One of the problems with de-emphasizing history in our schools is that children grow to adulthood with no perspective on life.

Too often we see people with no understanding of what life was like in any other period but the present. They make judgements that are totally out of the context of the issues and pressures of the time.

The result is that everything becomes simplified into today’s view of the world. The sacrifices are ignored and the mistakes highlighted. We forget how many parents watched their young children perish to disease that is today only a minor inconvenience. We forget the poor communications and harsh realities of survival. We are critical of past leaders of our nation because they didn’t rectify all the problems of society in their one (usually short) lifespan. We focus on the negatives in their lives and turn them into cartoon characters. George Washington becomes a slave owner with wooden teeth who chopped down a cherry tree. How could we have possibly named a city and a state after him? Abraham Lincoln sought to compromise on the subject of slavery in a failed effort to avoid the coming horror of a civil war. Why would we give him a monument and put his picture on our currency? Benjamin Franklin was a party person who probably took drugs. Banish him from the role of hero of the Revolution.

Our efforts to redefine history in terms of the present day focus on “politically correct” actions is eliminating our sense of honor and integrity as a nation and gradually tearing apart all of those who helped create and sustain our democracy. And surprise…we have found no one to replace them.

This has left our nation lost. We have been plunged into the chaos of a world where our children eschew the old emphasis on strength of character and morality, and have instead been taught through the new media to emulate the gangbangers, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires who offer material wealth as the new sign of leading a successful life.

We are taught to laugh at or ridicule a speaker who refers to things like “ideals”, “morals”, “honor”, “integrity”’ and “sacrifice”. He or she is referred to as naïve, or that worst of putdowns “a Boy Scout”. Instead, we flood our TV’s and internet with shows that highlight “egotism”, “greed”’ “violence” and “ignorance”. Our political candidates surge ahead by being the ones who say the most outrageous and divisive things.

We have become an angry, sad and frightened nation whose residents have lost all sense of what made us a great nation, and, instead, cringe behind the locked doors of our homes hoping the developing conflagration will pass us by.

I fear for our future. We have lost our perspective about our past and what we created that was so unique in the world. We crush the dreamers, ridicule those who see the best in us, and applaud those who have no soul. .

We do all this at our own peril, for we open ourselves to the siren songs of the “true  believers” who would plunge the world into hatred and vengeance.

I am closing with a poem True Believers ( In the Cat’s Eye, Snap Screen Press, 2009). The world has been down this road before. I pray we are smart enough not to choose it again.

Glenn K. Currie

                            True Believers

They wear their causes

Like tattoos.

Insignias

Made from the cloth

Of cultural epiphanies

Or sacred decrees.

They march to words

Beaten into placards.

Written too large

To accommodate

The small surface

Of their hearts.

Their torches burn

At my windows,

Demanding

Allegiance

To a society

Without questions.

They want to create

A new world,

Where everyone

Believes the same.

Where everyone knows

All the answers.

Where are we going? Who knows? That’s what makes the journey so exciting.

I don’t understand people who give it up because they fail once or twice. Every successful person has failed. And as long as you are still living on this earth, you still have the opportunity to make your journey a better, more satisfying experience.

I have changed careers five times in my life. I achieved a modicum of success in each, but I also failed at times in each. If you are fortunate enough to have good health, you have new opportunities at every stage of life. You may have to replace energy with experience, but there is a place where you can be a positive influence on the world around you.

I am turning 72 in a few days. I am at another one of those stages in life where I need to renew my purpose. I don’t know how long this stage will last, but I know if I do nothing, I will wither away. Once you have cancer, even if it seems under control, you never again have the same feeling of being in control of your life. But it also sends a message about how precious is your time on this planet. It is a time to make those days as valuable and useful as possible.

For those at younger crossroads in their lives, the options are much greater. The choice is yours as to where you go and what you do.  Suck it up and find something in life that makes you happy and takes full advantage of the opportunity to live on this beautiful planet.

Everyone finds their path in a different way. We may search in different places, walk in different shoes. The important thing is that even if you get lost along the way, a path is still there, and you can find it again if you are willing to work at it.

A Gospel Song (Daydreams, Snap Screen Press, 2004) is just one way to find a road that will help make life’s journey a rewarding trip.

Good luck to all of you in your travels on this Earth.

