Thursday's postcard, and the piece I didn't write today

October 12, 2023

October wedding at the Finch Arboretum

Almost speechless…

I haven't always been on my best behavior. One example: In 1968 my friend Willy and I were organizing a pickup football game on the upper playfield behind Diablo Heights Elementary School. I thought we’d put together a quorum of players when we suddenly realized the teams were uneven, that someone was missing.

It was our classmate Billy. I will spare you his last name because he did nothing wrong. He was just being a boy, wandering off to play foursquare with the girls while we were doing our guy thing out on the field, organizing a football game.

The foursquare court was right next to the gym, directly in front of the office where our physical education instructor, the lovable but temperamental “Mo” Morris, held court. I must have been extra frustrated that day. Before I calculated a cost-benefit analysis, I launched the football on a long, arching spiral, aimed right at Billy’s head. It was actually one of my better throws that year. It only missed by three inches or so, and the point of the football found a gap in the chicken-wire protecting the glass louvers in Mo’s window. The ball shattered one of the louvers all over Mo’s desk (where she was sitting at the time) and we could hear the glass breaking from where we were standing, some forty yards away.

It took only a second or two before Mo grabbed her wooden paddle—a cricket bat—and made a bee-line, trotting right toward me, elbows pumping like pistons, announcing her rage like a cloud of hornets. The kids in the foursquare game stood back and gasped. I remember Willy adjusting his glasses and looking at me as if it had been nice to know me.

“You’re screwed,” he said.

I have lived through harder things since and wondered at times what my last chosen meal would be if given the opportunity. Probably a pint of fresh Guinness and a wood-fired pizza. If there were time for a last movie, I’d go see My Cousin Vinny and that priceless courtroom scene where Mona Lisa Vito (played by Marisa Tomei) explains to Vinny (Joe Pesci) and the jury why it was impossible for the innocent boys’ car to make the tire marks left at the murder scene, at the Sack o’ Suds in Wazoo City.

Because Mo had a golden heart—beloved even by many of us who got whomped by her cricket bat—she eventually forgave me. Life as I’ve known it tumbled on to other memorable experiences, some incredibly beautiful, others tragic and heartbreaking, and some experiences in which beauty and tragedy converge. It has felt that way in the last couple weeks, a bewildering mix of joy and sadness, seemingly all at once.

I wouldn’t necessarily bring that up except this project—The Daily Rhubarb—forces choices about what to write about, and what not to write about. I actually spent much of yesterday studying and thinking about the great Permian Extinction of 250 million years ago. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud, and others, refer to it as “the mother of all mass extinctions”—inasmuch as it wiped out 90 percent of planet’s species at the time. It was a terribly bleak and devastating transformation, drawing a deathly curtain on the great diversity of life (reptiles, arthropods, insects, a wide variety of plants and trees) that propagated in the preceding 48 million years. One of the common denominators between then, and now, is rising carbon dioxide levels that, if unchecked, inexorably lead to a much hotter planetary atmosphere, one that is incredibly hostile to life.

Good topic, but bad timing given the malfunctioning of our government and a brutal new war in recent days. This during a period when I’m sensitive to my own melancholia and aware of how the weight of the Covid epidemic and the seeming insanity and cruelty of our politics has taken a toll on so many others. I’m a great believer in humor as medicine for the spirit. I also remember that period after the shocking 9/11/01 tragedy when we quietly asked ourselves and our close friends when it might be okay to laugh again. This week has had a similar feel to it.

There’s nothing funny in the wars and plagues of the moment, and nothing funny about the great Permian Extinction. That said, had I written about it today—and I’m not going to—I would have ended with what is new and hopeful about the 250 million years since. Humans.

Our potential works in both directions: we can be remarkably cruel and destructive, but also remarkably good to one another and incredibly creative-when we choose to be. There are still reasons to believe we can solve big problems, even the really big ones we create for ourselves.

—tjc