Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Drip, Drip, Drip...

Drip, drip, drip, little April showers.   A line from a song in one of my all time favorite movies, "Bambi" and yes, I haven't met a Disney movie of old, I haven't liked.  They were the movies of my childhood.  The first movies at the drive in to lure young parents with small children.  The Disney movie would start just before dark and be done, the kids bedded down in the back with pillows and blankets, an hour and a half later.  The adult movie would then be shown and parents could seemingly have their cake and eat it too, all for a by the car price.  I saw most of the Disney animated movies that way, and the music from them is something I can still sing in my head whenever I recall the movie.

So it is drip, drip, drip, little April showers, and it seems it has been dripping or worse, (snow and sleet), the whole of the month and will pretty much end on that wet note.  At a time when I long to be out checking on my spring blooms and doing battle with pesky Peter Cottontail and his assault on all my new tulips, I am confined inside, trying to be optimistic that this rain will make for gorgeous blooms later on, and the cooler temps keep those precious daffodils flowering now, around longer, and that come summer's heat I will be wishing myself back to this time.  Right now I have my doubts I will ever see summer's heat again....

I wonder how my grandparents and great grandparents endured such times of long winters, unending snows, wet, cold springs and drought laden summers.  Did they complain as much as I seem to do?   I complain a lot and the older I get, no scratch that, the more mature I become, the higher the frequency of weather complaints spouts forth.  It would seem with all the distractions we have to combat every kind of mood, in our techno world, that such things as SADD and plain old boredom would be unheard of, but yet everyone I talk to complains about the weather.  We complain about the cold, coming too early in December.  We dread the long cold dark of the winter months, and even if we like the snow originally, by the end of January, it has lost its charms for all of us, and when we have to endure a March such as this year, which seemed to hold no signs of spring even when the calendar proclaimed it, it seems unendurable and we long for spring days like a duck to a junebug.  Speaking of which, those ducks have no sense as they arrived here in very early March and sat on the pond ice like they were nesting....

I don't know how Grandma and Grandpa did it, without hurting the dog or frying pans flying very near spouse's heads.  A couple of decades ago, I wouldn't have thought twice about all of this heavy stuff.  I didn't wonder at what my grandparents did during the long winter evenings, before tv, to keep from going CRAZY.  And I loved history, it was just that I would rather fantacize about riding into battle at Gettysburg, then actually contemplate what people in the 30's, 40's and 50's did to combat cabin fever.  Maybe I should blame it all on television.  While a wonder and one I grew up with, it takes what essentially for most of us, is the small worlds of our day to day existence, and enlarges it for us to see how globally, everyone lives.  We can see that in Argentina, in the midst of our winter, it is their summer.  We can look at Hawaii, the Bahamas, and even Tahiti and make them travel destinations, (at least in our dreams), and are no longer content to sit and wait out the bad weather, or bad times.  Its the word, content, not con-tent, but to be content, and I'm not sure any of us know how to be in that place any more.  We know what the world does every minute of every day, and we know the excesses and the tragedies almost as they happen.  These are anxious times and its hard to be content more than a minute at a time.  Its not that our grandparents didn't have troubles, heck, they had troubles far more life threatening than most of ours, but the troubles were something they dealt with.  If they had a roof over their heads, food to eat, a way to make a living, good kids, and a church that was their community, life was pretty good.

Maybe its the Norman Rockwell image I persist in believing that makes it appear that grandparenthood, if you lived to get there, was a time of ease, fishing with your grandchildren, making cookies with them, and enjoying the company of family and friends.  Maybe I am totally off base on this, and Norman Rockwell just saw things the way people wanted him to.  Maybe its what sold those illustrations.  I sincerely hope not.  I need to believe that there were elements of Norman Rockwell and his art, everywhere.  No decade and no generation was immune from war and strife, but maybe it was their perspective and their contentment in their situations.  Maybe.  The world and the U.S. in particular seems to be throwing itself headlong into a chaos of what has been before will be as fading as kodachrome film, but maybe there are pockets of humanity everywhere who don't buy the hype and the doom at the other end, and work towards being good neighbors, friends and family.  They love God, their spouses and their kids.  They love their country and get tears in their eyes at the Star Spangled Banner, no matter how hard it is to sing, and have known those who gave their last full measure to protect us.  They pay their taxes, though not without complaint at times, go to work, and try to be good employees and employers.  They try to do what is right, and though it often seems today that is like swimming upstream, they still do it.  Yes, they become jaded and yes, they are depressed about what is happening to us, but they believe and hope we will finally get it as a Nation. 

Maybe Grandma and Grandpa faced some of the same things I wrestle with.  That life in every stage hasn't been what I expected.  Maybe we are all just figuring it out as we go along, and every new generation has to do it all over again, as it changes.  Challenges change and our capabilities change.  Maybe that's the secret.  As long as God gives us breath to breathe, He is giving us a chance to figure it out, at least for today...

I wonder if I'll remember all of this to tell my grand kids.  And I wonder if they'll listen...Maybe we'll just make cookies...

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