Running Commentaries:4

June 24th, 2012, Sunday

Will be: 102 degrees

Katydids and Rolly Pollies seem to be out.  All other creatures are in hiding

     Quite a kaleidoscope of happenings these past few days. One topic that's been dropping in and out of conversations all week is a feeling of exhaustion, caused mainly, everyone thinks, by the newly formed habit of daily trying to hear, read, process, and understand all the information bombarding us by our tech gadgets. There's no time to learn the lesson of the story.

     Laura fell down a cliff last Thursday. I was certain the 'Running Commentaries' were doomed. She had taken her two youngest daughters and family dog for an afternoon of splashing around in Bull Creek. Climbing a hill back to their car, Laura slipped, assumed a facedown, spread-eagle, and slid the short distance to the bottom; she banged her head and landed in the creek. The EMS and fire department came to the rescue--seven guys in uniform strapped her on a board and carted her off to the hospital. Unplanned, Laura engineered all the elements of a summer afternoon blue-ribbon drama. All hospital tests cleared. Running was back on the schedule.

     During Laura's two days of recovery, I queued up, Bill Murray's, 1979, Meatballs. On the morning run, the day before the creek tumble, Laura asked me if I'd ever seen Murray's rant, 'It Just Doesn't Matter,' which he gave to a group of summer campers, and, which, in her opinion, was the core of the movie. "You haven't?! Gotta see it!" Friday afternoon, I settled in to find out just what I'd missed.

     Surprise! Before the 'It Just Doesn't Matter' scene came onto the screen and could then become a memory, buried memories of the times, in the 60's, at summer camp--Southern Baptist camp--Falls Creek, which was around Turner Falls in the Arbuckle Mountains of sourth-central Oklahoma, sprouted into real time. Three times a day, young Baptist campers gathered to eat, sing, and pray. Left over hours, were spent sitting around on limestone rocks practicing boy kissing. Cognitive dissonance lurks among Southern Baptists.

     My little White mother's insistence of Sunday church, morning and night, Sunday school, Bible study on Wednesday's, vacation Bible schools, and summer camps, did allow a peek into cross-angled adult behavior. Recently, reading Massie's, Catherine The Great, page after page was filled with stories of eighteenth-century power lusting and material greed. Those Russians could have taken a few lessons from Oklahoma Southern Baptists. When I left home for college, at age sixteen, I never walked through the doors of another church until I was thirty-six years old.

     Karen read my last three blogs and emailed that she "would like to read more thoughts about cross-generational friendships, why there are so few and, in your case, why this friendship works [with Laura]." After checking Laura's scrapes and bruises, this was the first topic of the morning run. Laura told me she would have to think about the question.

     For me, those in the older category, teach about the past; keeping an eye on the younger generation provides glimpses of the future; peers provide the mirror to the present. This generational mirror reflects how we are, how we were, and how we can be. This thought offering (worth about 10%) was given to Laura; but, she continued to think.

     After the first water break, Laura tackled Karen's question. To Laura, it seemed like most of the elementary school teachers she was around were 50 years of age, or older; the other age group were in their twenty's. Thirty and forty year olds were missing. She hypothesized that maybe this middle age group had just gotten tired of all the bureaucratic crap, or were having babies. She told me that one time she did go to Happy Hour with a group of 20 year olds. All they talked about was drinking and who they were chasing after. She thought them shallow. When they ran out of drinking and guy stories, they were on their cell phones and Facebook. Here they are, supposedly with these great lives, Laura continued, and they are taking pictures of their food and friends and posting this nonsense to each other. Laura was quick to say her comments were only representations of her experiences. She paused a second and then added that she preferred older people because they were more in the 'present;' better listeners; better conversationalists. Frankly, I was solely concentrating on trying to breathe and wasn't able to ask for her definition of 'present.'

     I remember a UTX professor telling his class one time--keep friendships in your own age group, those older, and those younger. You will lead a richer life.

     After yells of , 'It just doesn't matter; it just doesn't matter,' to get us up a pretty long neighborhood hill, the question of just what is metaphysics was put out there for discussion. Laura suggested it meant everything outside the physical. That's what meta means, doesn't it--above? Or, beyond, I added. But, I think it's more than that, was my second chime.

     "Meaning what?" asked Laura.

     Well, taking all the physical and the meta into consideration, you've got to think about the different ways people think. Whites, for example, think from straight line to straight line. What you see is what you get. Indians will take this straight line and add all living things in the environment, along with outer voices--those 6th senses we talked about a couple of weeks ago. The more information you've added, the more you've got to stir--round and round. Indian thinking is circular.

     We laughed at the heavy running talk. Time for a water break.