Category Archives: people

Hope

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About twenty-five years ago Dr. Harrison Schmidt traveled from his Albuquerque home to speak to a group in Jefferson City.  I do not recall everything he said although I recall the general topic.  But one sentence from his remarks is vivid in my memory and it is worth thinking about today.

We are living through troubling times, particularly in the last two calendar years, times of uncertainty and fear caused by a pandemic, times of uncertainty in our political system and campaign-induced fears, warranted or not, of our national future followed by the frightful events of January 6 and their lingering impacts on our political mentality.

There are major differences of opinion about the greatness of our nation.  Have we been made greater or has our greatness been dimmed by events of the past half-decade?  Do we dare think, regardless of how we answer that question, that we truly can be great or greater still?

We cannot be either if we wallow in self-pity, if we focus on our unresolved shortcomings as a people, if we accept that we as a people are limited in what we can achieve, what we should achieve, what we must achieve.  We cannot be if we worry more about false differences that divide us—and those who would stoke fears of those differences—than in the common interests we have within our diversity.

And so we come to Dr. Schmidt, world-famous geologist best known for finding one rock and finding some orange soil.  The rock is known as Troctolite 76535.  The soil is a mix of orange and black volcanic glass formed in a process we known as a “fire explosion.”

One rock and some dirt.

From the Moon.

Harrison Schmidt was the last person (for the last 48 years and counting) to set foot on the Moon.  The rock has been called by NASA “without a doubt the most interesting sample returned from the Moon!”  Note the exclamation point. Mission objectives do not often feature them.  Troctolite 76535 is at least 4.2 Billion years old and is significant beyond its age. It shows that the Moon once had a magnetic field “generated by a dynamo at its core” as our Earth has.

And the dirt shows that the Moon once was volcanically active, explosively so.

Dr. Schmitt, who reached 86 in July, is one of the four Moonwalkers still alive (Buzz Aldrin turned 91 on January 20; Dave Scott turned 88 in June and Charlie Duke will hit 86 in October).  Schmitt was 37 when I watched from the press site at Cape Kennedy as he, Gene Cernan, and Ronald Evans thundered into the night sky in December, 1972.

More than two decades later, when he talked in Jefferson City about space, his mission, the discoveries made in the Apollo program and the opportunities that waited for a nation unafraid to reach for the stars, he reminded us:

“Apollo is often forgotten as having been a program where 20-year old men and women were managed by a few 30-year olds, none of whom believed anything was impossible.”

Think of that last clause: “None of whom believed anything was impossible.”

That’s the path to national greatness.  It’s not just for 20 and 30-year olds.

Whether it’s finding rocks on the Moon, finding a vaccine against a worldwide plague within months or even finding middle political ground, we know that nothing is impossible.  But we have to look beyond ourselves. We have to look up for hope rather than down on others.

This entry can be dismissed as saccharine babble. And it might be by those to whom tomorrow is to be feared and to whom uncertainty precludes discovery. But they will not seek exclamation points in life and might limit opportunities for others to find them.

Greatness is not created by cultivating fear and uncertainty personally or on a broader stage.

Greatness is achieved by those who go beyond those issues, none of whom believe anything is impossible. Political leaders might say it.  But it is you and I who must live it and lift up others to join us.

It’s time for more exclamation points!

The simple folk

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(“What do the simple folk do?” is a song from the 1960s Broadway musical hit Camelot.” Guinevere and King Arthur discuss the lives of commoners and what they do “when they’re blue.” Guinevere notes, “They obviously outshine us at turning tears to mirth, and tricks a royal highness is minus from birth.”  Arthur’s final conclusion, after listing several things the simple folk do is, “They sit around and wonder what royal folk would do.”

Dr. Frank Crane suggests those not burdened with noblesse oblige do quite well—because it doesn’t occur to them that they should be living—-)

A MISERABLE LIFE

Poverty is a point of view.

It all depends upon what you are used to, and upon what you see others enjoying

The average realistic author who seeks to harrow the reader ‘ s feelings with his account of the wretchedness of existence is simply performing the trick of bringing a man with one set of tastes into the life of a man with another set of tastes .

The king deceives himself if he thinks the cobbler unhappy, for the   cobbler has never been king.

