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Photo by Joshua ChandlerWhen I was a young man, I began searching for the meaning of life. Along the way, I wrote a travel journal, a mix of prose and poetry, and labelled it Fool’s Odyssey.
My first real day began with an inhuman lack of sleep and a maliciously lingering fever. But I was anxious to squeeze the juice from life, so I took the Tube and bought a ticket for a West End show. I explored, ate Indian food for the first time, and went to the theatre!
I have no idea what the play was. Before the third act, about to enter vertical sleep, I left for my B&B, and fell into bed at 10. Amazingly, I slept better than any rock ever did, and awoke at 8, alert, feverless and famished–for everything.
At a Soho creperie, I guzzled coffee and planned the day ahead, and then, out the window, watched the sun…set. Wait–what?
“Excuse me, waiter. Why is the sun setting at 8:30?”
“It usually does at night, sir.”
“Night?”
“Take the wrong exit, did you? This is England, not Iceland.”
I’d slept for 22 hours! Still undaunted, I planned my wonderfully meaningless future.
For the world is in their hearts
and no one can know the meaning of life.
Abandon this search, I told myself.
For there is nothing better than that a man
Should rejoice in his accomplishments.*
Oh, those natty, woolen suits, they suited me well! I dreamed of owning a bunch, and of dating tight tee-shirted blondes like the ones in the Underground ads, and of having a fresh-squeezed, spit-clean Rolls-Royce in my colour-of-choice, and of being civilized and drinking gin. I’d stop searching and let my life begin! I’d want what I wanted, and be as wanton as they come.
And so it began, this vision of want and of have and of get,
To ravel itself around my brain.
I’d poked about in the ashes and found
A lovable con-artist in me.
I’d learned to “look out for number one.”
How good, how fun!
I’d be at the civilized center of self-esteem
And never repent of this new dream.
I’d run through the door of that old hotel
Like a six million dollar man,
Spitting out splinters, the knob still in my hand.
And all of the way down to Harrod’s, I’d plan.
I’d live in a would-be-could-be world
where I was arrogant and fine,
and paralyzed profits and crucified time.
I’d ranch the prairies
And build a dynasty:
“Someday, little darlin’, this’ll all be yurs,
as fur as the eye can see.
They’s gonna be a town over there,
and dogies, little dogies everwhur.
And we’ll name the town after our son,
and he’ll be rich and subjugate poor people,
just like we taught him to do.”
*Ecclesiastes 3:11-13 (paraphrased)
My Featured Blogger this week is Victor Negro, author, philosopher, founder of Evolving Minds Training and Consulting Personal Development and leader/teacher at The Sophia Club of Nigeria.
Never stop watering you dreams!
The Chinese bamboo tree takes five years to grow. The seed is planted, watered and fertilised every day but it doesn’t break out of the ground till after five years. Once it breaks through the ground, within five weeks it grows to 90 ft tall.
The question is: did the bamboo tree grow in five weeks or in five years? It grows 90 ft tall in five years! Because, at any time if the person stops watering and fertilising the dream of the bamboo tree, it would have died in the ground.
To some people, the five years that the bamboo seed is being watered seemed like foolishness. Why are you watering what is not growing? You’ve been out here for a long time; go get something else to do! You could hear people asking these questions with good intentions. It’s like hearing people say “how long have you been…
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‘Grasshopper Face’ by Boris Smokrovic (unsplash.com)Eddie was different. He sort of looked Chinese, and I liked that. He also talked different, and very little. And even though he was bigger, he didn’t seem as smart as me, but I didn’t mind. His mom seemed grateful when I visited, and offered non-stop treats. But Eddie had two big obsessions which kept us outside.
First, he collected string. Even the tiniest pieces were treasures. The moment Eddie found one, he’d add it to his humungous ball of string. Which I found kind of boring. But what happened next wasn’t!
One day, Eddie took his giant ball of string to a big tree out front, and began ceremoniously stringing it from limb to limb. He started with the lowest limbs, then climbed to reach the rest–and I got to help. After two days, the tree was a colossal spider’s web of string!
And then the fun began.
Eddie climbed up above the highest strings, and then dove down into the spider’s web, bouncing from level to level until he’d reached the ground! And so I did it too. It was epic! Once we’d reached the grass, we did it again! And again, and again, until we’d finally broken most of the string. Then Eddie began lovingly re-building his giant string ball for some future colossal spider’s web event!
Eddie’s other obsession was collecting grasshoppers. Cool, yes, but… He’d add the grasshoppers to his Red Flyer wagons after tearing off one of their legs in order to make them stay. “No!” I shouted, and ordered him to stop! But he absolutely refused. Which was not OK with me (remember the parakeets?).
So one day, while Eddie was inside, I pulled his wagons to the front yard and set all 200 grasshoppers free! When Eddie came back out, he was devastated. He screamed forever it seemed, and then sat down and began tearing up of handfuls of grass. I went home, thinking, Boy, Eddie really is weird.
I felt good, heroic, noble. So, even when Eddie’s mom told my mom about the Great Grasshopper Liberation, I refused to apologize. I was grounded for a week, but even then refused to relent. It turns out I rather enjoyed martyrdom.
Mommandad finally sat me down and explained: Eddie was what some people back then called a “mongoloid,” a type of “retarded” boy (he was much older than me), which gave him those “Chinese” eyes* I liked. He wouldn’t be going to kindergarten with me that fall, or ever, they said.
