Saturday, April 2

Rich and Mysterious Vanilla

At 28 it seems rather useless to continue to insist that I am not an adult. Yesterday I found myself on the floor of the file room, digging through boxes. I got up, dropped something and then bent down to pick it up again. Effortless. It gave me pause to wonder how much longer I will have this freedom of movement. How old can a person get before they have to stop sitting cross legged in their office chair? I'm realizing now that I've turned toward a modest, pragmatic view of life and those dull virtues that I ran from in my youth — don't run in the dark, don't be a jerk, get over yourself, do your work, avoid self-pity, pay attention, know that the law of gravity applies to you too, and hang onto your old friends because there may come a day when there's no good reason for people to like you except out of habit. These are sensible virtues of people that strike me in adulthood as vital to the preservation of life. One doesn't have to be so smart to make your way through adult life, but one should know the basic rules.

My church has recently hired a new organist who plays with a lot of flash and pulls out the trumpet stops and he makes me appreciate our old, now retired, organist who isn't that good and knows it. As a teenager I dated boys who were brilliant and unreliable and I amused myself with them and then I met a sweet guy who has those little virtues cited above and is be a good father and caring boyfriend, a steady reliable man who will dispose of deceased rats and will open doors and is capable of astonishing things.
The young and the restless are dismissive of the sensible virtues, on the basis of poor information, as vanilla, but you wouldn't dismiss vanilla if you'd ever tasted real vanilla, which is as rich and mysterious as chocolate. They only know the artificial vanilla that McDonald's sells, which is completely artificial. The blandness is in them, not in the vanilla, and their dismissiveness is pure horse hockey. Which is itself rich and mysterious, but not as good as vanilla.

1 comment:

The Bug said...

Again, you are SUCH a great writer :) Love that last line the best...

And, yes, appreciate the ease with which you get around now - I'm really struggling these days with hip pain that makes it very hard for me to bend over to pick things up - and you can forget sitting on the floor because it takes forever to get back up. Sigh. BUT I think a lot of my trouble is being overweight, so if you watch that your youth will last a lot longer.