The poet is mistaken when he imagines the life of a rough teamster to be miserable, for the teamster is a teamster and not a poet.

Leaving actual pain out of account, most lives are reasonably content  so long as they are what they are and do not view themselves from the point of what they are not .

Much of the description of the hollowness and emptiness of existence  we find in George Gissing or Upton Sinclair and their ilk might be thus parodied:

“Little do we suspect the sorrows of the poor. The days crept on with leaden feet for   Archibald Vandergold. There was no golf nor lawn tennis. Only the full routine of behaving himself and earning a living.

“In his little flat there was only one servant and she was absent  Thursdays.

“There were no mistresses nor chorus girls to eat lobster and drink  Veuve Cliquot with him at 1 a. m. No, only one wife and a child.

“He had to reach for the bread at table himself, and pass his own plate when he wanted another piece of ham. No butler stood behind his chair and whisked away his plate every time he took another spoonful of beans. Like all the dreary bourgeois to whose class he belonged, he did his own buttling.

“To arise in the morning and select your own collar, tie your own tie, and stoop over to put on your own shoes until the temples throb with the constrained attitude, to have no valet to turn on the hot water for your bath, but to be compelled to handle the faucet yourself; to go out to the dining room and drink your coffee instead of having James bring it to you as you lie abed; to ride downtown on a tramway instead of taking a morning gallop upon your thoroughbred; to have no polo ponies, no private yacht, not even to belong to a club; to have no box at the opera where you can wear your dress suit and loll about and converse with duchesses and millionaires’ daughters in Robert W. Chambers’s* dialogues; such is the life of that submerged class which the reader of the average magazine society yarn hates to think about.

“Little do we suspect the sorrows of the poor. Archibald Vandergold felt his humiliation. His bathtub was not of porphyry. His cigarette case was not gold with his monogram on it; it was leather and carried the advertisement of a coal dealer.

“He actually went to church Sundays with his wife and child and not to a gilt restaurant with another man’s wife.

“The darkness of his narrow existence can be imagined when it is added that he actually liked his wife, liked to go to church, enjoyed being decent, and was interested in his business.

“And, pardon my vulgarity in saying it, but the whole fetid truth must be told—the poor wretch did not own an automobile!”

*American science fiction and historical fiction writer 1865-1933)

I’m sorry, but—–

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This is going to sound cruel.

Awful.

I’m going to say it anyway—because what others are saying by their actions or inactions is just as bad or worse.

I almost lost a friend to the Delta Variant a few weeks ago.

She’s making a slow recovery, finally off the ventilator that saved her life.

She is a vaccine-denier.

I’m glad she didn’t die.  I’m glad she’s getting well.  I’m glad none of her immediate friends or family have been stricken as badly as she was.

But I’m not sorry she got sick.

No, that’s not quite right.  I am sorry she got sick.

But she asked for it.

She gambled that she could go without vaccination and not get hit by the virus.

She lost.

She lost a lot, although fortunately she did not lose it all.

She had the usual excuses—no full FDA approval; it’s only for emergency use; fear of side-effects; stories of people who got sick anyway; the need for more research first; don’t want to be a guinea pig; it will affect my DNA; I’m healthy and my immune system works just fine, etc.

The CDC says that, as of August 2, more than 164 million people have been fully inoculated. That means that every day, 164-million Americans have been willing guinea pigs and are proof these vaccines work.  That should carry some weight. A lot of weight, in fact but some people are so fixated on the inflated anti-vax rhetoric that won’t believe this reality.

The CDC says less than 0.01% of vaccinated people develop breakthrough infections that produce serious complications or death. Deaf ears listen to such figures.

DNA is not affected.  This virus doesn’t attack the cell nucleus and that’s where DNA resides.

I suppose it is as hard for me to understand why somebody decides to roll the dice on their health instead of getting a shot or two that is proven effective as it is for anti-vaxers to understand why they shouldn’t get shots.

I bet I’m not the only person who is troubled by what we should feel under these circumstances.

Conversations with medical personnel have not been uncommon for me lately, and I’m hearing irritation, frustration, anger and resentment in their voices because they have worked themselves to the bone for the last year and a half, have watched people decline and die before there was a vaccine and now they’re inundated by people who don’t need to be sick or dying who are demanding medical care. And the medical profession is duty-bound to provide it.

