Three Events

March 8, 1999

Three events this day inspire this musing.

First, Joe DiMaggio died. The press, TV, and radio are fulsomely relating his distinguished life and stellar baseball career. Apart from occasional TV, I saw Joltin’ Joe only once in a baseball game at Fenway Park. My clear memory is his lining a hit between center and right fields. Ordinarily a double, nearing second base, Joe glanced over his right shoulder and accelerated going over second to third and sliding safely under the throw. He had a long, loping stride that was faster than it appeared. A sports reporter noted that DiMaggio had never been thrown out going from first to third.

My other DiMaggio memory is of a clerk in the warehouse at Quonset Naval Air Station during WW2. She was still in her teens. As she studied her typing notes, she was singing a children’s chant,

“Joe, Joe, DiMaggio
We want you on our side.”

Second, while waiting to be picked up at the Y, a woman entered, her T-shirt bearing the message:

“Aging is inevitable
Maturity is optional.”

I thought to myself, “Right On.”

Third, Peanuts in today’s cartoon is in bed with Snoopy on top of the quilt. In the first panel, Peanuts says, “Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, ‘Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?’”

In the second panel he goes on, “Then a voice comes to me out of the dark and says, ‘We hate to to tell you this, but life is a thousand word essay.’”

I find synergy between the message on the T-shirt and Peanuts’ soliloquy. Life and living are too complex for easy answers or uninformed guesses. “Maturity” may depend somewhat on one’s age. There was a time, like so many teen-agers, I believed it was mature to be old enough to get a driver’s license, to acquire an auto, and smoke cigarettes.

Now, as an “old old” as the statisticians classify me, I am bold enough to suggest certain distinguishing qualities of maturity. This is today’s list. If I wrote it heretofore or days hence, there would be differences.

Neither do I assert or imply that I have lived up to these, my measures of maturity. But I have tried to so believe and act. Peanuts might object that this is more than a thousand-word essay, but here goes:

WE have the power and/or potential to use critical-thinking when faced with issues and problems. Use that power.

Recognize both a sense of limits and unrealized opportunities.

Do your best daily with appointed tasks and prepare to sleep with no self-condemning remorse.

Be plain-spoken with no cruel intention.

AS long as it commands your mind and your heart, keep and serve your faith. In Henry VIII (Act 3, Sc. 2), Shakespeare has Cardinal Wolsey say to Cromwell,

“Had I but serv’d my God with half the zeal
I serv’d my King, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.”

Read YOUR sacred scripture, whether Torah, Christian Gospel, Koran, Buddhist or other Asian insights, Shakespeare, Adam Smith, Emerson, Marx or whatever. Believe me, the rewards for as little as two or three paragraphs a week are fresh insights as well as rediscovery of what, for you, is enduring wisdom.

Be a thermostat not a thermometer. In important situations or issues, where you have informed convictions, try to set the temperature rather than just reflect it.

Keep love in your life. Give love – it will sustain you.

Be aware that the artist, sculptor, poet, musician, composer, playwright, actor, film-maker portray our human condition in ways that can reinforce our better hopes and dreams, as well as by their vivid, creative representations remind us that we humans can be brutal, selfish, greedy, bigoted.

Recognize, with all honor and respect to our prized individuality, that everyone exists by the presence of community – family, religious, medical, academic, fraternal, labor, business, city, nation, world. Hillary’s title, IT TAKES A VILLAGE, has more social depth and reach than at first impression and applies not just to raising children but also to saving our human venture on this planet.

Know that not only you, but everyone you meet has a fear to be confronted, or a pain to be eased, or a conflict to be addressed, or a threat of darkness to be lightened, or a joy to be shared.

Do not feel guilty about savoring the gustatory pleasures of gourmet food or the exhilaration of fine wine. On occasions of course. Indulged every day, the celebratory zest quickly fades away.

Well, there it is. Because it fits my mood, I conclude by quoting Arthur Miller. I believe he will be judged the the best playwright of the 20th Century. (Quoted, “Entertainment”, 2/5/99):

“He who understands everything about his subject cannot write it. I write as much to discover as to explain.”