Playing The Glad Game

I'm man enough to admit it: I like Facebook. And, as every delusional, fibbing dude SHOULD have admitted when he bought a copy of Playboy back in the day, claiming he liked the magazine for its insightful articles; I like Facebook for the pictures. It's a great way to keep up with old friends, their kids and grandkids.

Lately I've really been enjoying posts of prom pics and spring sports and kids I feel connected to who are doing well--like a young pole vaulter named Brenon winning regionals, advancing to state, accepting a scholarship and signing with a great school, with a stellar track program.

For many years, I had the privilege of working with teens, watching them grow and discover. I got to be friends with some very creative, fun, wacky people. It was a blast walking with them, seeking some hope in the despair. 

I am a very proud dad of two sons. The youngest serves in a role that brings him in touch with some of the ugliest, cruelest, most tragic elements of our society. I don't know how he does it, but I'm grateful to him for serving in a way few of us would.

Do you see the ends of the broad spectrum I'm trying to paint here? On the one end: happy, healthy kids in photos with prom dates or their winning teammates. On the other end, photos of people often in a drug-addled state standing against a wall with height markers, holding a number. I know it not as clear cut as that, but...

Does it seem sometimes like the floor is tilting the wrong way?

Best I remember, my first movie star crush was with Hayley Mills in the movie Moon-Spinners. I was thirteen. She was eighteen. It didn't work out.

Ms. Mills was probably best known though for her portrayal of Pollyanna in the movie of the same name. Pollyanna was an eternally optimistic little girl who would NEVER have had a "SH#T HAPPENS" bumper sticker on her car. She liked to play a game called "The Glad Game" where she could turn every negative into a positive.

If Pollyanna were still alive, and if she had somehow insulated herself from the infectious, slimy ooze of the 24-hour A Day TV news shows, and if she had somehow found a place for herself in the hateful, vitriolic, political rhetoric that has become the norm for us citizens of the not-so-United States; it would be fun to follow her on Twitter and Facebook. Would she still be playing The Glad Game? Would she post selfies of herself smiling from ear to ear after realizing she wouldn't have a date for the prom? (But she would of course--she's Hayley Mills.)

It got me to thinking about the roles I play. (BTW: the plural "roles" is appropriate for all of us because we do play many.)

If you follow this blog (bless you), you know that I am known to my Grand-Girls as "Pops." Here on this blog I also use the term as an umbrella term for the roles of grandfather.

As you know, the prefix for "many" in our language is "poly." So, I'm hereby branding the persona of a grandfather who plays many important roles as: PolyPops. It will remind me that one of the roles we  must play is Pollyanna-like; to play a version of The Glad Game when the need arises, to help find things to celebrate.

Hayley Mills as Pollyanna

Occasionally, in the midst of all the mistrust and oneupmanship and bullying and bitterness and bad news so pervasive in our world, maybe the highest calling for grandparents is to bite the bullet and go to Chuck E. Cheese's, or to say, "Yes, let's do jump on the bed, but be careful because all we have now is Obamacare which apparently is the end of life as we know it," or "bedtime; schmedtime, let's have some fun, because life is short and your parents can time-out-chair you back in to shape when you get home." PolyPops to the rescue.

"Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged." --G.K. Chesterton

Happy Pi Day

It's 3.14 (2014)

Let's celebrate. I'll have Pecan please.

Path or Trail?

IN THE LAST POST, A Baron, Fried Chicken & Trailblazing, I quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

A little background refresher: remember Emerson was a good friend and mentor to Henry David Thoreau. It was on Emerson's land near Walden Pond where Thoreau lived his two year, two month and two day experiment in roughing it for self-reliance sake. As a result, we have Thoreau's book Walden--one of my favorites. Here's an abridged line from the book:

"I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived".

Maybe this adventure was inspired partly because of his mentor's talk of paths and trails. Maybe it was partly because of his own observation that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation."

In that last post I mentioned a few things I hoped people might say about me, if they say anything at all... someday... One of the things I don't want them to say is "he lead a life of quiet desperation." Let me clear something up: my objective in life is not to live in such a way that people will have good things to say at my funeral. Hopefully that will just be the honest summary of the reflection, sprinkled with a dash of our tendency to remember the newly departed a little better than they were. (Okay so you can add, "and he was cynical.")