It is hard not to look at people such as my friend and think, “Well, you got what you deserved.”  Or to want to ask, “If you worry about the side-effects of getting a shot, why don’t you worry about the possible side effect of NOT getting a shot?  Is death not a side effect that should motivate you?”

I’d much rather attend a funeral WITH somebody who has a sore arm than attend a funeral FOR somebody who died without one. I came close to attending such a funeral a few weeks ago. So did my friend, although she would have been beyond knowing whose funeral it was.

There is a certain guilt that comes with being callous enough to say that those who refuse to protect themselves get what they deserve.  Nobody deserves to get sick with this thing.  Nobody deserves to die.

But I can’t bring myself to be particularly sympathetic.

I don’t want to go to someone’s funeral angry that they are dead. I’d rather go to a funeral being sad.  But I’m afraid anger would be the predominant emotion.

So a few questions for the people who don’t want to get shots:

Why should I send you a get-well card? How should I feel if you gamble and get very sick?  How should I feel if you gamble and you lose everything?

How should I mourn friends who threw away their lives because irrational politics overrode rational thoughts of self-preservation?

What should I say to the grieving spouse you leave behind? The comment, “Well, at least they died doing what they loved to do” becomes even more ludicrous when what they loved to do was LIVE!

I probably won’t go to your funeral at all. It’s your fault that I have to make that choice. I don’t want to be your pallbearer.

It’s awful to feel these conflicting emotions.

It’s cruel.

I’m sorry, but—–

Humanitarian

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(We admire those we call “humanitarians,” but they’re just being human. That’s something all of us can be. Dr. Frank Crane wrote 106 years ago about what it takes to be a human-itarian—-)

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE JUST HUMAN?

It means to love folks; to be drawn instinctively to any human being; to gaze on the face of every passer – by with curiosity; to feel the heart warm a little even when looking at an old portrait in a book of one who lived five hundred years ago; to have a sense of uneasiness in    solitude, so that one wants to hunt up the sewing maid or the janitor for a bit of talk  to find pleasure in watching from the window the people in the street; to have every man and woman tempt to acquaintanceship; to see in every room, where people live, something to pique the      imagination; to follow with the eyes every schoolboy and wonder what home he comes from, what companionship he goes to, and what dreams occupy his soul; to feel awe at every old house, deserted and desolate, because human laughter has rung there; to reverence every church because men have worshipped there; to feel a touch upon the soul at the sight of a name carved on a tree, because human feeling is traced there; to hate war, because it means the extermination of men and the spoiling of men’s handiwork; to love human qualities in birds, beasts and things, as the fidelity of the dog, the playfulness and affection of the cat, the whimsicality of the parrot, the docility of the horse and cow, the water that babbles, the fire that talks and dances, the wind that sobs.

It means to be touched with pity at all human misfortune; to have a pang shoot through you when another’s finger is crushed; to shed tears when another’s heart is broken; to feel saddened at the thought of the many lives that are dull and hopeless; to take in one’s own mouth the misery of the multitude; to be shattered and rocked in the depths of the soul at the sight of a prison or a madhouse; to seek in one’s least words and ways to cheer and help any human being one may meet; to smile against the grain for another’s sake; to have an unconquerable aversion to causing pain, or even embarrassment; to avoid drawing attention to one’s own success before the unsuccessful, to one’s own talent before the ungifted, to one’s own health or beauty before the  diseased or ugly; to be insincere rather than unfeeling, so that one pretends mightily to enjoy the box of sweets a little child has given, though one inwardly detests them; to spare the feelings of   the washerwoman as readily as the feelings of the banker; to seek to set any one at ease who       approaches with shyness; when one asks the road to go with him a little way; to treat with respect all who wish to become acquainted; to be gracious even when in a surly mood; to listen patiently and interestedly to the egotist, the domineering and the opinionated, and to encourage the hesitant and diffident; to try to find some points upon which we can agree with every one; to shun all conflicts and seek all fellowships; to take some part in movements for the protection of   the weak, so that one helps do something in an organized way for the rights of children, of laborers, of criminals, of the crippled and the defective, of the common citizen against systematic plans to prey upon him.

