or minority populations (a minority of me, anyway).
Our culture has dug itself into a black hole that vaporizes enormous amounts of time, energy, and money. I speak of yard work. I do not mind yard work. In fact, I have often thought that pulling weeds provides one of the clearest distinctions between childhood and adulthood: weeding is one of the easiest of an adult’s duties, but among the most grievous of a child’s day. For adults, yard work can be a release from tensions and a rest from the nerve-wracking endeavors that we encumber our lives with … or it can be another endeavor to encumber our lives with. It is not hard; in fact, I like exercise and hard work in the outdoors (like hauling hay). Fiercely leveling a weed patch with a shovel can be a good workout; but most forms of yard work, such as having to be careful of flowers when weeding between them, are tedious and time-consuming. And the mandatory regularity of it all takes such a chunk out of life (it seems to me). For other people, the slow-paced rearranging of dirt is relaxing and even therapeutic. I can understand that—have felt that way on occasion. Nonetheless, many thoughts and questions have puzzled me over the years, not to mention the pressure brought to bear by a neighborhood full of nice yards. The subtle underlying expectation toward conformity is a menacing cultural innovation (it seems to me).
Do not misunderstand: I am not criticizing those who enjoy yard work. To the contrary, I hold them in the highest esteem. In fact, I revere them as nearly superhuman. Some people create masterpieces of their purchased plots on earth, and their houses sit in the midst of landscaped works of art. It is wonderful that some are inclined to create an oasis of beauty, bursting with the lush and lovely. Their talent and interest should be applauded as much as a concert violinist’s talents. However, just because a few concert violinists walk the earth, should the rest of us feel obligated to humiliate ourselves in ludicrous attempts to keep up with them? If violinists play Saint-Saëns violin concertos with a musical eloquence that nearly transcends mortal experience, or if gardeners produce flowerbeds of similar affect on beholders, should the rest of us squeak the strings or blight the blossoms, and afflict the masses with our meager imitations of the masters? Heavens, No! The concert violinist needs an audience. If everyone could play like that, no one would pay attention to anyone else; all could listen to themselves practice. A concert violinist's extraordinary talent is rare, and thus highly valued.
Why can’t green-thumbed people be like that—a little more rare instead of everybody trying to be one? And why can’t their yards be viewed as unique wonders of the world, instead of every homeowner from the Atlantic to the Pacific trying to keep up with whoever started it all? An unrelenting series of 500 nice yards in a row only guarantees that none of them will be viewed as special. Variety and contrast are key to aesthetic appeal. Rainy days make clear days more wonderful, and too many clear days are droughts and make rainy days welcome. We need an alternation of both exercise and rest: an unceasing continuation of either without the other would kill us. So if the essence of beauty is variety and contrast, why not let my yard (and those of the similarly disinclined) be the contrast that makes the other yards stand out as really beautiful? Somebody should have to do it (it seems to me).
Probably a small percentage of the general populace truly enjoys the toils of tilling and tending to dirt. The majority exert themselves against the incessant forces of nature in order to hone out a decent-looking lot simply because everyone else is doing it (which means that it is cultural). They fight this endless battle simply to avoid the embarrassment of having the only "disgraceful yard" in town. Seeing the nationwide acceptance of this cyclical futility without anyone questioning the meager returns for so much work, I often ask myself: Where did it all start? Whose idea was this cultural madness that everyone should have an immaculate yard? Or that every blade of grass should be cut to a uniform length of two inches, that bushes should have regular haircuts, and that colorful wild flowers, like dandelions, do not count because they need no care, but only the kinds of flowers that we must buy at the store and that need hours of TLC to survive are permissible? Thus, the original plants that were in the yard must be taken out, so that purchased plants that were originally out can be put in. Then some of us husbands try to weed the resulting mixture and seldom get it all right, unable to distinguish the good, bad, and the ugly. Consider dandelions, for example. I happen to like dandelions. They are beautiful yellow flowers with greens as nutritious as spinach and other vegetables sold in the store. How did they become culturally defined as undesirable? I have eaten clover, pigweed, dandelion greens, lettuce, and broccoli; and if what tastes worst is best for us, I'm sure they're all very nutritious. So my weed patch may have about as many vegetables as my garden. If not, my garden certainly has as many weeds as my weed patch; so what do I weed out of which? Emerson said a weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. That explains my hesitancy. I’d rather be cautious until all the discoveries are in. One careless Saturday of overzealous hoeing could wipe out a fortune.
