There is a small park that serves as a buffer between the Willamette River and downtown Corvallis. I have gone there a few times in the past couple weeks because I like to sit on a bench in the shade and read a book and watch people ride by on their bicycles. Somehow, I feel a little more like an Oregonian by doing that. If I did it while drinking coffee or recycling, I would be the real deal. A little farther down from where I like to read, there is an area with all of these fountains that constantly shoot water into the air like a glorified sprinkler system. On hot days, young mothers take their children to the fountains so that they can play in the water. It's a good way to get their whiny kids to whine just a little less for a while. The kids go crazy over the fountains, too. They run and whoop and act like today is the greatest day in human history. And I sit and think, "Poor kids. They're just so ignorant. Little do they know that those fountains really aren't that great. There are certainly more exciting and fun attractions in the world. Someday they'll grow up and be as enlightened as me." But that's the great thing about kids, really. That's the reason the rest of us might wish we could go back to our childhoods from time to time. To a child, even small things like fountains in a park are exciting experiences. To a child, everything is an adventure.
If we think of our lives as stories, we may be tempted to focus solely on the "big picture," on the overarching narrative than runs throughout our entire lives. Issues such as college choice and careers and marriage and retirement communities are important in such stories. We look for giant signposts to mark the significant moments of our lives, and everything else, the filler material, is shoved aside. Everyday scenes are forgotten for the sake of the bigger scenes. Life is only about major moments of climax and not so much about what happens in between. If a person views life this way, and you ask them, "What happened today?" they reply, "Nothing." Because to them, nothing happened. Or at least nothing worth noting, and so they have forgotten it all.
A kid playing in a fountain experiences life differently. For him, a hierarchy of events does not exist in such sharp distinction. Every scene can be fun and beautiful and wonderful and awe-inspiring. He does believe that "nothing" happened today. Maybe we would do well to follow suit. We need to learn to value events and conversations and interactions that at the time seem trivial. We can't allow ourselves to be numbed to the opportunities for adventure that exist all around us.
A few weeks ago, I received a letter from a friend. The letter was a very enjoyable read because it was a bunch of random stories from her recent experiences. They were not life-altering. But they were life as it happens. That's what the life-story is, in a way--a collection of smaller stories woven together like a quilt. At the beginning of the summer, I read J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. It's supposed to be a classic in literature. I really liked the book (though I'm glad I didn't have to read it in high school English class. I feel like that could have caused me to dislike it.) In The Cather in the Rye, it is difficult to find a typical storyline. Instead, it seems to just be loosely-connected experiences of Holden Caulfield over the course of a couple days. Maybe that's why so many people have enjoyed reading it--because it tells of a man's life as it happens, through a string of stories.
I want to do a better job at appreciating the little things in life, and maybe you could do likewise. Late-night Taco Bell runs and games of Horse and conversations in dorm rooms and fountains and pet birds chirping in the kitchen and hikes along rivers and car rides with stereos bumping: these are what make up a life and a story. And it would be a shame if we skimmed all those pages.
Every once in a while, I wonder how my bank teller back in Joplin is doing, the one that I like to pretend flirts with me. I hope she's doing well.
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