Guess I Must Be Having Fun
Write with a smile. Somewhere close by in this tangled garden of narrative those four words are strung together as a guidepost. In “53 Things I’ve Learned”, “Write with a smile” lives one drifting thought before “Life is too short for light beer, lame cars or hard feelings” and four after “Turning down ice cream is always a mistake”. Which, I suppose, was a prescient clue I might one day reside in America’s Dairyland.
The 53 Things I’ve Learned wing of this free gallery of jabberings began as Fifty Things I’ve Learned By Fifty. It was originally published in the Des Moines Register, as I recall. There were two sad parts, which did not make it explicitly into the list. The small sad part was I offered it up to the Des Moines Register rather than the Quad City Times because I had grown a little tired of the Times’ negativity, suburban bias and false piety by then, and saw no reason to provide them free content.
The big sad part was I eulogized dear ol’ Dad on my prior birthday, and was more than a little contemplative about the year that had passed, and the years ahead without his guidance. So I re-read the eulogy and tried to assemble the path forward. In words, as I am wont to do.
Being born on New Years’ Eve makes year math more tricky than you might at first think so, it is not one of my strengths. Add that to the list. Thusly challenged to remember years correctly, we are somewhere in the early teens since the semi-nonsensical inventory was first unleashed on the unsuspecting folk of middle Iowa. The catalog has expanded a little since then (haven’t we all?) but it will remain at 53 because … reasons.
Reason #1 is fifty is too many to start with. Editing is on the long list of things I ain’t good at. Multiple times, in fact. If Christianity has ten commandments and Buddhism gets by with just four noble truths, where do I get off with fifty or more life tenets? No wonder I flunked out of high school English so much I did not graduate with my class.
Anyway, Reason #2 is I would have to pay the graphic designer to update the 53 to be a different number and that, combined with Reason #1, just seems silly.
Where was I? Scroll upward. Oh yeah, some number of years more than ten since the first list. Three jobs, three states, five places to live since the 50 list. Graduations, births, deaths, that rainy Wednesday night in Cleveland. 100K city problems replaced by mountains replaced by fire-fighting for adventure. Some days you win, some days you lose, some days it rains. A few things added to the list, a few removed, a few tweaked.
Write with a smile remains.
It is not “see with a smile”, “read with a smile” or “listen with a smile”. There is injustice, guile, trauma and sadness in the world. Some of it gets visited upon you from hundreds and thousands of miles away. Some of it lawyers get paid to write about you. Some of it gets dug out of ground long since tilled and prosperous to land at your feet.
Do not step in it. Do not trod it into your home, or place of work, or other places of joy.
Someone called me yesterday from Davenport with questions. Fair questions, answered honestly. An old friend from Davenport also called me (from Seaside of all places) last week and we chatted for a bit. His family is on vacation and he stopped into Seaside City Hall to say hi, and found I had moved on (cue the forlorn Seaside staff, missing the cupcakes I'd bring from the bakery). The old friend is distraught about Davenport governance and I commiserated a little, but kept steering the discussion toward happiness.
We are - all of us - temporal input / output creatures. Small collectives of sinew, synapse and sentience; living and breathing, loving and aching, for the blink of an eye in the span of Earthly time. The inputs can be truly awful, and wholly out of our control. But our spirit controls the outputs.
Write with a smile. Work for a just future. Extend a helping hand. Leave places better than you found them. Never for money, always for love. Depart not with sadness, regret or rancor, but with enduring works and a joke carved into your tombstone.