Of course, gardens, fields, and food producing lands have been tended and weeded throughout history, but no people in history had lawns cut to a uniform height and manicured about the edges with clean straight lines separating them from weedless dirt—not until now. The homesteaders of the West and the Native Americans among whom they insteaded both let the land lay about their homes, tepees, hogans, or cabins as is (or was). Whatever wild grass carpeted the prairies did so up to the walls of their abodes or to areas trodden bare by domestic traffic with stone walk ways for muddy seasons, but they did not spend their time bothering with nicely manicured lawns or sections of prairie. The idea never occurred to them, and if it had occurred to any precocious seer of those past cultures, the stares of disbelief from his peers as to what he might even be talking about would have been as strange as the stares I get when I ask: why do we have lawns?
Though a few breathtaking yard extravaganzas dot each municipality, most of us slave merely to make our yards "presentable"—not in hope for joy in the beholders or that they will even notice if the yard is nice, but because we know they will notice it if it is NOT nice. Did yesteryear's Amerindian villages, picturesquely positioned on the prairies or in the woods, look bad? No, they were beautiful scenes. Yet can you imagine a chief's reaction if someone from our day could have asked him why they had no manicured lawns or trimmed hedges? The Natives already think we are crazy—no sense in proving it beyond dispute with a few more stupid questions. They did not have time to fiddle with such nonsense, but we evidently do, judging by the national habit.
Both technology and a "keep-up-with-the-Joneses" mentality contribute to this insane eradication of plants (weeds), resources, time, and money. The invention of the lawn mower did not help any. How would ancient Native Americans or medieval serfs have kept a lawn uniformly two-inches high without a mower? Such an effort by hand would have been a ridiculous waste of time and energy. So why is it not still a ridiculous waste of time? Merely because we can now do it some other way than by hand? It may be that a newly mowed lawn looks nice to us only because we have been culturally conditioned to think so. If an 18th-century chief had seen a square section of prairie mowed to two inches, he might have thought it quite funny looking—like a woman's long beautiful hair sheared to a crew cut.
Most of us work five days a week; and if we strive for some semblance of sabbath-keeping, that leaves one free day in a week to have fun—Saturday. Yet what do people spend their Saturdays doing? Yard work! How did a whole nation of intelligent people allow themselves to be caught up in a custom of selling their lone free day of each week for a fancy yard?
Beautiful yards are wonderful for those keen on devoting their time to them, but it is unfair that those yards have so much power to make all the rest of us feel guilty or to subject us to the pernicious pressure to whip out the tools and let the metal fly in its fury to beat the Saturday sunset ... and for what? So that we can feel a sense of accomplishment at having shot our one free day of the week?
Having five weekdays tied to a job and most summer weekends tied to yard work leaves precious little time to enjoy the mountains. Nevertheless, we occasionally get away from our weeds for a weekend in order to enjoy nature's wide-open spaces. We arrive at the camping spot in the mountains, take a deep breath of fresh air, scan the majestic mountains as far as the eye can see, and exlaim, "Isn't this beautiful!" And what are we looking at? Millions of acres of weeds! We fill most Saturdays trying to keep a puny plot of earth free of weeds, so that we rarely reach the summit of a mountain to overlook huge landscapes full of them; but when we do, we marvel at the majesty of how beautiful they are! In the mountains the weeds are beautiful, but in our yards they are not, but are culturally determined to be unsightly and not allowed. I do not understand.
