Rather than relying on my unreliable memory, I should have looked up Daniel Day Lewis who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Lincoln. I wrote that he starred in No Country for Old Men. Not so, he starred in the equally gruesome There Will Be Blood, according to an e-mail sent by Steve, an eagle-eyed and precise Irvington librarian.
“Happiness is in your own back yard.” — Dorothy, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
I fear that Mr. and Mrs. Clarkenstein have created a little monster. Independently, Bill and I each gave charming Squirrelie peanuts twice yesterday. Two other squirrels showed up to steal his nuts. Eek! The three of them began to fight at my feet. “That’s it,” I said. “No more nuts today!” Later Squirrelie came back and stared through the window. He perched on a piece of driftwood in the flower bed from which he ran back and forth to the door if one of us moved. “Please, please, please!” “No!” said Bill. Then Squirrelie jumped up onto the frozen water of the birdbath, sat up on his haunches as still as a statue, paws raised in a prayerful attitude as if he were saying, “Oh divine Mrs. Peanut whom I love best of all, bring me some nuts.” He reminds me of a cocker spaniel that Bill had who looked at us with big brown, melting eyes while we were eating and of Vicki and Tom’s chocolate lab. I resisted his blandishments. Angrily he shook his tail. “Bring out them nuts, or else!” Nope.
Be the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher of your own streams and oceans, explore your own higher latitudes . . . be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought . . . it is easier to sale many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans of one’s being alone.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I was pleased when a pair of purple finches came to the feeder along with a glossy red-winged blackbird with pretty bars on its wings. Bill’s niece, Candy, wrote to me once about how thrilled she was at seeing a huge gathering of hundreds of robins in her yard. “It takes very little to make me happy.” She is very wise. Most of us have higher expectations of happiness than our lives can deliver, or we mourn for what once was but will never be again.
The awesome journey of Lewis and Clarke, the stories about Lady Hester Stanhope who deserted stuffy Victorian England and ended up in Lebanon, and the adventurous travels of Richard Haliburton fascinate me. One has visions of high adventures and great achievements when one is young, but time passes; and one is no longer young. Instead of planning adventures, perhaps one worries about what is going to become of one as the vicissitudes of old age creep in.
I know / it’s hard to be reconciled not everything is exactly / the way it ought to be but please turn around / and step into the future leave memories behind / enter the land of hope
— Zbignief Herbert
Dwelling on what one has missed and what cannot be rather than what is makes one sad, petulant and needy. I am not too old to profit from the examples of others. One of our friends with whom we taught in Franklin Twp., ninety-nine-year-old, sharp-as-a-tack Helen Ernstes, a longtime Irvington resident and staunch member of Irvington Presbyterian, decided that it was time to change direction and move into assisted living in Lebanon. I called her: “Helen, are you happy?” “Of course I’m happy. I made the decision before I came here that I would be happy. If you decide that you’ll be happy, you will be!” All of us could profit from her example. wclarke@comcast.net