Friendship and other stuff

I've never made friends easily.  In school I typically had one or two good friends at a time.  We moved and changed schools 5 times so I never had one good friend for a long time.  The oldest friend I have now I've known since my junior year in high school.  Our friendship happened by chance.

The first day of school that year, in geology class, the teacher assigned us to seats, two to a table.  I happened to be placed next to James.  Neither of use knew the other.  27 years later, James is still my friend, though now we live thousands of miles apart and I haven't seen him since August of 2000. 

On July 9th, 2008, James' father died of a heart attack.  He called me from Wisconsin that morning just hours before I was to catch a plane to Poland.  James had been to my Dad's funeral in 1989 and I felt bad that I couldn't get to his Dad's funeral.  His Dad was a good, hardworking man and he always made me feel welcome when I went over to their house.

The beauty of modern communications means distant friends are able to keep in touch, even if only sporadically.  The Internet has made it possible for people to meet and chat online.  This very rarely ever results in true friendship, but humans are social creatures and we crave contact with like-minded people.  I'm a fairly regular participant in some online chat forums and I've had some interesting exchanges with a few individuals (whose real names I don't even know!).

 

Other stuff

For baseball fans, July brings the famous "trade deadline" of July 31st.  I won't go into the details of the rules, but it becomes harder for teams to make trades after July 31st.  What the trade deadline means is that teams that feel they have a legitimate chance at making the playoffs in October are looking to pick up a player or two in order to shore up some weaknesses on their rosters (they're called 'buyers').  Teams that have to admit the obvious fact that it isn't going happen for them this season are looking to unload some players with pricey contracts via trades and get some young prospects in return (they're called 'sellers').

In other words, the buyers give up some of their future talent in order to win now.  The sellers are hoping the younger talent they receive in a trade will pay big dividends down the road.

I'm afraid my beloved Milwaukee Brewers fall into the 'sellers' category this year.

The Fountain Overflows

Over the last 5 weeks I've been re-reading Rebecca West's 1150-page opus Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia.  The framework of the book is a travelogue of the extensive visit West and her husband made to Yugoslavia in 1937.  However, as West writes of the various places and people they visited, again and again she digresses for tens of pages on history, art and religion. 

West was incredibly erudite and her digressions are a pleasure to read.  I don't agree with all of her opinions.  She both understood and profoundly misunderstood a lot about Christianity.  But I'm with her passionate arguments for the agreeable over the disagreeable, beauty over ugliness, civility over brutishness - in short, for light over darkness. 

She also had the clear sense to understand that civilization is the result of tremendous effort and that it and life are worth defending with violence when necessary.  Pacifism had sapped the democracies of Europe like a cancer in the 1930s, but this lady was having none of that.

Human history is a tapestry of all peoples and times and so West's historic narratives cover a much wider scope than just Yugoslavia.  Europe in 1937 was threatened by imminent war and the shadows of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany loom large in West's account.    Yugoslavia was invaded by the Germans in 1941 and so many of the places she visited had already been bombed or looted and burned, and many of the men and women she had visited and befriended had been murdered or imprisoned or were refugees somewhere far from home by the time this book was published in 1942.

Rebecca West

Summer
by Randall Peaslee

In the cooling air of an evening in July,
Beneath a space of blue, magenta clouds sail high.
Swallows, sharp as arrows, swoop, turn, then rise again
In arabesques as swift as light, sweet as rain.