Lesson Number One

by Joan L. Cannon

When I think of the lessons I’ve learned through a life that has fulfilled actuarial expectations (and then some), there are many to choose from for the top of the list. Most people who have passed four-score are likely to be in the same boat. It’s one of the things that go with this age to become self-conscious about what, if anything, might be useful for our offspring and anyone enough younger not to have had time to find out what we have. After all, we’re a rare animal in our ability to pass on information and to learn from it. Seems kind of like a duty.

When you’re groping for the imagined summit of adulthood through the fog of adolescence, you’re too often unable to see the proverbial forest for the trees. Some people tend to watch the path ahead right in front of their toes, and others are staring up into the canopy. Both are sure to trip  often. About half of what happens for good or ill will be the result of providence, coincidence, chance and that ineffable thing called Luck.  A bad choice is equally as likely (if not more so) than a good one. Even among my oldest and closest friends, my luck beats most of theirs.

You just don’t get a choice about where and when — what generation, century, country — you get to be born. My schoolmates and I  know something about new ideas and situations, arriving as we did in time for the Great Depression, World War II, atomic science, and electronic wonders that boggle any thinking mind almost daily even now. I have two centenarians as acquaintances, and have interviewed one at some length. She made me appreciate that at least I grew up in a part of the US with electricity and indoor plumbing for everyone we knew. Granted, my grandfather’s farm kitchen still had a wood stove his cook preferred to the gas one. However, antibiotics were still new, and I’m lucky to be alive after a severe illness when I was in my early teens.

Even as a child, I was in love with love — for the natural world, for the flora and fauna and weather, and words. Partly this was thanks to my parents and their insistence that I had to go to camp, partly because of an impressive grandmother of the “old school,” and partly because of a school that fostered all intellectual curiosity.