Here are a few very small stories. I should mention that my parts in them are ostensibly true.
#1 long ago, in the waning years of the Eisenhower administration, when I was quite young, I went to a kindergarten. This was a rather progressive Kindergarten, we had a very large room (well, maybe I was that small…) where we took naps, played games, and we had large tables to sit at. There were maybe seven or eight students to a table.
I remember one day in the early spring, the sun was shining, and while I sat at my big table with many other students, I noticed that the pretty young girl (maybe all girls in Kindergarten are pretty…) sitting to my right (OK, I do remember that it was to my right hand side, but I was hazy about that term back then). She was in the process of wetting her ‘pants, in this case, it was a pretty sun dress. I recall vividly seeing all of this silhouetted in the sunlight. I was, understandably, quite disturbed by this and tried to get her attention, since she was wetting her pants after all…
Well, I was not a master of the psychology of personal interaction in those days (nor now…sigh), and I was ultimately impelled to get her attention any way I could…. I pinched her.
At this point caterwauling immediately began, and the teacher came to the situation. I was expecting to see this unfolding (spreading…?) mess taken care of. What happened was that the teacher dealt with the situation using not a sense of justice, but of some misguided sense of experience. At least, this is what I thought later that day.
I was sent to sit alone, in the dark, in the cloak room…
I still feel a sense of outrage at this miscarriage of justice.
#2 many years later, I was living in Minneapolis. I had a small apartment, and a good enough job. I was happy. As I approached my thirtieth birthday, many of my older friends would tell me about how hard that year was to bear. They talked about the wall of depression they went through, about the newfound sense of fatality they now had to endure.
I thought that sounded pretty interesting.
By birthday is in ht elate summer, and that particular year it was a beautiful, sunny day. I woke up, and heard the birds singing, the sun was already climbing in the sky. As the morning devolved, I began to see that I was not dealing with any walls of depression, I felt no new, or old sense of fatality about my life.
The net result was that because I didn’t feel depressed… I felt depressed.
#3 centuries ago, in Asia, Tamerlane the Great was the ruler of most of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and even parts of Kazakhstan. He was really called Timur the lame because…he was lame. He was the complete overlord of most of central Asia. After this point, when I felt that he had conquered enough land, he spent the rest of his life consolidating his empire. He summoned as many clerics, wise men, monk, and holy men that he could, from as many different religions and schools as were in his empire. He had only one question for them to answer… he gave them a year.
Tell me one phrase I can use in every situation, one that will always be fitting.
A year passed, and the wise men, clerics, and monks returned from their deliberations and gave him the answer…
This too, shall pass…
When I was still living in Minneapolis, I had (at this time) a couple of roommates. We got along quite well, there was rarely any friction, and if you have ever had roommates you know how rare that is.
It was a Friday evening, in that part of the year where it is too late to be called summer, and too early to really be part of autumn. I finished working at my job, and stopped off to have a drink with some friends. When I got home I found ht at the apartment was dark, except for some candles flickering in the kitchen.
It seems that one of my roommates had taken up a deep interest in the Tarot. She was giving readings to my other roommate, her boyfriend, and a few others who must have wanted to have their ‘cards read’.
I just wanted to go to bed, and while all of this ‘Stevie Nicks’ sort of stuff may seem charming (at some distance), I was just tired. So I asked her to answer a question for me.
How and when would I die?
I swear that the candles almost guttered…well it certainly felt that way after I leveled this sort of buzz kill question onto them. She spent some time working on this conundrum, and finally came back to me with an answer.
I will die in relative obscurity, and relative insanity.
I thought that sounded pretty cool at the time. But now I see that I could have died any time since that evening in the early 1990’s, and as a matter of fact, almost every man, woman, and child could have died and this would statistically fir them too! How many people do you know who aren’t seen (occasionally) as a little crazy and how many world famous friends do you have…?
I think that Tamerlane would have been one of the few who didn’t fit this appellation.
By the way, I think it still fits.