Glenn K. Currie

                        A Gospel Song

I chose a path, then lost my way,

Each turn another wasted day,

The woods were dark and cold and deep,

My spirit numb, my mind asleep.

The forest filled with empty souls,

Its young too quickly growing old,

Decaying life defined the scene,

A jungle, home to broken dreams.

I searched to find another road,

Through dark despair and storms I strode,

But all the signs were pointing down,

The only exits under ground.

Then suddenly a light broke through,

What source it was, I never knew,

And far away, across the pines,

I heard a church bells distant chimes.

A path emerged, that cleansed my soul,

It led me home and made me whole,

The road so hidden in the night,

Was wide and gleaming in the light.

Just a quick note on modern life. Here is a slightly updated view of our electronic world. This was first published in Granite Grumblings, Life in the Live Free or Die State,( Snap Screen Press, 2011). I hope you have some fun with it.

Glenn K. Currie

Multi-Tasking

Multi-tasking may have saved civilization as we now know it. Given all the wonderful new electronic toys that have been developed over the last thirty years, it doesn’t seem like it would be possible to fit their full usage into a twenty-four hour day without our citizens’ remarkable ability to become skilled at multi-tasking.

Think of how difficult it would be to devote proper attention to all our computers, IPhones, televisions, video games, and IPads, if our inventiveness hadn’t made many of these electronic wonders capable of performing many tasks simultaneously and at the press of a button.

Our modern society has essentially ended the need for stereos, VCR’s, CD players, DVD’s, pagers, paper notebooks, calculators, calendars, cameras, typewriters, fax machines, copiers, compasses, telephones (landlines), encyclopedias, books, newspapers and games requiring other people in the same room. All of these can now be easily replaced by a portable computer, an up-to-date smartphone, and/or an IPad. And each of them is gradually doing more of the work of the others. You can talk for hours, practically free, on computers, stream shows on smartphones and IPads, and do your word processing by just talking to Siri.

People have learned to use these simultaneously. Now they can check email, stay current on the latest soaps and reality TV, commute on the turnpike, dictate reports to the office while receiving a fax from overseas, scream at the guy cutting them off at the exit and write, text, tweet a friend,(although, please, not when the car is moving). In previous eras, it would have taken hours to get all that done.

Things actually began to change with the proliferation of fast food places and the invention of the microwave. Once the need to cook dinner on a real stove was eliminated, it opened up all sorts of additional time for families. Everyone could get home later, eat faster, and waste less time actually communicating with each other. Then we got remote controls on the TV’s so guys could watch three different sporting events at once. This in turn forced wives and kids to get their own TV’s, which further cut down on face time.

The arrivals of all the new electronic toys were initially a challenge, but with the reduced need to communicate with real people, we began to see evolution take hold. Our fingers became more dexterous as we learned to use them for video games, channel flipping and text messaging. 

Our Blackberries became smartphones which then became cameras and pagers, our automobiles became portable offices and movie theaters, our computers and smartphones became capable of video conference calls, “Skyping”, and “face time”, and they all talked to each other. Pretty soon we didn’t even need to get involved in some of the conversations.

For many, there was almost no reason for real life to intrude on these virtual worlds. Messy issues such as meeting people face-to-face, having real conversations with our children and meeting our neighbors needed to never occur. Even the survival of the species was assured without the need for face-to-face meetings.

But if you are still of the old school that favors some contact in this last critical objective, our inventive geniuses have developed easy ways to multi-task this as well. This was clearly pointed out in a television commercial a while ago. Modern man was busy playing with his remote control and waiting for a big game when his wife signaled that it might be time for a little face to face contact. What to do! Then he remembered the opportunities provided by multi-tasking. He could record the big game, take a Viagra and spend some quality time with his wife without missing anything important, or getting too emotionally involved. Heck, a lot of the ads now emphasize people taking Viagra or some similar pill and having sex in separate but adjoining bathtubs. (I’m still not sure how that works, but I’m old). Lots of folks also seem to turn their IPhones on and tape the actual act to share with a whole bunch of other people whom they don’t know.

Some of you out there may think this is the beginning of the end of our civilization. But most of us in New Hampshire don’t get too caught up in this stuff. We may use many of these new marvels, but we still find plenty of time to spend with our families, watch a sunset, count the stars and get to know our neighbors, right?