To respect every human being and to despise none; to shrink from spoiling any man’s ideal or hope; to shun power and control over people and seek to serve and help people; to value a human soul above all moralities, religions or laws; and to esteem life greater than all institutions.

This it is to be just human.

Bicentennial

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A big weekend is ahead as Missourians celebrates its bicentennial—two-hundred years since President Monroe signed the proclamation making Missouri the nation’s 34th state, the second state west of the Mississippi.

But if all we do is look back, we’re ignoring a responsibility we have for creating the state that will celebrate its TRIcentennial.

The Maori people of New Zealand have an ancient proverb: Ka mua, Ka muri that translates into “walking backward into the future.”

That is what our bicentennial is about—walking into a future we cannot see while looking back on the historic and the familiar things that shaped the present, knowing that we have changed as a people during this journey and that our descendants will be a changed people, too.

Some who do not understand how different we are fear who or what our next generations will be—and out of that fear are making what surely will become futile efforts to confine that future to present, or even past, standards that often are not based on history but are based on the myths of history.

We cannot stop time and if we are realistic about our future as a people, we must recognized that those who gather to celebrate our state’s TRIcentennial in 2121 will be different in appearance, social relationships, political references and in a multitude of other ways we cannot anticipate no matter how hard we might resist.

We are honoring those first settlers of mid-Missouri. But the historical record shows how different from us they were.  We know the names of the men but it is harder to learn the names of their wives and even more difficult to learn the names of the slaves they brought with them. We know they were people of hope, of ambition, and hard work, qualities necessary to survive in a world where fire was an essential ingredient of life. We live in a world where fire is a disaster at worst and a mostly decorative feature of a modern living room at best.

In our world, our homes and even the furniture in them are not products of our own hands. We travel farther in an hour than they sometimes traveled in a week, more in a day than some of them traveled in their lives.

They were not the first Missourians.  In Montgomery County’s Graham Cave State Park, evidence has been found of human habitation 10,000 years ago, long before the Osage populated much of Missouri—and other sites in Missouri date back farther than that.

We are observing 200 years in a place inhabited for thousands of years. We should honor the memories of the ancient ones, too.

We celebrate the bicentennial of man-made boundaries that define where we are and a history that tells us who we have become. But if we look only back on what was and became what is, we are making a serious mistake.  Walking backwards into the future endangers those who will be that future.

Our responsibility is to turn and face that future, respectful of the past but unafraid of the changes that our descendants will make because they must remain, as the people of 200 years ago were, people of hope.

What we do today—what we ARE today—lays the foundation for the state and nation our grandchildren’s grandchildren will inhabit.

So the Missouri bicentennial gives us some choices to make.  Will we continue to follow the trails our ancestors established through extraordinary effort and the  inalienable truths and hope that they brought with them……or will we follow trails of fiction and fear too easily established these days, and too easy to blindly follow?

Will we be a people fearful of one another, often victims of those who would generate fear among us for their own purposes or  power…..or will we be a people who recognize there is nothing wrong with a different heritage, a different color, a different outlook on identity, a different faith?

Will we be people spooked into division, derision, and disrespect….or will we be a people of thought, who seek understanding rather than hostility, people who respect knowledge, and who trust our neighbors regardless of their differences from us?

Will we be the kind of people who choose leaders who  DEmand blind allegiance or the kind of people with wide-open eyes and minds who choose leaders who COmmand respect?

What kind of people are we going to be as we lay the foundation for the kind of people we want our grandchildren’s grandchildren to be?

A hundred years from now, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will gather around the then-weathered monuments we have put up to honor the bicentennial.

What kind of people—in what kind of counties, state, and nation—do we want to have gathered around those monument in 2121?

Our generations will take those first steps on the new trail that stretches before us—the steps that will determine what kind of people and what kind of nation will be here in 100 years. We cannot take those steps by walking backward into the future. We must be unafraid to recognize our grandchildren’s grandchildren will not be like us.  We have to lay a foundation that allows them to be better than us.

We have to create a trail that is broad enough for all and grows broader as it advances. We have to create a trail that is not darkened by division, derision, and disrespect but is brightened by intelligence, independence, and acceptance.

