Fiddler Crab

Dickens, Modernized

It was the best of times,     it was the worst of times,    it was the age of wisdom,   it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way …

Cape Cod Sunset

The Rights of Man As Perceived By a Child

I think I may have been a singular child.  Certainly, I know of few boys who have so early developed and cultivated into maturity a sense of the rights of the father in the family setting.  I was, as I say, quite young when I first recognized the man of the family’s greatest and most sacred privilege: the claim to the driver’s seat.

The father’s right to drive was something I long considered a certain unalienable right with which he had been endowed by his Creator.  After all, whenever we went anywhere as a family, Daddy always drove.  And, I suppose I reasoned, if something were always done a certain way in our family, mustn’t it be the supreme law of the universe?  Indeed, I could think of few worse infractions against the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God than for the mother to drive the family anywhere.  Of course, when the father was not around, the mother must inevitably sometimes assume the role of chaufferess.  This was no sin.  But for the woman to drive when the man was in the same vehicle was a dreadful usurpation of paternal authority, and I never beheld such an occurrence without grave fears for the souls of the reprobates in question.

I remember one particular time, long ago, when just such a scenario was played out before my eyes.  We were leaving church, I believe, and I spotted some naughty woman driving her husband away – and in such proximity to the very house of God!

“Mama!  Why is … (I can’t remember who the culprits were exactly, so I’ll make this generic) … why is Mrs. Smith driving instead of Mr. Smith?”

“Well, Aaron, maybe Mr. Smith is tired or doesn’t want to drive.”

Doesn’t want to drive?!?  This was food for thought, indeed.  What right had he not to want to drive?  I was perplexed and baffled.  A little crack opened up in the dike of my convictions.

“Well, if he’s tired, I suppose it’s all right…”

I stuck my finger into the crack.  But it kept growing, growing, growing, through the years, and soon all my precocious ideas began to crumble and my youthful, imaginative dogmata were reduced to the ruins of real life.  Just look at me now!  Half a dozen women could drive their husbands by me and I would scarcely blink an eye.

The Hunt Begins

I haven’t written in a long time.  That I haven’t blogged in a long time is abundantly clear, but really writing of any kind has been on neither my to-do list nor my have-done list in months.  I haven’t been keeping up my journal, and none of the last couple of classes I took at school required any writing beyond simple note-taking.  I have written several letters to friends in the past several weeks, it’s true, but those only whetted my appetite for more.  I’m hungry to write. 

Of course, one of the biggest, most insurmountable obstacles that I face when I want to write is that I have great difficulty coming up with a subject.  To continue my hunger analogy, it’s as though I’m all geared up to go hunting for my much-needed food but I never start because I don’t know what I am hunting for.  So I get nothing, and that’s that. 

But now!  Ah, now things are different, for I have decided to hunt deer.  And deer are whatever I want my subject to be at the moment, whatever story or idea it behooves me to share.  See?  Problem solved. 

The deer of the moment is a simple little quote: “Never stay up late browsing the internet.  It is a dreadful waste of time and sets you onto a dreadful cycle of fatigue producing fatigue.  Beware!”