Herb Gardner, "General-All-Purpose Apology"

I shall now leave you breathless with the strange and wondrous tale of this sturdy lad's adventures today in downtown Oz.

Picture, if you will, me. I am walking on East Fifty-first Street an hour ago and I decided to construct and develop a really decorative, general-all-purpose Apology. Not complicated, just the words "I am sorry" said with a little style.

Sorry for what? Anything. For being late, early, stupid, asleep, silly, alive--

Well, y'know when you're walking down the street talking to yourself how sometimes you suddenly say a coupla words out loud? So I said "I'm sorry," and this fellah, complete stranger, he looks up a second and says "That's all right, Mac," and goes on.

He automatically forgave me.

I communicated. Five o'clock rush hour in midtown you could say "Sir, I believe your hair is on fire," and they wouldn't hear you. So I decided to test the whole thing out scientifically, I stayed right there on the corner of Fifty-first and Lex for a while, just saying "I'm sorry" to everybody that went by. "Oh, I'm so sorry, sir..." "I'm terribly sorry, madam..." "Say there, Miss, I'm sorry."

Of course, some people just gave me a funny look, but I swear, seventy-five percent of them forgave me! "Forget it, buddy." "That's O.K. really." Two ladies forgave me in unison, one fellah forgave me from a passing car, and one guy forgave me for his dog. "Poofer forgives the nice man, don't you, Poofer?"

It was fabulous. I had tapped some vast reservoir. Something had happened to all of them for which they felt somebody should apologize. If you went up to people on the street and offered them money, they'd refuse it. But everybody accepts apology immediately. It is the most negotiable currency. I said to them "I am sorry," and they were all so generous, so kind. You could give 'em love and it wouldn't be accepted half as graciously, as unquestioningly.

I could run up on the roof right now and holler "I am sorry," and half a million people would holler right back, "That's O.K., just see that you don't do it again!"

That's the most you should expect from life, a really good apology.


from "A Thousand Clowns" by Herb Gardner

C.S. Lewis, "As The Ruin Falls"

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love – a scholar's parrot may talk Greek –
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

Hormones

I'm having a brief sabbatical this weekend as Jane has her sister Lois over and two of Lois' sister-in-laws - Jan and Ginny. They're all catching up after several years apart, I'm sure reminiscing about teen years spent together at a Brethren camp near Timmins. Anyway, I've been invited to find other things to do and places to be. So I taped video greetings yesterday for a new Chinese church building expansion banquet (that I can't attend) and then spent the afternoon, with my Mom, visiting my Dad at CAMA Woodland nursing home. He was quite lucid in some ways, for a change - though in and out of sleep. Thought at first I was his brother (Bert, who's been dead for several years - which doesn't say much for my facial colouring) but then thanked me for coming, calling me Laurie when I was leaving. Stayed overnight with friends in Hamilton and, because I have a really sore back, didn't go to church with them - which adds to my being stiffnecked and perverse, I suppose. Soup for lunch and then home to Jane, and to a house empty of 'sisters' - but I'm sure with a lingering aura of hormones. Ah, well.

Only Jesus

When there are no answers, only mystery, and when the road seems closed and all bridges back and forward appear to be washed away, one turns to the Friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Choices

Sometimes you feel that whatever you do, you just cannot win. Speaking to a graduating class a few years ago, Woody Allen said to the graduates: "More than any other time in its history humankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly." We've all had days when we feel like that. Question is - what to do about them?