And we must begin building a foundation strong enough to support a  greater nation than we are today.

So let our celebration of the past be brief.  Let our steps today be steps that those celebrating the TRI-centennial of our Missouri will be as grateful to us for taking—as we are for the steps taken by those who were here first.

We will honor the yesterday by the honorable steps we take today into tomorrow.

(The State Historical Society of Missouri was designated by the Missouri General Assembly to be the lead organization for planning the bicentennial. Coordinator Michael Sweeney has worked with every county to plan some event or project celebrating the event. You can learn more about what’s happening statewide or in your area at https://shsmo.org/missouri-2021.)

Making a house a home

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(It might sound a little old-fashioned, but what’s inside a house—or rather, what’s inside those inside a house—make it a home.  Dr. Frank Crane explains the values that make a house a home.)

THE HOUSEHOLD GOODS

The walls of a house are not built of wood, brick, or stone but of truth and loyalty. Unpleasant sounds, the friction of living, the clash of personalities are not deadened by Persian rugs and polished floors but conciliation, concession, and self-control.

The curtains that screen the household gods from the eyes of the vulgar and the curious are not woven of lace, but of discretion.

The food of the home is not meat and bread but thoughtfulness and unselfishness for these keep joy alive.

The real drink is not wine or water, but love itself, which is the only known thing that is at once a food and an intoxicant.

The bed is not to be of down and white linen but of “a conscience void of offense toward God and toward man.”

The lighting is not to be of the sun by day or by electric bulbs at night but by loyal affection, shining always in dear hears, burning always in true hearts.

Your home is not where you layoff your clothes but where you lay off your cares.

The cellar of your house is not be filled with apples or rare vintage but with the memory of sacred intimacies, of little heroisms unknown to the world of sufferings borne nobly.

In the attic, you do no store old trunks, letters and gowns, but you keep there the kisses, sayings and glances that cheered you when you gathered them fresh, and are now a sweet sorrow when dried by time.

The house is not a structure where bodies meet, but a hearthstone upon which flames of souls which, the more perfectly they unite, the more clearly they shine and the straighter the rise toward heaven.

Your house is a fortress in a warring world, where a woman’s hand buckles on your armor at morning and soothes your fatigue and wounds at night.

The beauty of a house is harmony.

The security of a house is loyalty.

The joy of a house is love.

The plenty of a house is in children.

The rule of a house is service.

The comfort of a house is in contented spirits.

The rats and mice in a house are envy and suspicion.

The maker of a house, of a real human house, is God himself the same who made the stars and built the world.

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Faith, Hope, and Justice

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(A friend of mine observed many years ago:

“I once read about a man

Who went about doing good.

It disturbs me that I am satisfied

Just going about.”

Dr. Frank Crane suggested years ago that faith, hope, and charity—or faith, hope, and love—have an additional component.)

JUSTICE

THERE are many earnest souls occupied in trying to do people good.

There are nine million societies, more or less, organized to improve and to ameliorate.

There are preachers, missionaries, evangelists, reformers, exhorters, viewers-with-pride, and pointers-with-alarm without number wrestling with sinners.

All forms of industry are booming these days in the U. S. A., but the uplift business is still several laps ahead.

It seems ungracious to say a word to any enthusiastic person who is engaged in so laudable an enterprise as that of rescuing the perishing, feeding the hungry, and healing the sick.

And yet, when you take time to think right through to the bottom of things, you must come to the conclusion that there is but one real, radical and effective way to help your fellow-men, and that is the way called justice.

If I want to redeem the world I can come nearer my object, and do less harm, by being just toward myself and just toward everybody else, than by “doing good” to people.

The only untainted charity is justice.

Often our ostensible charities serve but to obscure and palliate great evils.

Conventional charity drops pennies in the beggar’s cup, carries bread to the starving, distributes clothing to the naked. Real charity, which is justice, sets about removing the conditions that make beggary, starvation, and nakedness.

Conventional charity plays Lady Bountiful; justice tries to establish such laws as shall give employment to all, so that they need no bounty.

Charity makes the Old Man of the Sea feed sugar-plums to the poor devil he is riding and choking; justice would make him get off his victim’s back.

