Friday the Thirteenth

It’s your story. Feel free to hit ‘em with a plot twist any moment. Author Unknown

Friday the 13^th came a few weeks late for us this September past.

Now, I am not one of those who associates Friday the Thirteenth with bad luck or portents of doom. If anything, those days have been filled with blessings and all sorts of good things over the years, so I’ve never given them much thought. Besides, I don’t ponder life’s happenstances in terms of luck – good OR bad.

Life is, and we take it as it comes. If there is a correlation to be found, it is generally that we get what we expect. If we expect bad things to happen, they do. If we expect good things to happen, they do. Some of that has to do with seeing what we expect to see.

Some people look at clouds and foresee rain. Others look at clouds and see dragons or bunnies. I admire those who perceive the fanciful in cloud formations. Rain and snow are real enough for me; I’ll take fluffy bunnies and wonky doggies any day of the week!

The other day, though, was another matter. Barb-the-love-of-my-life and I went down to the local Department of Licensing to convert our drivers licenses to the new and improved “Enhanced” licenses so that we will be able to board planes or travel into Canada from time to time. The local DOL was virtually empty, so we were called up immediately. I presented my documents to the smiling, pleasant clerk, and within just a few minutes, I paid my fee and was finished.

Barb, on the other hand, was stymied. Since her birth name differed from her married name, she needed a copy of the marriage license before her clerk could proceed. We drove home, grabbed the marriage license out of our files and returned with it to the DOL, and presented it to the clerk with whom Barb had been working. The clerk admired the document but told us it wasn’t acceptable as it wasn’t a “certified” copy.

I pointed out to the clerk that not only was it an original document, but it had allowed us to make several children! She apologized, spoke with her supervisor, and informed us (with some regret) that we needed a “certified” copy of the marriage license issued by the county in which we were married.

Now, we could have gotten all hot and bothered, but the law is what it is, and while I may (personally) think it truly stupid that all the documents we brought to prove we are who we are were insufficient for obtaining the document we were seeking, so-be-it; we’d move along and send away for what we need. We’ll return when we have it (probably a week or so) and that’ll be that.

We then left there and went to a pharmacy to have passport photos taken (as our passports had expired and were in need of renewing). The clerk pulled out his camera, sent me to where I needed to stand, and – nothing. The camera battery had died and he wouldn’t be able to take any pictures for at least a half an hour. Uff da!

So we wandered over to the pharmacy counter to turn in some old, expired prescription drugs, for we were told they had a disposal/return service. Nope. Wrong again. Not only did they have dead batteries in their cameras, they weren’t part of the drug-return program advertised on television, either. Uff da x2!

We left the store, got back into the car, looked at each other, and I said, “Well, it looks like Friday the Thirteenth came a couple of weeks late for us.”

To say that life throws curves is an old, tired cliché, but it’s true. Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed, but when things need doing, there’s no use putting them off, and if challenges arise, we simply face them, address them, and when finished, we move on. It’s called “acting like grown-ups.”

If the worse thing to happen on a given day is a dead battery or bureaucratic snafu, that’s not bad. We have the basic necessities of life – and more. We’ve got clouds. We can see rain, or we can see dragons. The choice is always ours in this, our valley.

Tripping Into Fall

It’s your story. Feel free to hit ‘em with a plot twist any moment. Author Unknown

The weather has cooled down significantly. The grass has turned a brilliant green as it re-awakens from its summer slumbers – a final shot at life before going back to sleep for the winter. We’ve still got some flowers blooming their heads off in the yard as they don’t seem to have gotten the memo that “the seasons – they are a changin’.”

Fall is and always has been my favorite time of year. As a child, fall meant leaving those dog days of summer behind and going back to school to rub elbows with friends and buddies I hadn’t seen for a couple of months. It meant kicking through piles of leaves that littered the sidewalks – making like an NFL kicker out to “win it” for the team. It meant watching in fascination “helicopter” seeds falling from the maple trees, spinning their way to earth.

The start of school also meant new clothes! It meant jeans that were generally too long (in September; just right around Valentine’s Day; looking pretty “high water” come school-years’ end); it meant shirts with sharp-pointed collars and rich, clearly identifiable colors; it meant full-length #2 pencils (complete with bright pink erasers and perfectly pristine points of lead); it meant a completely fresh start, with clean blackboards (which would eventually become green-boards – long before the advent of efficient (but boring) white-boards and dry-erase markers).

No one ever accused me of being a scholar back in those halcyon days of yore, but the fact is I was seldom bored. I enjoyed school. I enjoyed going to classes, as well as recess and lunch. I appreciated having each day laid out in an orderly fashion – dependable in its purpose and rhythm.

I am sure there were bullies in those days, too, but I honestly don’t remember ever having to deal with them. I do recall stepping in to break up a wrestling match where one lad was definitely bullying another kid. The bully and I wrestled a bit while the unfortunate target of his abuse ran off to safety, but when we were done that was that and nothing more ever came of it. Life rolled along and was delightful in that it was primarily and blissfully uneventful for the most part.

The scariest part of living in the 50s and 60s was the threat of nuclear war. I didn’t pay much attention to world events in those days, but the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Kennedy administration was the closest thing to feeling we were going to be vaporized and become an extinct species I’d ever felt. But I also trusted in God and in the “rightness” of the American way of life and the probability that we would come through this crisis just like we had come through the past couple of world wars. So I kept the faith and never lost hope. The fear of nuclear annihilation never dominated my attention for more than a minute or two at a time.

Those days are long gone, of course. I am in the autumnal years of my life, and just as the fall betokened new life in a strange sort of way for we school-aged wee-ones, so do these present days do the same for me now.

I am able, in retirement, to spend time doing the things that energize me. At least that’s the theory. The fact is that without the daily rhythm and routine of life’s labors, work schedules, appointments, and such what-not, I’ve had to wrestle with what it means to have that so-called leisure time. Once the house is clean, the dishes done, the lawn mowed and trimmed – what is there?

Life has been good to us. God has been good to us. Retirement is not the end of work (or life, for that matter), but an opportunity to sharpen new pencils, kick new leaves, and seek out new helicopter seeds with which to be fascinated and mesmerized. As always, we are beckoned to move forward with eyes wide open lest we trip and fall (and enjoy a Pumpkin Spice Latte, if one so wishes).

Ultimately, we each are called to continue becoming what God has called us to be here in this, our autumnal valley – God’s children, each and every one.