After that, I felt bad for Eddie and sort of apologized. On some level, it seemed, he was a one-legged grasshopper. But when school began and I found myself surrounded by “normal” kids, I suddenly felt like Weird Eddie myself. So from then on I made a point of befriending other weird kids…
Like me.
*Some people with Down Syndrome (the old term “mongoloid” was based on outdated, racist theories) have slightly upward slanting eyes.
I took this photo of magnolia buds on a recent walk. It may be the only time I’ve ever snapped a shot of tree buds. In fact, I rarely even notice them. Instead, early each spring I look at the “empty” tree limbs and wonder when they’ll ever “come to life.”
But of course, they already have.
Long before any signs appear, life is at work within them. And then the first signs—tiny, nascent buds—become visible. But only to those who look closely.
When we moved to Ohio, I noticed that redbuds were among the first trees to blossom in the spring, and that, although their flowers were beautiful, they were pink, not red.
“So why are they called redbuds,” I wondered aloud.
“Well, duh,” my wife gently replied, “because their buds are red.”
Why hadn’t I noticed that? Because I’d never actually looked at their buds. Once I did, I realized they had a beauty of their own, a subtle slow-growing beauty.
How many people are like that? Tragically, some never reach full flower at all. But others simply take a long, long time to get there. And so we fail see their sleepily developing promise of beauty. Instead, we see only their rough and scarred bark.
Maybe, if we look closer, we’ll learn to see the nascent good in others, to recognize their slow-growing beauty. And when we do…
Maybe they’ll even see it in us.
“Just as when we were children, we were afraid to be alone in the dark and could only be assured by the presence of someone who loved us. Well this is exactly what happened on Holy Saturday, the voice of God resounded in the realm of death. The unimaginable occurred; namely, love penetrated Hell.”
~Robert Cardinal Sarah
~AΩ~
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I walked into a church for the first time in my life on Easter morning 45 years ago. I’d never before heard the words “He is risen” or the traditional response “He is risen indeed!” much less said them. But as I spoke those words I sensed that my life would be 
changed forever. Mark Twain said the two most important days of your life are “the day you’re born and the day you find out why.” Easter 1976 was the day I found out why.
Is the Easter story your story? Or is it just Jesus’ story? Faith, real faith, is not a spectator sport. It’s hands-on-the-ball, up-to-your-cleats-in-the-mud participation. Jesus’ prayer for his followers–the reason He died and rose again–was “so that they may be one, as we (He and the Father) are one…so that the world may know.” (John 17:22-23)
People need to see Easter in us! Do others catch fire when they stand too close to you? If not, check to see if your Pilot light is out. 2 Corinthians 13:5 says, “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ is in you?”
Every Easter for a decade (until the pandemic struck last year), I had the privilege of leading fellow followers in my favorite variation on that traditional Easter greeting:
“He is risen.”
“He is risen in me!”
Note: Fool’s Odyssey, my search for the meaning of life, will resume next week.
Overgrown House 4 by Hoekemannen (flickr.com)I spotted a weasel in the spring of my 5th year. Apart from a few orange trees and an incinerator, our back yard was boring. The trees were too young to climb, and I’d already checked the incinerator for any treasures that might have survived the last trash-burning.
The sleek little weasel didn’t want to play. It saw me and took off like a high-speed monorail. So I chased it. Out of the yard and across the street into an overgrown lot. Through the weeds it raced, and down a tunnel of wooden arches choked with dead vines.
At the end of the tunnel, I found Crazy Old Alice. My first friend. Diminutive, shriveled, and dressed in a raggedy frock, she showed me her cottage. No, there was no furnace for cooking wayward children (although Alice was as skinny as a weasel). She didn’t want to eat me, she wanted to show me the massive soldier statue that dominated her tiny living room. She spoke very little and mumbled when she did, so it remained a mystery. There was almost no furniture other than the statue.
Then we went outside and Alice showed me her rabbits. “Easter Bunnies!” I thought. They lived in hutches and loved attention, so I began to visit regularly. I was Alice’s only friend.
I always brought carrots for the bunnies. But one day I caught Alice stealing their carrots! I told her it was wrong to steal, especially from Easter bunnies. But she continued to do it.
A few weeks later, I was climbing through the overgrown arches, when a tall, scary man suddenly lifted me up by my shirt collar. He shouted, using all sorts of bad words, and told me he’d kill me if he ever caught me there again!
That night, I dreamed I was climbing through the vine-choked arches–only now they were electrical wires! The scary man was at the end of the tunnel, laughing menacingly. Then I accidentally touched a wire, fell to the ground…and died! (More on that here.)
I finally told my parents about my visits to see Alice and the Easter bunnies, and about the man who’d used bad words and threatened to kill me. They were stunned, and went straight over to Crazy Old Alice’s cottage. What they discovered was horrendous:
Alice, the widow of a decorated war hero (the soldier statue), was only in her late 40s, but she’d had a stroke. She lived on a hero’s pension, but it was regularly cashed and pocketed by her son, the tall scary man. As her legal guardian, he provided her with a few meager canned goods and an occasional cheap smock. She was starving and alone.
But no more. The neighbors had Alice’s son arrested, cleaned up her house, and showered her with food and clothing.
I was no longer her only friend.
My Real Memoir is a series. To read the next one, click here.
