And This Is What You Can Do

“. . .and this is what you can do.”

“Brighten up the corner you’re in.”

“Work with what they give you.”

“Take what you can get.”

“This war is bullshit, but it’s the only war we’ve got.”

“Those are the things that were written on the inside cover of her notebook. She’d obviously written them there over the course of years, one at a time, whenever she ran across a phrase which spoke to her condition.”

I chuckled.

“Now, there, see? That’s the funniest thing. You said ‘spoke to her condition’ - you used Quaker talk, because you’re a Quaker, same as she was, and yet, one of the phrases she put in her notebook was ‘the only war we’ve got’. That’s kind of weird.”

“Well, it’s not as though no Quaker ever went to war.”

“No, but I suspect fewer went to Vietnam than to any other war in the last three hundred years, and that’s a quote from the Vietnam war.”

“On the other hand, it’s a war that had a big effect on Quakers - a lot of people went to Vietnam and came back as Quakers, or some other kind of pacifist, and Quakers did a lot of work to heal Vietnam veterans, and to heal Vietnam.”

“Okay, so maybe it isn’t totally out of character for her. I do wish I could understand her better, though.”

“Well, we have her notebook, and her writing, and we have what her friends have to say about her, and that’s about all there is.”

“Yeah, that’s all there is, now.”

“Hey, it happens to everybody. We come into the world, we live in it, we go out of it. It’s life. If we lived a thousand years, we’d be sorry we didn’t live a million years.”

“I know. I still wish I’d known her better.”

“Good. That means she was worth knowing.”

 

http://yearsrisingmaryoliver.blogspot.com/2010/09/mozart-for-example-september-14-2010.html

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Get to know someone while you can."