Just yesterday, the General gave me the benefit of her unsolicited wisdom. Yes – indeed, I am a lucky man! How did she express it? She said: “If I didn’t start paying attention to my posture and stand up straight when I walk, I’ll wind-up stooped and be unable to walk without looking at the ground. She even mimicked her perception of my stance. I was not amused.
Frankly, I didn’t see the humor. Of course, a gentleman would never strike a lady with his cane. I suspect it was to my benefit and perhaps hers, that I didn’t have one. However, I do have a collection of several. That is not a veiled threat, but a statement of fact.
Life does go by quickly and things inexplicitly change. The thing vividly clear in my memory is the wonderful time we enjoyed in Maine. Our friends who lived near us in the hill country of Texas relocated from a summer heat wave in Texas and went north to the cold country. We visited them in the fall of the year. The leaves were beginning to turn colors, but had not yet reached their colorful zenith and they had not begun to fall.
I awakened early this morning. Actually, it was much earlier than I wanted to get out of bed, so I didn’t. From the hours of two-to-five, I thought of many things. Some were bothersome. When a bothersome thought surfaced, bringing a scowl to my face, I rolled the roulette wheel inside my head another time. Why let the bothersome thoughts of yesterday or days before, contaminate and spill over into today? To do so, is like drinking lukewarm coffee filled with poison. It isn’t good to the taste and it has the capacity to slowly drain the life from you.
At some point in the early morning hours, I heard my mother telling me: “Into every life some rain must fall.” There was a playfulness in her voice that didn’t echo with a sense of doom, but it was more like gentle redirection.
So, this morning the roulette wheel landed on a memory. I was four or five years old and disappointed that the downtown parade had been cancelled because of rain. Periodically, over the period of childhood, mother reminded me and my brothers that in each life some rain must fall.
Do you ever wonder when your mother or dad learned the sage advice they often offered to an inquiring mind or self-determined youngster bent of self-destruction? “Into every life, some rain must fall”.
Could either of them have borrowed the phrase of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? For that matter, Longfellow was only thirty-five years old when he folded the line into the last stanza of his poem. Reportedly, Longfellow was living in Portland, Maine when he wrote: “Rainy Day”.
It reads like this:
“The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary”.
Perhaps Longfellow’s reminder that the sun is still shining is an antidote to the level of despair one could easily draw from today’s environment. Yesterday, I found myself longing for my old life back. I have grown weary of the self-imposed stay-in-place that has made me a prisoner in my own home.
Zoom is a wonderful gift, but a poor substitute at best for face-to-face, in-person conversation, a shared meal, and the freedom to seek adventure in far-away places without having to be in quarantine for fourteen days after arriving.
Of course, my mother was right. Into each life, some rain must fall. Perhaps one of the best ways we can take care of ourselves is to remember to turn the roulette wheel inside our heads when a negative thought, an unpleasant memory or a feeling of despair surfaces.
It might even be a good time for a road-trip in the Miata. Of course, I’d have to drive at night because it is way too hot for a rag-top down experience in the day time.
All My Best!
Don