While we're clearing things up, please don't assume that I count my life to this point as hollow and desperate just because I'm intrigued about trailblazing. At this point, I take a look back and say, (with all humility of course) "So far; so good." In fact as I look back and count my blessings I can even say, in the words of my friend Grady Nutt, "So good; so far."

Back to this whole Trail (slash) Path thing. I researched (googled) the difference between the two and found this:

Definition

"A path is a trail in which all vertices (except perhaps the first and last ones) are distinct. It seems at first glance that a path could also be defined as a walk in which all vertices (except perhaps the first and last ones) are distinct.
By this definition it would appear that a path is automatically a trail, because if an edge were to be retraced in any walk, then the vertices at either end of it would necessarily be visited more than once. However, under this looser definition, the walk u→v→u for two adjacent vertices u and v, for example, would fit the definition of a path, and therefore be a cycle. But such a walk is not a trail, as the edge uv would be traversed twice. Hence the insistence that a path is a type of trail." http://www.proofwiki.org/wiki/Definition:Path_(Graph_Theory)

What the What?

I guess we're on our own to decide the difference and get at what Emerson was saying.

In the last post, I mentioned that I had an issue or two with Ralph's rhetoric. Here's my main objection. He seems to be implying that there is only one trail and one path. I hope he's wrong. I think I can prove he is.

We'll take up there in the next post I'll call: "WHERE IS Ralph WALDO Emerson?"

TO BE CONTINUED... 

All The Wrong Dreams?

Philip Seymour Hoffman was, without question, one of the great acting talents of our time, playing a wide variety of roles like Truman Capote, which earned him an Oscar, and Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman on Broadway in 2012. I recently watched a film he did, also in 2012, with Christopher Walken called, A Late Quartet. The title comes from Beethoven's "late" string quartets. Watch the trailer here.

These quartets were written by Beethoven late in life and are amazing, especially given the fact that Beethoven was deaf by the time he wrote them. Did you hear that? He was deaf when he composed some of the most beautiful music ever written.

The play Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy by Arthur Miller. The protagonist is a guy named Willy Loman who, in the years following The Great Depression, is a firm believer in the American Dream. Without going in to the whole story, suffice to say, it, like all tragedies, doesn't end well. His son at the graveside of his father has this to say of his father's life: “He had all the wrong dreams. All, all Wrong.”

NPR this morning aired an interview with Hoffman about his portrayal of Willy Loman. The interviewer asked Hoffman if playing Willy had had an impact on him personally:

"He has two sons who are kind of impressive," Hoffman says. "They're beautiful, talented, physically gifted, but he's not. He's none of those things. I think Willy probably was like that when he was young, but he had no sense of himself. He's never had a sense of himself. He's been cobbling together a narrative from birth."

Hoffman also acknowledges it's easy to judge Loman and the choices he's made. Early in life, the character might have had an opportunity for adventure, but he turned that aside in order to get security. When he learns, at the end of life, that he can't pay his bills or even hold on to his job, it's heartbreaking.

But Hoffman says Loman's struggle is not without value.

"He really did give his life for his sons," Hoffman says. "He didn't do it in a way that's effective, or got what he wanted, or actually nurtured his sons in a way that was going to help them, but he did."

Hoffman, who has three children of his own, says the play is one that provokes thinking on all aspects of life, including family.

"It really seeps into why we're here," Hoffman says. "What are we doing, family, work, friends, hopes, dreams, careers, what's happiness, what's success, what does it mean, is it important, how do you get it?"

Connecting all these themes together, Hoffman says that ultimately, the play is about wanting to be loved. 

In the movie, A Late Quartet, there is a scene on a subway train where a young girl is speaking. She seems to be speaking philosophically about  old guys. Then you realize she's reading from a poster on the train. I paused the movie to try to read the poster and found it was a poem called Old Men by Ogden Nash

People expect old men to die, 
They do not really mourn old men. 
Old men are different. People look 
At them with eyes that wonder when… 
People watch with unshocked eyes; 
But the old men know when an old man dies.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is dead now. He was not old by any definition; 46. Did he have the wrong dreams like Willy Loman? Could he or did he metaphorically write a "late" quartet while deaf?

There are two things that scare me: tragic endings and poverty. Not just economic poverty, but poverty of the soul--spiritual poverty.

The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations. --Adam Smith

I'm not judging Philip Seymour Hoffman. These questions are just me, soul searching out loud.

I have learned this: Damn addictions. Damn hopelessness. Damn our poor choices.

Blessed are the poor in spirit... -- Matthew 5:3