Sometimes he stood 8 feet 2 inches tall. Sometimes he lived in a garbage can. He often cited numbers and letters of the alphabet, and for nearly a half century on “Sesame Street” he was Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, opening magic doors for children on the secrets of growing up and the gentle arts of friendship.
His name was Caroll Spinney — not that many people would know it — and he was the comfortably anonymous whole-body puppeteer who, since the 1969 inception of the public television show that has nurtured untold millions of children, had portrayed the sweet-natured, canary-yellow giant bird and the misanthropic, furry-green bellyacher in the trash can outside 123 Sesame Street.
I have always related to Garrison Keilor’s humor. My background in rural Ohio was similar to Keilor’s. While the 1950’s didn’t seem to be particularly humorous at the time, they do in retrospect.
Quaint. Endearing. And funny.
The Depression still informed my family’s attitude. And the underlying message was always “things could be worse” no matter how bad they seem in the moment.
Why not take this thought forward into your Thanksgiving Day? Instead of falling down the rabbit hole of some family dynamic, remember things could be worse. Someone ran a stop sign a mile away from your home today. They hit an unsuspecting driver entering the intersection. They didn’t hit you.
It
worries me that I’m using GPS to guide me around Minneapolis, a city
I’ve known since I was a boy on a bicycle, and also that I text my wife
from the next room, and when I get up in the morning Siri sometimes asks
me, “What’s the matter? You seem a little down. Would you like to hear
the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3?” And I say, Leave me alone, I just want
to think, and she and I wind up having a conversation about delayed
gratification.
This week Krista Tippet’s On Being’s “The Pause” featured an article by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel about life viewed through the lens of death.
Zenju is a Buddhist monk. She is also a lesbian. And she writes about breaking silence:
I don’t write to receive pity or an apology for the hurts imposed upon me. I write to speak up, to acknowledge the devastation wrought among us when a human life is omitted in the midst of humanity and treated as less than a treasure amid life in general.
It seems wise to keep Zenju’s words on the tip of our tongues before we knee-jerk into what is “good” and what is “bad.”
My father was already sixty years old when I was born. So even at a young age, I was aware of death looming over him. Riding around town in his Buick was one of our father-daughter activities. One day, I saw my father go out to the car. I waited, expecting him to call me out to take a ride with him. The minutes ticked by but he had not called me. I decided to go out and check on this ride I was expecting. I peeked into the window of the car he cherished. He was slumped over, unmoving on the seat. Was he dead?
“Sanctuaries of Silence” takes you on a virtual journey into one of Earth’s last remaining bastions of true quiet — the Hoh Rain Forest, in Washington State. Shooting in beautifully immersive 360 video, directors Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee follow acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton as he explores the mossy, green heart of silence. In “Sanctuaries of Silence,” the threat is not so much to a place, as to our very ability to encounter the natural world on its own terms. As Hempton puts it, “Silence isn’t the absence of something, but the presence of everything.”
Recently Maria Popova featured a small book called Words of Pain. It was written in 1909 by a young woman, Olga Jacoby, after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Unusual for her time, to say the least, Olga defines a good life and her God…
“Love, like strength and courage, is a strange thing; the more we give the more we find we have to give.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
Half a century before Frida Kahlo made her impassioned case for atheism as a supreme form of freedom and moral courage, before Robinson Jeffers insisted that the greatest spiritual calling lies in contributing to the world’s store of moral beauty, before Simone de Beauvoir looked back on her life to observe that “faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly (…) a German-Jewish Englishwoman by the name of Olga Jacoby (August 15, 1874–May 5, 1913) — the young mother of four adopted children — took up the subject of living and dying without religion, with moral courage, with kindness, with radiant receptivity to beauty, in stunning letters to her pious physician, who had just given her a terminal diagnosis. (…)
This week Larry Lynn, co-founder of the grief and loss website After Talk, featured Rabbi Berger’s famous Yom Kippur sermon, which he delivered shortly after the 1986 Challenger spacecraft exploded and all on board died. I understand why Berger’s sermon is read to this day. What is incomprehensible is his own demise a few years later.
FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE is a famous sermon given by Rabbi Kenneth Berger on Yom Kippur day in the fall of 1986. It was inspired by the crash of the Challenger space shuttle on January 28, 1986 and the subsequent revelation that the crew had likely survived the explosion and lived for another five minutes while the craft plunged 48,000 feet into the ocean. The catastrophe compelled Rabbi Berger to contemplate what those five minutes would have been like for the seven crew members.
Three years after he gave this sermon, Rabbi Berger, his wife, Aviva, and his three children were returning from vacation on United Airlines flight 232. An engine exploded, and for 40 minutes passengers were told to prepare for a crash landing. The plane exploded on impact, killing 112 people including the Rabbi and his wife. His three children survived.
The scene still haunts me: It was perhaps the most awful moment of the past year. Against the pale blue sky on a crystal clear Florida day, the space shuttle Challenger exploded before our very eyes. Seven brave astronauts, who just a few hours before were chatting with the press, schmoozing with proud relatives and friends, were suddenly gone.
I bring this to your attention because life and death is a major theme of Yom Kippur. We read in our prayer book:
Who shall live, and who shall die?
‘Who shall attain the measure of man ‘s days and who shall not?