Nevertheless, I sympathize with my poor wife, who must bear with this unique view of vegetation, though I am not entirely alone in this perspective. The front yard of our rental once launched some weeds to an impressive height. Quite embarrassed at how fast the summer sun gave rise to this unruly crop's power to shame us unawares, my wife armed us with weapons of war on weeds—a shovel or hoe to every man (me), woman (her), and child of ours. We marched to the battlefield and had scarcely begun to get the upper hand on this field of foes, when the renters came out and expressed their sorrow at our intent to fell the weeds, which they thought were beautiful, natural, and wished that they might remain in place. With help from the shovel I was leaning on, I remained standing instead of rolling on the ground with laughter, while witnessing in my wife's countenance a degree of bewilderment as rare as a hair on a bald man's head. She had told me for years that I was probably the only one in the world with such a weird opinion, and here we found a whole house full of them. She paled in speechless astonishment that others could harbor similar sentiments as the children and I helped her home, where she eventually recovered, though the weeds won the war that day.
Comparisons with others' yards can be as unfair as sibling comparisons. "Why can't you be like your brother Johnny?" and "Why can't we have a yard like the Joneses?" both carry the same intonation pattern. People should be accepted for who they are—green thumb or not. The risk of psychological trauma that may result from sibling comparisons—or yard comparisons—is simply not worth it. No one should be judged by the color of his thumb! Or by his lawn! In fact, some of my best friends have lawns. Come to think of it, everyone in town has a lawn. I guess I do too, for that matter. Nevertheless, you cannot judge a book by its cover, and neither I nor Mother Earth should be judged by her cover either. Let her wear her hair how she likes! Who am I to rearrange it and then assume I have improved it?
Yes, I did grow up in the 60's, but I was not rebellious then. I dutifully spent every Saturday morning trying to start the lawn mower, etcetera. Not until 30 more years of etcetera have I begun to wonder about us—about our culture of living life by the yard. We grow by the inch, die by the year, and live by the yard throughout. Both slopes of time—the climb to and the descent from a brief prime of life—are filled with the lawn of life. Yet for what more noble cause can we give our lives than to have uniformly trimmed lawns, sculpted bushes, and weedless dirt between the thorns ... I mean bushes.
Okay, maybe I am getting carried away. I can see the other point of view too, which moves me to great compassion for my wife and neighbors, none of whom like weeds, or so I surmise from the unanimity of opinions heard thus far. For them, I regularly sacrifice my view for the good of the neighborhood. (It's better my view be sacrificed than me.) So to keep their peace of mind and to keep my pieces in mind, I try for a tolerable appearance.
What can I say except what I usually say after trying to explain my perspective to either wife or neighbor: "Never mind. Sorry I brought it up. Yes, I have a shovel. No, I can do it." Furthermore, if it makes my wife happy, maybe it's worth it for that alone, in spite of the fact that (to me) it seems a bit overly optimistic of folks to expect us to make earth look better than the Creator made it look. But we can try! In fact, cultural norms say that we must try ... or have little choice but to try ... no matter how hopeless ... no matter how far (away in time this elusive perfect yard may be) ... an impossible dream, to be sure. There I go again ... being realistic. (knock, knock)
Excuse me; I must answer the door.
Oh, it's the neighborhood beautification committee!
What? You all read my essay on yard work?
Oh no, it won't be necessary to string me up by my non-green thumbs.
Please! Try to calm down!
It was merely a point of view ... only one way of looking at things.
I simply wanted to express that opinion ... and get it off my chest.
There ... I feel better now.
Our culture has dug itself into a black hole that vaporizes enormous amounts of time, energy, and money. I speak of yard work. I do not mind yard work. In fact, I have often thought that pulling weeds provides one of the clearest distinctions between childhood and adulthood: weeding is one of the easiest of an adult’s duties, but among the most grievous of a child’s day. For adults, yard work can be a release from tensions and a rest from the nerve-wracking endeavors that we encumber our lives with … or it can be another endeavor to encumber our lives with. It is not hard; in fact, I like exercise and hard work in the outdoors (like hauling hay). Fiercely leveling a weed patch with a shovel can be a good workout; but most forms of yard work, such as having to be careful of flowers when weeding between them, are tedious and time-consuming. And the mandatory regularity of it all takes such a chunk out of life (it seems to me). For other people, the slow-paced rearranging of dirt is relaxing and even therapeutic. I can understand that—have felt that way on occasion. Nonetheless, many thoughts and questions have puzzled me over the years, not to mention the pressure brought to bear by a neighborhood full of nice yards. The subtle underlying expectation toward conformity is a menacing cultural innovation (it seems to me).
