Bad With Good

I’m in a pensive mood. I’m glancing out the patio doors. It is barely 5 AM. The light is still mostly dark; sun has not arrived as yet. But enough light to see the tree tops swaying in a crisp spring morning. The temp is 51 degrees. The humidity is low for this hour – 50%. It will be a cool, breezy sunny spring day. Delightful.

Yesterday was 87 degrees, sunny and humidity low at 25%. But the day before was similar, a little cooler, 73; humidity was an astonishing 18%, a record for Illinois in the usually damp spring! 

Breezy, snappy dry air. Full sun. Cloudless skies. Purely glorious and filled with bird song if you listen. 

Now this is good. The weather is perfect in every regard. The aromas of spring are everywhere: sweet grass, freshly mown lawns, warming damp soil, flowering shrubs and nectaring trees. A fresh but sweet smell that bolsters my step!

In spite of this I have a friend narrowing to his life’s end. A trip of pain and sorrow, a reluctant leave taking, really. Bittersweet because it cannot be avoided, but life is still a treat, still a joy, making all the more a langorous exit… He is still young at 62. Too early. 

And an elderly friend at hospital; she is 93. Another friend we lost at Thanksgiving at age 73. Another in April at 59. These are the ‘bad’ we live with even as the skies are bright and airy. 

And the city prepares for the NATO meetings this weekend and the expected protests which have led to so much personal injury and property damage in the past. That’s not the feared; the violence is. The starkness of anger and hurt and upset of private lives; the juxtaposition of peace and violence. A knife cut in our life. Sudden. Unwanted. But there. 

And political campaigns waged with vitriol and ill humor. No discussion of issues. Just barbs flung at broad targets. Hit or miss is not the point; the endless slamming without fact or logic. Just keep the landscape roiled and unsettled. There are people who make their living doing this! How ugly. How pointless. Selfish, yes; of value, no.

But the ebb and flow of life goes on. We do our jobs. We help our friends and family. We visit folk in hospital. We plant a garden, or sweep a walkway. Water a plant and write a letter. Send emails. Write blogs. Edit a newspaper, pulling the stories of individual and group lives into print; sharing them with others to instruct lives rather than entertain. Life goes on in dizzying array.

And yet the good happens; so does the bad. The breeze delivers freshness and hope. A new tomorrow with new beginnings and possibilities. Ever the hope. The threshold of…?

May 18, 2012