Conventional charity piously accepts things as they are, and helps the unfortunate; justice goes to the legislature and changes things.

Charity swats the fly; justice takes away the dung-heaps that breed flies.

Charity gives quinine in the malarial tropics; justice drains the swamps.

Charity sends surgeons and ambulances and trained nurses to the war; justice struggles to secure that internationalism that will prevent war.

Charity works among slum wrecks; justice dreams and plans that there be no more slums.

Charity scrapes the soil’s surface; justice subsoils.

Charity is affected by symptoms; justice by causes.

Charity assumes evil institutions and customs to be a part of “Divine Providence,” and tearfully works away at taking care of the wreckage; justice regards injustice everywhere, custom-buttressed and respectable or not, as the work of the devil, and vigorously attacks it.

Charity is timid and is always passing the collection-box; justice is unafraid and asks no alms, no patrons, no benevolent support.

“It is presumed,” says Henry Seton Merriman, “that the majority of people are willing enough to seek the happiness of others; which desire leads the individual to interfere with his neighbor’s affairs, while it burdens society with a thousand associations for the welfare of mankind or the raising of the masses.”

The best part of the human race does not want help, nor favor, nor charity; it wants a fair chance and a square deal.

Charity is man’s kindness.

Justice is God’s

Fly Missouri

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Our son flies for Southwest Airlines.  Living the Dream.

Always wanted to be a pilot.  Went through the program at Warrensburg before it was the University of Central Missouri.  Went through the Ramen Noodle days as a flight instructor to pile up the hours that let him fly cargo planes (I told him he should always fly cargo because a box never hijacked a plane) until he racked up the hours to fly people.  Flew regionally then became a First Officer for Southwest five years ago or so.

Great company to work for.  Loves it.

Pretty handsome forehead, don’t you think? A few months ago Rob got to fly a special plane.   Missouri One.

Back in 2015, Southwest decided to honor thirty years of service in Missouri with a special 737-700.

It’s been six years since Southwest unveiled Missouri One.  Don’t know why we haven’t heard about it until recently but it sure is a beauty.  It was decorated at Aviation Technology Services in Kansas City, the first city in Missouri that Southwest started serving.

Southwest went into business in June of 1971. Flights involving Kansas City began on February 18, 1982 and St. Louis about three years later. Southwest has done so well at St. Louis that everything comes out of the East Terminal and Lambert Airport has become the line’s international gateway.

At the time Missouri One took to the air, Southwest had nine other state-themed planes. And now Rob, who lives about a half-hour from Denver International Airport, has gotten to fly his home state’s plane. It wasn’t intentional.  Crews go to the airport and get aboard whatever plane is headed to the city to which the crew is scheduled to fly.  Missouri One just happened to be THE plane that day.

We can’t write perceptive and always-correct political observations, you know.  Every now and then we have to bust a button about something.

How did Southwest get the state seal and all that other stuff on that plane?

Take a look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLKFVIbVEfk

Missouri hasn’t declared an official Missouri Bicentennial Airplane but if it did, this one would have to merit serious consideration.

Someday, Southwest will have to retire Missouri One.  Maybe the company would donate it to be with TWA Constellation, DC-3, Lockheed 1011, and other planes at the Airline History Museum at the Charles B. Wheeler Airport in Kansas City.  Might not be too soon to suggest it.

(photo credits: Rob Priddy, Southwest Airlines, worldairlinenews.com, Airline History Museum, Kansas City)

 

Another trip around the sun

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(We celebrated at our house a few days ago the completion of another trip around the sun, another anniversary of the birth of the compiler of these columns. Although ascending as gracefully as possible in the number of our years we shall not try to impress you with the number of these trips we have made. But it is enough that contemplating the total journey each year leads to increasing time spent reflecting on the places in life we have been and offering advice to those still early in their journeys—-as Dr. Frank Crane might have been doing when he told readers of Woman’s World in 1913:)

REMEMBER OLD AGE

In youth, one finds himself full of many forces, physical, intellectual, and emotional. He is a bundle of desires. He ought to be. It man’s life’s forces run rich in him. So he desires to make love, to get popularity, to play, to do great work, to see the marvels of the world, to amass knowledge and altogether give vent to the steam and electricity which nature has concealed in his makeup.