Do not misunderstand: I am not criticizing those who enjoy yard work. To the contrary, I hold them in the highest esteem. In fact, I revere them as nearly superhuman. Some people create masterpieces of their purchased plots on earth, and their houses sit in the midst of landscaped works of art. It is wonderful that some are inclined to create an oasis of beauty, bursting with the lush and lovely. Their talent and interest should be applauded as much as a concert violinist’s talents. However, just because a few concert violinists walk the earth, should the rest of us feel obligated to humiliate ourselves in ludicrous attempts to keep up with them? If violinists play Saint-Saëns violin concertos with a musical eloquence that nearly transcends mortal experience, or if gardeners produce flowerbeds of similar affect on beholders, should the rest of us squeak the strings or blight the blossoms, and afflict the masses with our meager imitations of the masters? Heavens, No! The concert violinist needs an audience. If everyone could play like that, no one would pay attention to anyone else; all could listen to themselves practice. A concert violinist's extraordinary talent is rare, and thus highly valued.
Why can’t green-thumbed people be like that—a little more rare instead of everybody trying to be one? And why can’t their yards be viewed as unique wonders of the world, instead of every homeowner from the Atlantic to the Pacific trying to keep up with whoever started it all? An unrelenting series of 500 nice yards in a row only guarantees that none of them will be viewed as special. Variety and contrast are key to aesthetic appeal. Rainy days make clear days more wonderful, and too many clear days are droughts and make rainy days welcome. We need an alternation of both exercise and rest: an unceasing continuation of either without the other would kill us. So if the essence of beauty is variety and contrast, why not let my yard (and those of the similarly disinclined) be the contrast that makes the other yards stand out as really beautiful? Somebody should have to do it (it seems to me).
Probably a small percentage of the general populace truly enjoys the toils of tilling and tending to dirt. The majority exert themselves against the incessant forces of nature in order to hone out a decent-looking lot simply because everyone else is doing it (which means that it is cultural). They fight this endless battle simply to avoid the embarrassment of having the only "disgraceful yard" in town. Seeing the nationwide acceptance of this cyclical futility without anyone questioning the meager returns for so much work, I often ask myself: Where did it all start? Whose idea was this cultural madness that everyone should have an immaculate yard? Or that every blade of grass should be cut to a uniform length of two inches, that bushes should have regular haircuts, and that colorful wild flowers, like dandelions, do not count because they need no care, but only the kinds of flowers that we must buy at the store and that need hours of TLC to survive are permissible? Thus, the original plants that were in the yard must be taken out, so that purchased plants that were originally out can be put in. Then some of us husbands try to weed the resulting mixture and seldom get it all right, unable to distinguish the good, bad, and the ugly. Consider dandelions, for example. I happen to like dandelions. They are beautiful yellow flowers with greens as nutritious as spinach and other vegetables sold in the store. How did they become culturally defined as undesirable? I have eaten clover, pigweed, dandelion greens, lettuce, and broccoli; and if what tastes worst is best for us, I'm sure they're all very nutritious. So my weed patch may have about as many vegetables as my garden. If not, my garden certainly has as many weeds as my weed patch; so what do I weed out of which? Emerson said a weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. That explains my hesitancy. I’d rather be cautious until all the discoveries are in. One careless Saturday of overzealous hoeing could wipe out a fortune.
Of course, gardens, fields, and food producing lands have been tended and weeded throughout history, but no people in history had lawns cut to a uniform height and manicured about the edges with clean straight lines separating them from weedless dirt—not until now. The homesteaders of the West and the Native Americans among whom they insteaded both let the land lay about their homes, tepees, hogans, or cabins as is (or was). Whatever wild grass carpeted the prairies did so up to the walls of their abodes or to areas trodden bare by domestic traffic with stone walk ways for muddy seasons, but they did not spend their time bothering with nicely manicured lawns or sections of prairie. The idea never occurred to them, and if it had occurred to any precocious seer of those past cultures, the stares of disbelief from his peers as to what he might even be talking about would have been as strange as the stares I get when I ask: why do we have lawns?