And if not, it’s not really that big a deal. I know some web sites that have great pictures of the galaxies and sunsets, and there are several that will send greetings to friends and relatives free of charge. As for the neighbors, most of them are too busy to want to meet you anyway.  And that gives you more time to pour a cool drink, go out to the screened –in porch and update your Facebook page. I now have over 150 friends and I honestly don’t know who half of them are. Once you start going down the friends-of-friends route it gets pretty confusing. I can’t wait for a new app to come out that will automatically update my Facebook page so I don’t have to deal with any of these people. I need more time to figure out how to play Madden Football.

The need for politicians to understand the issues that affect their citizens has been forgotten in many cases in our national elections.

We see candidates run for office who have either lost touch with the general public or never established it in the first place. Money gives people easy access to fame through TV ads and the general efforts of a good public relations team, but it doesn’t ensure that they have a clue about the real concerns.

We have a lot of candidates for high office who have simply spent too much time in Washington. We also have some from outside Washington who have never experienced the real world of life as an ordinary citizen.

Most of us can sense when a candidate had lost touch. They haven’t had to sit in a traffic jam for years, caught the middle seat in coach on a flight, or waited in line while some bureaucracy screwed up an application for something. They may have never sweated a paycheck, or ridden a commercial bus from town to town.

I am tired of having people in office who don’t know how to do stuff. They have never managed a company, hired or fired workers, or met a payroll. They have no idea how to manage. Yet we send them off to manage the most complex system in the world and are surprised when they are clueless. That is our fault as voters, but we don’t demand better. We also put people in office who don’t understand what really ticks off the ordinary citizen. They don’t have to deal with all the bureaucratic requirements our government puts on our shoulders: the inane health system and 100,000 pages of tax law, or the countless other things that irritate the hell out of us.

And a term or two in Congress does not qualify them in any of these areas. They  have “people” down there who do everything for them. Heck, we’ve been told straight out  by the leadership that they don’t even bother to read the bills they pass.

I wrote a piece a while ago about the need to demand more from our candidates. Leaders of the Free World (Granite Grumblings, Snap Screen Press, 2011) was a frustrated attempt to require more from our candidates than having a lot of campaign financing and a big mouth with a silver tongue. It remains even more true today. We are running out of time and need to pick leaders who can actually understand and lead this country. Playing the typical game of yelling back and forth, calling each other names and playing to a media that has lost touch with the country is not going to get us where we need to go.

I humbly herewith resubmit my suggestions for some of the things that might finally get us some leadership from people who actually understand America.

Glenn K. Currie

                                                Leaders of the Free World

Did you ever wonder how we got to be the “leader” of the free world? It is hard to believe that it is the result of the quality of our politicians.

Most of our leaders seem to be in Washington because their other careers went dead, or maybe they never had another career. And a lot of them aren’t able to apply themselves well at this job either, based on the amount of time they actually spend representing us at the various legislative meetings.

But once elected, they don’t appear to have much to worry about, because our voters don’t seem to care. Apparently our voters are so dumb they can’t even figure out a butterfly ballot, let alone determine if their representative is earning his paycheck.

No wonder the rest of the world is a little worried about us. Our election standards are even lower than our education standards.

Right now, any idiot who is a natural-born citizen and is at least thirty-five years of age, can run for President. And a lot of them have taken advantage of that opportunity. The election process isn’t doing a very good job of culling the herd. We, as voters, keep putting people into office and then complaining that they are in office. Then we nominate an even bigger idiot to try to replace him or her.

I think, as keepers of the first real primary, we have some responsibility to ourselves and the world, to establish a few minimum requirements to be eligible to be a leader of the free world. And maybe we should also impose a few demands on our voters as well.

For our would-be presidential candidates, I suggest the following eligibility standards:

1)      Live in an apartment without a doorman for at least a year.

2)      Serve at least one year in any combination of the following non-supervisory jobs:

Food service, manufacturing, sales, health care, transportation, construction, or education.

3)      Complete two years of service in the military, the Peace Corps or an equivalent (without a valet or PR person to assist).

4)      Ride a public bus across country, stay at least one night in a flop house, and spend at least two weeks in a place without indoor plumbing.

5)      Demonstrate the ability to successfully run an organization that is not inherited or funded by family trusts.

