Sunday Morning
Its Sunday morning. A few fellow guests join me for my morning coffee here at the Holiday Inn. I cannot help but overhear the collegial conversation of three older males, and several young adult males planning for a baseball game later in the day. I’d lay odds that the older guys are coaches, and the younger ones, athletes on a college ball team. One catches all manner of conversation while at breakfast in the lounge. Travel brings in close association diverse individuals with their respective projects. If I could I’d be a 21st century Chaucer and chronicle my observations of others as their journeys intersect on the road.
Behind me I can barely hear the commentary coming from a LCD screen which is tuned to Fox News. The volume is too low to be understood. Fox News is always in an “alert” mode. One banner for the “Fox News Alert” of this morning is that O. J. Simpson has been released. You may remember O. J. Simpson was tried for the murder of his wife and her lover in 1994. He was found not guilty by a court. To my mind the facts pointed in his direction. In 2008 he was convicted of robbery and sentenced. Such are the times in which we live. The video feed on Fox showed the silhouette of a seated, broken-down, forsaken man wearing a denim jacket. Not the Simpson that I remember running through airports shilling for Hertz rent-a-car. Mercifully I could not hear the propagandistic cant dispensed by the impeccably dressed talking heads on Fox News. We live in interesting times.
Yesterday we met with two old friends for dinner at the Cutting Board in Burlington. The evening was perfection. We have met many times at this place in the past to get caught up on where life has taken us. As the years recede in the rear view mirror one is disabused of the conviction that one is essentially in control. Children are born and grow up. Jobs come and go, being exchanged for what seemed at the time to be a different and improved work situation. In retrospect one wonders what might have been, …if. Such was our conversation around the table. Yet there was a overall atmosphere of thanksgiving. Our children are pursuing their journeys with hope in their hearts. Our grandchildren are thriving, beginning their journeys of life-long learning.
Is there anything in life better than old friends? What we discovered as interesting, worthy of our attention when growing up still commands our appreciation and our conversation. The mutual exploration of life continues, though we see one another infrequently now, living as we do in different parts of the country. Until we meet again!
“As so it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut would have said.