Though a few breathtaking yard extravaganzas dot each municipality, most of us slave merely to make our yards "presentable"—not in hope for joy in the beholders or that they will even notice if the yard is nice, but because we know they will notice it if it is NOT nice. Did yesteryear's Amerindian villages, picturesquely positioned on the prairies or in the woods, look bad? No, they were beautiful scenes. Yet can you imagine a chief's reaction if someone from our day could have asked him why they had no manicured lawns or trimmed hedges? The Natives already think we are crazy—no sense in proving it beyond dispute with a few more stupid questions. They did not have time to fiddle with such nonsense, but we evidently do, judging by the national habit.
Both technology and a "keep-up-with-the-Joneses" mentality contribute to this insane eradication of plants (weeds), resources, time, and money. The invention of the lawn mower did not help any. How would ancient Native Americans or medieval serfs have kept a lawn uniformly two-inches high without a mower? Such an effort by hand would have been a ridiculous waste of time and energy. So why is it not still a ridiculous waste of time? Merely because we can now do it some other way than by hand? It may be that a newly mowed lawn looks nice to us only because we have been culturally conditioned to think so. If an 18th-century chief had seen a square section of prairie mowed to two inches, he might have thought it quite funny looking—like a woman's long beautiful hair sheared to a crew cut.
Most of us work five days a week; and if we strive for some semblance of sabbath-keeping, that leaves one free day in a week to have fun—Saturday. Yet what do people spend their Saturdays doing? Yard work! How did a whole nation of intelligent people allow themselves to be caught up in a custom of selling their lone free day of each week for a fancy yard?
Beautiful yards are wonderful for those keen on devoting their time to them, but it is unfair that those yards have so much power to make all the rest of us feel guilty or to subject us to the pernicious pressure to whip out the tools and let the metal fly in its fury to beat the Saturday sunset ... and for what? So that we can feel a sense of accomplishment at having shot our one free day of the week?
Having five weekdays tied to a job and most summer weekends tied to yard work leaves precious little time to enjoy the mountains. Nevertheless, we occasionally get away from our weeds for a weekend in order to enjoy nature's wide-open spaces. We arrive at the camping spot in the mountains, take a deep breath of fresh air, scan the majestic mountains as far as the eye can see, and exlaim, "Isn't this beautiful!" And what are we looking at? Millions of acres of weeds! We fill most Saturdays trying to keep a puny plot of earth free of weeds, so that we rarely reach the summit of a mountain to overlook huge landscapes full of them; but when we do, we marvel at the majesty of how beautiful they are! In the mountains the weeds are beautiful, but in our yards they are not, but are culturally determined to be unsightly and not allowed. I do not understand.
Nevertheless, I sympathize with my poor wife, who must bear with this unique view of vegetation, though I am not entirely alone in this perspective. The front yard of our rental once launched some weeds to an impressive height. Quite embarrassed at how fast the summer sun gave rise to this unruly crop's power to shame us unawares, my wife armed us with weapons of war on weeds—a shovel or hoe to every man (me), woman (her), and child of ours. We marched to the battlefield and had scarcely begun to get the upper hand on this field of foes, when the renters came out and expressed their sorrow at our intent to fell the weeds, which they thought were beautiful, natural, and wished that they might remain in place. With help from the shovel I was leaning on, I remained standing instead of rolling on the ground with laughter, while witnessing in my wife's countenance a degree of bewilderment as rare as a hair on a bald man's head. She had told me for years that I was probably the only one in the world with such a weird opinion, and here we found a whole house full of them. She paled in speechless astonishment that others could harbor similar sentiments as the children and I helped her home, where she eventually recovered, though the weeds won the war that day.
Comparisons with others' yards can be as unfair as sibling comparisons. "Why can't you be like your brother Johnny?" and "Why can't we have a yard like the Joneses?" both carry the same intonation pattern. People should be accepted for who they are—green thumb or not. The risk of psychological trauma that may result from sibling comparisons—or yard comparisons—is simply not worth it. No one should be judged by the color of his thumb! Or by his lawn! In fact, some of my best friends have lawns. Come to think of it, everyone in town has a lawn. I guess I do too, for that matter. Nevertheless, you cannot judge a book by its cover, and neither I nor Mother Earth should be judged by her cover either. Let her wear her hair how she likes! Who am I to rearrange it and then assume I have improved it?