6)      Personally fill out and file a federal tax return.

7)      Demonstrate a sense of humor and the common sense to recognize BS when it is up to the ankles.

8)      Read at least one trashy novel and watch a week of daytime television.

9)      Demonstrate a working knowledge of baseball and football.

10)  Spend a month as a teacher’s aide in an inner city public school.

As for the voters, my expectations must be much more limited. But even with that realization, it seems that there should be a few basic requirements, none of which are currently being enforced.

Voter standards should be as follows:

1)      Prove they are United States citizens.

2)      Only be allowed to vote once in each election.

3)      Be required to identify themselves at the polls. (If they don’t know who they are, they probably shouldn’t be voting.)

4)      Be declared ineligible if they are convicts or persons legally rendered incompetent.

5)      Be a human being. (No more dogs or parrots getting the vote).

6)      Have a pulse.

7)      Be able to state the last name of the person for whom Washington, D.C. was named.

None of the above requirements are particularly demanding for either the voters or the future leader of the free world. They might, however, go a long way towards ensuring the humanity and executive abilities of those involved in the election process.

                 

 

All over the world it seems like we have citizens deciding that blowing themselves up is better than trying to lead a decent life. Most of these people are physically healthy and young enough to perhaps accomplish wonderful things.

The decision to kill or maim themselves, and as many others as possible, is a phenomenon that I don’t understand.

Contrary to the popular narrative, I think these people have lost their sense of religion. They have reduced themselves to robotic slaves willing to plunge the world into eternal darkness. I don’t understand how a creator would wish this upon such a wondrous creation or be pleased with those trying to do it.

Can they really believe that turning our planet into a nuclear waste dump is what life is all about? Does any real religion truly have as its objective to blow small children into pieces?

There are so many miraculous, wonderful things going on every day across our planet. And yet we all seem to focus on the negatives. Angry people hate other angry people and our humanity is gradually destroyed.

In the end, no one finds answers in carnage. Those that try, are like stones spit up from the bowels of the earth. They spend eternity oblivious to the beauty and wonder that is part of creation: instead becoming unseeing and unknowing parts of the fire and brimstone that is the total substance of their existence.

I wrote Two Moon Night (In the Cat’s Eye, Snap Screen Press, 2009) to describe what that world might look like when the monsters were free to roam on one particular evening. Are we really heading for a world where the monsters triumph every night?

Glenn K. Currie

                        Two Moon Night

The devil dances, on the two moon night,

His breath’s cold vapor, freezing in the light.

And a ghost moon rides the fog’s thick back,

Searching in the darkness for fugitive’s tracks.

He dances, dances, dances,

When the ghost moon rides the sky,

And the forest fills with empty souls,

Searching for a place to lie.

Treetops bend to the banshee’s scream,

Timber wolves gather by lava streams,

Red coals burn beneath tainted ground,

Waiting for those the ghost moon found.

He dances, dances, dances,

Across the two moon night,

Stealing through the luminous fog,

Blocking out the light.

Forest beds in decay, collect the purged debris.

Tattered shades, drawn this day, mourn what used to be.

 Reapers rise from below, sweeping up remains,

As two moons light the devil’s dance, o’er his dark domain.

He dances, dances, dances,

Fanning the rising flames.

While two moons search the shadows,

On the night the devil reigns.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece for my book Granite Grumblings ( Snap Screen Press, 2011) that discussed the difficulty of surviving meetings as we achieved a more “energy-deprived” age.

I am a veteran of many years with two Fortune 500 companies as well as serving on over a dozen corporate and non-profit boards. I thought my observations on what goes on in these types of meetings could be a useful review for all of us.

The “business of life” can be stressful and tiring but I hope that today’s entry in my blog will prove both useful, and something that you could perhaps surreptitiously read on your I Phone if you start to have a “nap attack” in one of these own meetings.

Good luck!

Glenn K. Currie

The Challenge of Meetings

As I continue to distance myself from age fifty, I am finding a steady stream of additional burdens that those of us who have passed that magic mark seem to share. One of these is that I am having an increasingly difficult time staying awake in meetings, presentations and speeches.

And, as I look around me, while attending these events, and before my thought processes begin to blur, I can see others, generally also over fifty, wrestling with the same difficulty. I see a gentleman facing the wrong way at his table during a luncheon speech, clearly doing some serious introspection. And I see another, hovering dangerously over a plate of mashed potatoes.

