Musings:
• The chief cause of divorce is marriage. You read that right, dear reader. Humans marry for the wrong reasons. They marry too young. They marry the wrong person. They marry because of social pressure. They marry because they become unexpected parents. Some couples realize they made a mistake early on, but remain married until the kids are grown up.
No one should marry until having reached 30 years of age. By this time, there will have been a few life experiences under their belts and are mature enough to enter marriage with a clearer idea of what it means.
• Have you noticed how a lot of young men slouch when they sit down and spread their legs wide? There is a cultural reason why they do this which goes back hundreds of thousands of years. When a group of male monkeys gather together, they all display their genitals in order to determine which one is the alpha monkey. Because most human males suffer from delusions of grandeur, their posture gives them away. Just saying.
• Time to get serious, folks. I read with interest the essay in The Voice of 15 September written by my colleague, Barb Nadeau, and it gave me pause to think about my own mission in life.
I have been a clerk at a local YMCA, a taxi driver, and a librarian (in that order), and I have interacted with hundreds of people, young and old, male and female (and perhaps the in-betweeners), and of different races/ethnicities. The only thing I was able to give all of them was courtesy which all human beings deserve and expect.
Barb’s essay brought to mind one particular elderly person with whom I interacted during my taxi-driving days. I included that encounter in an essay I wrote for the “Common Sense” column in TONIT (that other newspaper in town), dated 20 April 2000. I quote:
“When I was still driving a taxi, one of my current assignments was to transport a select group of senior citizens to and from Mercy Center’s Behavioral Health Center building for counseling sessions. One passenger was a dear sweet lady in her 80’s who resided at Jennings Terrace…
“I‘ll call her ‘Rose’ for that was what she was to me, a rose amongst the brambles. Rose and I would talk away during the entire trip, and often we’d stroll down memory lane; she’d see a building and would comment upon its history in Aurora, and I’d contribute my few bits of memory. Rose loved poetry, and we’d talk about that too. It was always a pleasure to see her, and our times together were much too brief.
“Sadly, Rose had a dark side, a thorn, if you will. She was severely depressed. She didn’t like going to the sessions, she kept telling me, because she wasn’t interested in listening to other people’s problems, and she didn’t care to talk about hers in public.
“She believed she had lived long enough, life no longer had any meaning for her, and she wanted to die. Frankly, I was embarrassed by this direction of our conversations, and I tried to put a happy spin on it. Whether I succeeded is a moot point.
“Rose claimed the only time she was happy was when she was with me….”
Occasionally, I think of “Rose,” and I wonder when she was finally granted her fondest wish. I doubt that she received it when she wanted to receive it. Euthanasia is frowned upon in the medical community in these United States. In a way, her passing was a great loss, not only to me personally, but because (1) she was such a delightful person to be with and (2) she had much to contribute to the cultural environment of Aurora. She was, to use a hoary old cliché, “one in a million.”
Just a thought.