Stay curious.  Why exactly did your car fail to start?  How much do know about anything?  Who made the clothes you are wearing?  If you are not curious, you are not really alive.  Curiosity engenders enthusiasm for living and makes each day more fun.The older I get, the more I know, the more I know how little I really know.

Be an active citizen.  You can vote.  Your female ancestors could not.  Your dark-skinned friends could not even have used the same public bathrooms you do when I was young.  Who changed that?  Why do the cars you ride in have shoulder harnesses?  Does your drinking water have harmful chemicals in it?  Why are U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan ready to die for you?  Who controls that?  A person who does not vote endangers life for all of us.  Government is the “we the people” of the Declaration of Independence.  It is our collective whole and more precious than any single commercial activity.   Citizen participation in our democracy gives us a chance to express a humanitarian good that benefits mankind.

Work hard. Working earns you money but more than anything it allows you to become a full person.  When you are working, you are part of something bigger than you are.  You are expressing who are by the way you work.  Every worker is important and deserves respect.  All work, especially blue collar work, should be dignified.

Engage your fellow your human beings in a positive way.  Push the up button on the personal relationship elevator.  How you act affects others.  You have an obligation to do no harm in contact with others.  Every small human contact is a chance to help someone even if all you do is act pleasant.

Realize your lucky circumstances.  Americans are a small fraction of all the people in the world.  We are lucky citizens in a country that was formed in a favorable geographical region in the Age of Reason.  By virtue of being born in this country we have natural advantages that few other people in the world have.

Be a good steward of the planet.  What right do you have to buy something and discard it in a landfill?  Why should your house be cool or warm if the energy demanded for your comfort damages the environment?  What do you recycle?  How efficient is your transportation?  We all need to breathe air.  Earth has just one atmosphere.

Seek common ground.  Conversation is an art and within the art you have an obligation to give the person you are speaking to a way to talk back.  Listen more than you talk.   In any controversial area look for some middle ground.

Change your mind.  Nothing and no one is constant.  Keep Emerson in mind: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds adored by philosophers and divines.”

Be comfortable with who you are.  Study the world and apply what you learn to yourself.  After you come to know who you are, be yourself.  If you are odd or out of step by nature in one way or another, live with the rhythm that you find within yourself over time.

Know history.  It is a tool that allows us to live better.  We all stand on the shoulders of others.  How did you get to be where you are now in your time?  What social actions, events, and inventions created the society you live in?

 

 

 

 

 

After five p.m. on a Saturday is not the best time to float a kayak at River Walk Park.  The Pump House Restaurant near the launch ramp was beyond packed because it was prom night.  The traffic on both the I-77 and U.S. 21 bridges was disturbing.  Somewhere in the background a voice from microphone at a nearby event made the irritating breathy sound I associate with certain ministers on local cable television.  I was exactly in the middle of the Catawba River that runs through the fastest growing county (2016) in the United States.

I gave up on casting around the big rocks near the launch ramp and headed a half mile down river toward Spratt Island and swung left into the flooded channel on the Fort Mill side of the river.  I found some noise relief and the privacy that comes from a canopy that encloses the waterway.

Just around the second bend I took my eye off the current and traced the flashing bright white of the bald eagle that took off aloft hard enough to rock the limb it was perched on just before I saw it.

Slightly right and then mostly up in it circled above the giant steel power transmission towers looking back toward the spot it had left.  I stared at to for awhile and left it perched again on one of the power lines to find my way into a more overgrown smaller branch of the Catawba River.

Ever seen an old photo of a well-dressed man from the 1950s wearing two-toned dress shoes?  The white tail feathers and white head bring that unexpected two at once experience to mind.  Nothing neutral there.  It is meant to stick out.

(April 23, 2017)

I built a quick crude seesaw this week to show Nita something I was thinking about.  In my mind I keep going back to the newly built Saluda Elementary School of my youth.

We first graders started off at the old three-story school that was just over two blocks behind my house toward the very edge of the town of Saluda.  Several months into the year we moved to the flat-roofed new school that was for grades one through six.  It still exists.  Zigzagging I walked about two blocks in front and across from my house to get to it.

Stand in front of it and look left to see what was the first and second grade side that was interrupted by the office and cafeteria near the middle.  To the right was the slightly longer upper grades side.  It had big bathrooms.  Our toilet facilities were in room.

What I struggle to remember with precision is the exactness of the lower grades playground that stood behind the building.  In line with the very end of the building and Mrs. Boozer’s room on the back–my first-grade home–stood the first of two or three steel swings.  I think each had four seats.  The piping was big and secure.  My hands would not come close to closing around it.

I’ll say there were three swings.  What came next in line as one moved down toward the cafeteria that jutted out from the rear of the low-slung modern contemporary building was the merry-go-round.  It could probably hold twenty kids.  The fine dust that piled up around it swept over shoes in the manner of a ballplayer sliding into a base.

The last piece of equipment was the see-saw, if my memory is accurate.  Like the previous structures it was heavy steel and had long wooden seats.  That is where I learned to seesaw.

Let’s say Tommy Rankin was opposite me.  All we had to do was assume a normal middle position and hold on the upright handle bars.  Automatically we were nearly balanced.  I could jack him up by moving backwards to the tip of my seat.  He could counter and do me one better by daring to lean way back.  Slight nudges forward or backward brought immediate big aerial changes.

Seesawing requires finesse and is limited to two.  I think that is why some of us had trouble with it.  I could ride with a big kid or a smaller one but I had to be willing to push back in my seat or slide up.  My bigger or smaller partner had to work within parameters to make the whole ride work.

Sometimes a lack of patience or just plain meanness resulted in a hard bump down.  Likely I wasn’t smart enough or lacked a good partner to ride it in a pleasing way often.  Come to think of it, I think girls were the best seesawers.  Being smart and cooperative comes more naturally to them.

Those swing, merry-go-round and seesaw rides soon gave way to my passion for throwing balls in the space in between the lower grade wing and the play equipment. I can remember consistently being among the last of the boys from the football game to grudgingly go in, testing the endurance of the waiting teacher.

For various reasons I go back to what I did not not work hard enough on in my halcyon days: the perfect balance of a seesaw ride that allows two people to be suspended perfectly in the air riding safely above the Earth but not quite touching it.  (March 5, 2017)