I understand that certain speakers and subjects can bring out these tendencies even in younger participants, but it seems to strike more frequently now that I have passed my golden birthday. I have been trying to determine why this inclination towards “meeting somnolence” seems to afflict those of us over fifty more extensively. (Maybe it is partly the result of too many speakers using words like a couple of those in the last sentence.)

After some careful analysis, I believe I have isolated a few factors that may contribute to why we are more susceptible than younger people to this malady.

1)      Those of us over fifty have already had to sit through a lot of these darn things.

2)      I think most of us are more tired. (Hey, I didn’t say this was rocket science.)

3)      In an informal survey, 98% of us hate acronyms and speeches laced with PC (politically correct) double talk or bureaucratic wordspeak that advocates  intelligence-challenged protocols, requiring interventions and consensus-building. (No matter how many cups of coffee I have had, I am going to lose my focus and go comatose after about thirty seconds of this stuff.)

Because there is some justification, as listed above, for our condition, the good news is that when you get past fifty, people have a tendency to excuse a few sleep indiscretions.

This basically means that fellow attendees will generally ignore, perhaps even envy, you as long as your head doesn’t hit the table hard enough to break china, and you don’t snore too loud.

In business, I have seen some absolute masters at “meeting sleep”. My first boss in civilian life had perfected this skill to its zenith. He sat through almost all meetings with his eyes closed, so no one knew whether he concentrated better with his eyes shut, or just slept a lot. I learned that he had a remarkable ability to keep a mental tape recorder going so that, almost invariably, when asked a question at a meeting, he could answer it. After several years of observation, I realized that I could tell if he was really sleeping by how long it took him to answer. If he had to stare off into space for a while, demonstrating deep thought, and maybe did the “ church and steeple” thing with his hands, I knew that he was having to rerun that tape recorder back a fair distance to get a true sense of the discussion leading up to the question. It was a skill that required a special and perhaps unique genius, and the man was one of my idols as I learned the ways of the business world. A young man, however, could never have pulled this off. Young guys have to keep their eyes open at business meetings.

Another amazing display of successfully converting meeting time to sleep time was demonstrated by one of my own employees in Houston a few years ago. He was a 55-year old hardened field operator whom I had brought back from one of our Saudi Arabian projects. He was a veteran of some of the most boring meetings on the planet. Those were held in Saudi Arabia and involved 20-25 people. They were conducted almost entirely in Arabic, generally lasted three to four hours, and required almost no contribution from English-speaking westerners. When he came back to Houston, he was required to sit in on our operational meetings. He had a reputation for being taciturn and lived up to it. But halfway through the second meeting I asked him a question and got nothing. He was sitting there staring at the table, but it was like he was dead. A hand waved in front of his face didn’t even draw a blink. We were about to dial 911 when the commotion woke him up. He had absolutely perfected the art of sleeping sitting up with his eyes open. Since he was older and valuable in many other ways, he could get away with it. In fact, he also got out of most of our meetings since his presence could be distracting and a little creepy.

While I find myself now facing the same problem, I don’t possess any of the special skills of these gentlemen. I only have the standard defenses and they aren’t working as well anymore. I used to be able to drink five or six cups of coffee and be confident it would enable me to endure any meeting. Now, however, after six cups of coffee, I spend half the day in the bathroom. I’ve also found that this can have a negative snowball effect, because certain unscrupulous people will take the opportunity when you are out of a meeting, to appoint you to additional committees where you will have to attend even more meetings.

I also used to go stand in the back of the room if my eyes were really starting to glaze. Because of the severity of recent nap attacks, however, I now worry that I’ll lose my balance back there and incur serious injury.

In a desperate effort of self-preservation, I would therefore like to make the following suggestions/pleas to speakers, presenters, and callers of meetings.

1)      Don’t darken the room after people have eaten.

2)      Try to avoid using nouns as verbs, or speaking in the language of acronyms and abbreviations. This can lead to MEGOizing your audience. (If you don’t know what MEGO means, you haven’t attended enough meetings).

3)      Only speak to groups in rooms where the temperature is below 40 degrees. That way if we fall asleep we risk freezing to death. (Fear is a good stimulant).