Hence, he gives himself to varied activities. By gratifying all these wants he becomes somewhat in the world.

But whether he is a real success or not depends not on how he give way to these desires but upon how he controls them. It is not the things he does and the things he gets that make him a great man; it is the residuary deposit that is left in his soul.

All of these pleasures of getting and doing have their place, but the real object of them is that they shall pass over into the higher values of character.

So it is pitiful to see the old man was once a sensualist, a vigorous merchant, a political leader, and how now has nothing left but regret—for his lost vitality. Had he understood the art of living he would have gained from his more active days a wealth of inner qualities of spiritual strength and beauty; and instead of old age leaving him poverty stricken of happiness, it would have left him with the harvest treasures of wisdom and joy in life.

Adopt the philosophy of Omar Khayyam, take for your gospel, “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die,”  seek only “to get all the fun you can get out of life,” and you exhaust all your inner resources, and your old age will be that of a dyspeptic and a banquet.*

But begin in youth to resolutely choose the higher pleasures, to train yourself in independence from the domination of “things” and reliance upon the pleasures of beauty, thought, and love, and old age will come as the golden privilege of life.

It is a question of nobility versus meanness; it must be an ennobling and not a gloomy and narrow religion. Neither poverty nor riches matter; it all depends upon whether you are nobly poor or nobly rich. Sickness or health do not determine the temper of your old age; that is fixed by your being nobly feeble or nobly robust.

It is in old age that all of the higher truths of life shine undimmed by any deceiving circumstances. Then, if you are petty, selfish, egotistic, proud and small souled, there is nothing to conceal it. If you are patient, loyal, and full of love, it is apparent.

—-

*Although the quotation is often attributed to Khayyam, it actually is a combination of two verses from the Bible and also is found in the Book of Mormon:

Ecclesiastes 8:15—“Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.”

Isaiah 22:13—“Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.”

2 Nephi 28:7– “Yea, and there shall be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die; and it shall be well with us.”

We have found a couple of quotes from Khayyam that might apply to Dr. Crane’s theme today:

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring The Winter Garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To fly-and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing,” and–

“Why ponder thus the future to foresee, and jade thy brain to vain perplexity? Cast off thy care, leave Allah’s plans to him – He formed them all without consulting thee.”

(Omar Khayyam 1048-1131) was a Persian astronomer, philosopher, poet, and mathematician.)

 

It takes a town to make a town

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(We want our city to be greater than it is, more than it has been to its own citizens and to those who visit or will visit it.  But the town has to WANT to be greater than it is and that means its citizens must want it to be more than it is, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of generations to come.  It’s not a job to be left to the city council or the chamber of commerce. This observation, written by Dr. Frank Crane shortly after the end of the First World War and published in The Delineator magazine, remains valid today as he suggests we put—)

YOUR HOMETOWN FIRST

Work for your own town.

Beautify it. Improve it. Make it attractive.

The World War and the Treaty of Peace and the Protective Tariff and all such things are important subjects but what’s the good of cleaning up the world unless you sweep your own doorstep?

The city whose main street is dirty, sordid-looking, cluttered, uninviting, suffers much. Such a city wants to be cleaned, recreated, made a thing of beauty so that people will come from miles to see it.

The best advertisement of your business if the town you live in.

Towns get reputations as well as men. Make your town talked of all through the state. It will thus draw people. And where the people come, there is prosperity. It does not take money. It takes cooperation.

Get together. Organize for civic improvement. Develop the civic nerve.

Rid your town of one eyesore after another. Clean up the vacant lots and plant them in gardens. Make a cluttered yard a disgrace. Make public opinion too hot for those who will help.

It pays.  It will promote law and order. It will help in the education of your children. It will draw factories and other business enterprises to your locality.

Shiftlessness, untidiness, dirt and selfishness as shown in your streets and buildings react upon your people.

Such things make your boys and girls grow up hating their home town.

Make your home town a children’s paradise, something their memory will lovingly turn back to.

Look after your amusements, your parks, your playgrounds, your theatres and all other forms of communal enjoyment.

Make your home town happy.

It pays.