Life's filters
We all look at life through our own set of ever-changing filters.
Shaded and otherwise, ever-changing, adjusted for mood, age and state of mind,
A lot of folks remember the Readers� Digest version of Shakespeare�s �All the World�s A Stage . . .�
The uncondensed version is a longer soliloquy about all of us basically going through life as the lead role in our own play. Other folks come onto the set (into our lives) and play their roles while at the same time starring in their own life�s plays. Maybe there is a Master Director, maybe not. Maybe we are our own directors.
Some random thoughts popped into my world the past several weeks and I finally realized they all were about life�s filters.
I (we) get ripped by readers sometimes. My own favorite letter to the editor here so far came from an (un)happy mom. Never mind that the team she favored lost by more than 40, while scoring no points of their own and with no ballcarrier with positive yardage. This mom wanted a positive spin or she�d read the report somewhere else. No other paper covers her team�s games.
Gaithersburg, Mary-and, is annually listed as the most affluent community in the United states, per capita income.
There has been a sniper on the loose in that area and the sniper has struck in Gaithersburg.
I worked the first five years out of college in the South with a friend who is from Gaith-ersburg. His life in newspapering has brought him back home. He is the college football editor for USA Today and you can work there and commute easily to Gaithersburg and so he does. He used to kid me about being from Gary and I him about being from the affluent side of the tracks.
I have added him and his family to my daily prayers.
He Emailed me back:
� Questions you thought you'd never have to answer from your 10-year-old daughter: What's a sniper? Why can't I wear my patrol belt?
�The county is not letting student patrols do any duty since they could be seen as targets. Parents have been volunteering.
� Lots of activities canceled. It's a tragic situation.
�Thanks for thinking of us . . . �
For now, his hometown had surpassed my hometown of Gary for senseless crime. Neither of us had the ability to have imagined that happening. My life filters and his did not prepare us for such an eventuality. And, on the real-world level, it is two old friends also dads comparing how-would-you-answer queries asked by a child.
By the way, a professionally trained U.S. Military Sniper wants the media to stop using the word because this whacko�s work is not a professional (I guess he can tell) and the use of sniper in this context is demeaning to real snipers. It�s always the media�s fault, you know.
But then . . .
I solicited letters from second-graders about Fall.
We are printing them today.
It is my honor and privilege to type them into the system because I want to make sure we print them exactly as they are written and, mostly, because they enlighten and lift me.
Sure enough, there are a couple in there that makes me want to hug the writers. There are some plain hilarious ones as well.
Because these are from Argos, one of our many hometowns, the children all want to play the national game as they see it, soccer. That is a neat perspective to me; the children of a soccer-playing town get the message.
Then I go home, flop on the couch and there is my living perspective: Mikayla.
Meghan, the soon-to-be-18-year-old-teen-queen, has kept me rooted in adolescence for some time now; Mik-Mak is bringing back childhood.
My dad died when I was 15 and he was 43. I had my first of two major operations the year I turned 43, in which I left parts of me which were more than 40 years old in operating rooms each time.
But I did not die, obviously.
I see Megs� past seven years as a blessing in which I have allowed to partake. She has become a young woman. If I had checked out when my dad did, I would have missed that as much as she would have missed me.
So, every day, my life�s filter watches and remembers childhood to adolescence to now.
In those seven years, Patti and I have lost one child to a miscarriage and Mikayla has arrived wholly healthy.
When I get home at night, no matter what time the clock says, Mikayla knows it is time to participate in whatever I want to do, from going outside to see if we can find the moon to going into the basement to do laundry to just practicing her leaps from the back of the couch to the back of the dad.
One night, I went outside to retrieve something from the old red truck.
She heard the door bang shut and was sure I had forgotten to include her in a moon search. As I was getting whatever it was, I heard the door bang again and the slap slap of those little feet rushing to meet me.
She chose the wrong side of the vehicle and sailed down the driveway.
Suddenly there was terror and a d-a-d-d-y! wail and the slap slap in high gear as she found me.
As I held her and looked at the darkened driveway, I realized, exchanging my size for hers and the proper proportionality of the driveway, it would have been like me looking down a darkened football field.
At that moment, all that mattered was the hug, the murmurs of satisfaction at reaching her goal of her dad holding her and a moonlit night in small-town Indiana.
A life filter in all the colors.
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