4)      If you must drone on interminably, do it quietly, and don’t make any sudden moves or loud sounds. (People can get injured and a lot of the potential victims in this town are lawyers.)

5)      If you are doing a dinner speech, never start it after 8:00 P.M.. If I were home, I would probably already be asleep on the couch. An uncomfortable chair and indigestion at 9:00 P.M. will just make be a grumpy sleeper.

6)      Oh yeah, and finally, if you call a meeting, please make your point, get the decision and get out of there. And if someone looks like they are doing some deep thinking, leave them alone and let them sleep.  

Well the summer corn is here. Those that have traveled to New Hampshire this time of year know that, for about a month in late summer, the butter and sugar corn raised here is the best in the world.

This fosters a false hope among many homeowners that they owe it to the world to create their own backyard vegetable gardens where they can grow the corn and any number of other wonderful things.

They are wrong! I am here to say that for many, many reasons, they should leave it to the pros.

Backyard Vegetable Gardens is a piece from Granite Grumblings, Life in the Live Free or Die State (Snap Screen Press, 2011). It pretty much says everything that needs to be said on the subject.

Glenn K. Currie

Backyard Vegetable Gardens

My wife suffers from a malady that seems to afflict many in New England. I believe the formal name for this illness is “wormabodus disruptus”, but most know it by the more common descriptive term of “gardening”. In particular, I refer to the deranged efforts by some of our citizens to grow backyard vegetable gardens.

I have never really understood the attraction of digging holes in the backyard. There seem to be better things that people could be doing with their spare time, like watching baseball games, playing golf or going to the beach. But every year, millions of amateurs go out to their backyards, armed with spades and trowels and bug spray and calamine lotion…and proceed to totally brutalize a good patch of earth. When we do this to another country, the world screams bloody murder, but if we do it out behind the garage, it is some kind of noble avocation.

I don’t understand why these people don’t leave the farming to the professionals. Real farmers know what they are doing and grow good stuff, like melons and sweet corn and beans. But backyard gardeners spend countless hours disrupting worms and grubs, so they can grow stuff like turnip, zucchini and gourds. What the heck do people do with gourds? Their only strong point is they will last for weeks, because no one eats them. And if zucchini is so good, how come every gardener in America spends most of the early fall trying to give the things away?

When I ask these questions of my wife, she tells me that working with the earth is a relaxing, healing process that counteracts the stresses of modern living. However, my unbiased observations of her work in the garden leave me skeptical of the whole process.

Let’s look at a typical summer in the vegetable garden.

1)      Dig up a patch of the yard, usually someplace where a horseshoe pit or barbecue should be.

2)      Make a diagram for the garden that looks like the invasion plan for Normandy.

3)      Wallow around in the dirt for hours at a time, fighting mosquitoes, black flies and snakes, in order to scientifically bury a bunch of plants and seeds; many of which will never look better than the day she puts them in the ground.

4)      Build a fence around the garden to keep out all the little animals that want to eat the plants she just bought.

5)      Get really upset and stressed out because those little animals are smarter than the average gardener, and find a way through the fence and eat all the little plants.

6)      Buy new plants and build a bigger fence.

7)      Buy fertilizer to spread on the plants. Fill the backyard with olfactory reminders of why we don’t raise horses and opted for indoor plumbing.

8)      Spend approximately two months pulling out all the stuff that really grows well in the garden, so the scrawny little plants can grow a little bigger.

9)      Face the fact in late August or early September, that most of the “good stuff” in the garden, isn’t going to make it. But take solace in the fact that the zucchini is doing well.

10)  Go to the farmers’ market the next six weeks to buy all the good stuff that never made it.

11)  Spend a month giving bags of zucchini to the neighbors, many of whom desperately flee when they see us approaching.

12)   Give the sad remains of the garden a proper burial, after the first frost, and cover it with fertilizer and compost so there will be lots of disgusting stuff to dig up in the spring.

I never could figure out how this whole process actually reduced stress. She would spend all summer looking like a refugee from a mudslide and worrying about rain and sun and plant predators. The annual budget would include funds for plants, fertilizer, seeds, fencing material, equipment and gardening paraphernalia. I once estimated the average cost of a tomato, (counting her time at $8.00/hr), was about $143.00. Cucumbers probably cost about $18.00 each. Zucchini, of course, were cheap. But what do you really do with them? I know there are probably books out there telling you a thousand things you can do with a zucchini (and I can think of one more), but have you ever met anyone that looked forward to a big plate of the steaming stuff? My theory is that they’re really weeds, but gardeners won’t admit it.