Yes, I did grow up in the 60's, but I was not rebellious then. I dutifully spent every Saturday morning trying to start the lawn mower, etcetera. Not until 30 more years of etcetera have I begun to wonder about us—about our culture of living life by the yard. We grow by the inch, die by the year, and live by the yard throughout. Both slopes of time—the climb to and the descent from a brief prime of life—are filled with the lawn of life. Yet for what more noble cause can we give our lives than to have uniformly trimmed lawns, sculpted bushes, and weedless dirt between the thorns ... I mean bushes.
Okay, maybe I am getting carried away. I can see the other point of view too, which moves me to great compassion for my wife and neighbors, none of whom like weeds, or so I surmise from the unanimity of opinions heard thus far. For them, I regularly sacrifice my view for the good of the neighborhood. (It's better my view be sacrificed than me.) So to keep their peace of mind and to keep my pieces in mind, I try for a tolerable appearance.
What can I say except what I usually say after trying to explain my perspective to either wife or neighbor: "Never mind. Sorry I brought it up. Yes, I have a shovel. No, I can do it." Furthermore, if it makes my wife happy, maybe it's worth it for that alone, in spite of the fact that (to me) it seems a bit overly optimistic of folks to expect us to make earth look better than the Creator made it look. But we can try! In fact, cultural norms say that we must try ... or have little choice but to try ... no matter how hopeless ... no matter how far (away in time this elusive perfect yard may be) ... an impossible dream, to be sure. There I go again ... being realistic. (knock, knock)
Excuse me; I must answer the door.
Oh, it's the neighborhood beautification committee!
What? You all read my essay on yard work?
Oh no, it won't be necessary to string me up by my non-green thumbs.
Please! Try to calm down!
It was merely a point of view ... only one way of looking at things.
I simply wanted to express that opinion ... and get it off my chest.
There ... I feel better now.
Ice Cream
As my wife and I watched the news the other evening, a 114-year-old woman was featured. Imagine that—114! Born in 1895! Of course, the traditional question to all such wonders of our fast-food world is the secret of her longevity. She answered, “Ice cream.” Ice cream!?! Not being one to doubt evidence from a study lasting 114 years (albeit a rather small control group), I immediately went to the store and bought two cartons of longevity—cherry at my wife’s request and chocolate for me.
It’s the most delicious health-food regimen I’ve been on for years. The fact that after four days in a row of this latest health plan I have a headache, pains in several places, feel awful, have a cold, am stuffed up, and can’t breathe, I’m sure is simply due to the body’s initial adjustments to more nutrition than it’s used to handling at such accelerated rates, in contrast to my previous and evidently deficient diet of grains, fruits, vegetables, and an occasional steak. One of my daughters commented that even if ice cream were not discovered as the latest in longevity juices, she’d rather live 60 years eating ice cream than 90 without. I can understand that. In fact, that was my approach to life … and it works … until you’re 59. But now that it is the carton of youth, all the better.
Nevertheless, on the fifth day of our new regimen, I wasn’t sure that I felt up to another couple of bowls of longevity, so I told my wife: “Maybe if I miss a day, I suppose making it to only 112 will still be okay.”
It’s the most delicious health-food regimen I’ve been on for years. The fact that after four days in a row of this latest health plan I have a headache, pains in several places, feel awful, have a cold, am stuffed up, and can’t breathe, I’m sure is simply due to the body’s initial adjustments to more nutrition than it’s used to handling at such accelerated rates, in contrast to my previous and evidently deficient diet of grains, fruits, vegetables, and an occasional steak. One of my daughters commented that even if ice cream were not discovered as the latest in longevity juices, she’d rather live 60 years eating ice cream than 90 without. I can understand that. In fact, that was my approach to life … and it works … until you’re 59. But now that it is the carton of youth, all the better.
Nevertheless, on the fifth day of our new regimen, I wasn’t sure that I felt up to another couple of bowls of longevity, so I told my wife: “Maybe if I miss a day, I suppose making it to only 112 will still be okay.”
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