Asses of Us All
For ages people sat and wrote down their thoughts. They wrote and they wrote, and then sometimes they felt writer’s remorse, as Charles Francis Adams did when he came across his own youthful diaries. “For the first time, I saw myself as others saw me and the revelation was positively shocking,” he wrote in his autobiography. He burned every last volume saying "I humbly thank Fortune that I have gotten through most of my life since without making a conspicuous ass of myself."AS IF anyone could do that! isn't Life’s whole purpose to make asses of us all!? So why live life in a fear-tinged crouch, menaced by doubt and uncertainty and that terrible bully self-consciousness?I say be who you are. What people make of you they will make of you and you sure can’t control that.I think of the time my sister wrote a paper one the Election of 1928, and did what lots of young scholars have been known to do: looked into a half-dozen books the day before the thing was due, copied a few sentences from each, typed until dawn and handed the sucker in. Sure she had all the basics: the “whispering campaign” against candidate Al Smith as the first-ever Catholic to run for president; the new tension between rural and urban populations; the shining war-record of candidate Herbert Hoover. The only problem? She had Al Smith as the victor. Good old President Smith.But what are you going to do, open a vein? These things happen.I think of our old friend Pat who came to the April 1st party we threw where the guests were told to come as their favorite fool from history or the arts.As a kind of parlor game, everyone had to tell about the dumbest thing they had ever done and Pat cited the time in his senior year in high school when he was asked by his fellow students for help in selecting a deserving graduate to receive an award, accompanied by a sum of money. Humbly – and Pat is nothing if not humble – he suggested himself. “They just looked at me,” he told us that night.So, we do dumb things. What can we do but move on and live life forward? Think of the great Satchel Paige’s advice: “Don’t look back; something might be gaining on you.”Something sure is and it’s your own flawed human nature. I say you might as well let it catch up. You can’t outrun it. And it sure does provide some DANDY lessons.