There is no arguing with the bottom line, folks. You are much better off spending your summer hours watching bikinis at the beach, reading a book on the patio, or disrupting the plant and animal life at the golf course.

If you absolutely must spend your time communing with the worms and grubs, I suggest you stick with flower gardens, which are a whole lot cheaper and prettier. And if you get a few weeds in the flower garden, most of us won’t know the difference. Some of them are prettier than the flowers. Weeds, like vegetables, are a matter of taste, but at least you don’t have to eat the ones in a flower garden.

As we search for our places in the world, it often seems that our population wanders around lost.

We cover our faces and pretend that it is enough to slog through our days immersed in the pettiness of keeping the sand out of our eyes. We huddle in our little corners and hope the storm will pass us by.

There are lots of movies lately that imagine the end of the world as we know it. It seems to be a favorite topic for all those young theater-goers who assume they will be the survivors.

But what does the Earth look like in those scenarios? Where have we arrived when the dust settles? Are a few pieces of silver enough for what we have given away?

I wrote “Shamal” (In the Cat’s Eye, Snap Screen Press, 2009) a few years ago to ask some of these questions as we continue our journey through human history. I fear that too many of us are now willing to do nothing as the Earth withers under the winds of war and the fires in the forests of our minds.

Glenn K. Currie

                                 Shamal

The storm rolled across the land,

Pushing a wall of sand a thousand feet high.

It carried the remains

Of crusaders and martyrs,

Filling the cracks in the earth

With ancient epoxy.

The lines of living were lost

In the enveloping darkness.

Borders disappeared,

As the wind blended sacred soil

With the sweat of shepherds and kings.

It was a world of the blind,

Each man a wanderer.

When the dust settled,

The moon spread pieces of silver

Upon the burial ground,

And the stars whispered assurances

That nothing had changed.

I received my first comment on my blog today through Google 1. Thanks Mike. Hope things are going well and I am glad you liked today's post. I have a lot of visitors to this blog from all over the world. I hope all of you are also finding something here that you like.

So much in life is dependent on chance. Did we get good, healthy parents who gave us attention and guidance? Did we have the misfortune to be born to great wealth or terrible poverty, either of which can limit our choices and kill our imagination and initiative?

Okay, I hear you laughing at great wealth being a misfortune, but, from what I have seen, it can kill ambition and open a lot of the wrong doors in life. It is very easy to fall off the edge when expectations are high and you have little understanding of what the real world is like.

Yes, great poverty is a much larger hurdle to overcome. If you don’t have strong ambition and great strength of character, it is very easy to be swallowed up by the walls and the sink holes that surround you. But you grow up knowing that there are better places than where you start. I think there can be advantages in seeing that the world can be brighter where you are trying to go, rather than having the world so bright behind you that you find yourself staring into the shadows.

The real determinants in life are the choices you make from wherever you start. We all face a point in our lives when we must assess our particular strengths and weaknesses and decide which will dominate our path.

Luck determines where we start in life, but our choices determine where we finish. If we have the strength of character to overcome the stuff that circumstances and people throw at us, we can live good, productive lives.

Each of us has a “Stranger at the Door” (In the Cat’s Eye, Snap Screen Press, 2009) challenging us perhaps, or just waiting out there to see what we can make out of the great blessing of life.

We can pass the years hiding from the stranger or we can make the decision to open the door and face the world, no matter how much of a storm may be blowing.

The choice is there for all of us, no matter where we come from. What will you do?

Glenn K. Currie

  

                    The Stranger at the Door

There is a stranger at my door.

I hide behind my chains and locks,

Afraid of his judgement.

He has traveled a great distance

To demand more from me

Than I know how to give.

Through the drawn curtains,

I hear him taunting me for my fears.

“The Earth is too large”, I say,

“The universe is too small”, he replies.

My mind runs in circles

As I watch the mirror change.

I am torn between less and more,

What I am and what can be.

My vision is flawed by temerity.

Yet, if I dare, I will see

Who now stands so quietly,

This stranger at the door.