“When you come to a fork in the road you should take
it.” Even Yogi Berra isn’t sure he said what he said. Frost, on the other hand,
encouraged us to take the road less traveled by. He suggested we would never
wish we had taken the other. Too often, most of the time really, we want to
plow our own road, define ourselves as the ideal for others to contemplate, to emulate, and to follow. There are the few that don’t give a damn.
The last three years have been historical and
hysterical at the same time. The histrionics on both sides of the aisle
consumed our lives and our way of life. For the most part, the President took
the fork in the road and the media followed. I’m tired of it. I could use some
good news, something uplifting, something that brings a smile, something to
erase the jade. A quest to contemplate only good things, good news, for a
while, is a promise hard to keep. At first glance, there isn’t much out there.
Oh, it’s there if you look hard enough I suppose. The newspaper in the town in
which I grew up writes an editorial each week entitled, “Another Good Week.”
They fill it with all the good that happened; a local athlete wins a state
championship, a local country inn is named one of the best hotels in the
country, Mrs. Castonguay’s pies won blue ribbons at the county fair; local
items of interest that make you smile. They are small things, but they tell our
story.
My Father-in-law was a lifelong newspaperman, a
veteran of Stars and Stripes reporting, the founder of a successful suburban
newspaper, and the editor of a country newspaper in mid-Missouri. A small cadre
of local people, mostly women, wrote a few column-inches each week about the
goings-on in their neighborhood or along their country road. The bad news didn’t
show up much, but each week the folks in that county knew who had visited whom,
who had Sunday dinner at whose house, which son was home from basic training,
and who was headed to St. Louis for the weekend. It was all good news and you
smiled when you read it unless you weren’t the one invited for dinner.
For years, he wrote a weekly column, From the Front Seat, which allowed him
to comment on the events of the week without being too serious. He brought out
the humor in everyday happenings, the things that related to people’s everyday
life. Good news! There were hints about the chicanery of local politicians that
resulted in changed behavior by the next week. Good News! In one humorist
musing, he offered to buy his two daughters brand new top-of-the-line ladders if
they wanted to elope instead of going through fancy weddings. He accepted the
good news that they turned him down.
Sweden has been busy announcing Nobel Prize winners.
The Bay Area picked up its usual share of awards. Berkeley seems to lead the
pack with physic awards and Stanford with economic awards. UCSF also gets a lot
of recognition for its medical science achievements. Good News! Louise Gluck, a
former Poet Laureate, won the prize for Literature. Now she is a Nobel Laureate.
She teaches at an east coast university. The last poet to win the prize was Bob
Dylan in 2016. Good News!
The traditional TV channels end their news program
each evening with some sort of “human interest” story. I’m sure it is their
antidote to the bad news of the previous 29 minutes. Who can resist some kid’s
lemonade stand giving free drinks to homeless folks, or a kid who sends a stuffed
toy to firefighters trying to quell a firestorm? Pulled heartstrings become the
good news for the day. OK!
Every day, for months now, a friend has posted
pictures taken from her home in Park City that capture the sunsets beautifully,
show the changing colors of plants and trees. She includes a “song of the day”
that matches the mood of the day. The playlist includes lots of music I would
probably never enjoy if she hadn’t suggested a listen every evening. Good News!
Each day illustrates opportunities for grasping good
news to help us trod down whichever road we took. Robert Baron, an Auxiliary
Bishop in LA recently taped a philosophical talk about the notion of self-invention. The good news is that we can take the road most or least traveled
and form ourselves into whatever we want to be. Water takes the shape we give
it. Put it in a bottle and it takes the shape of the bottle. Put it in a pan
and it takes the shape of the pan because it is malleable. Jean-Paul Sartre
taught us that the existential world allows us to self-invent ourselves. That
thought has evolved to the point where too many believe that their freedom
comes first. That isn’t good news because it puts us before and above others.
The good news is the number of people who shape themselves into volunteers at
the local food bank, who work with local organizations helping kids, and who
that support civic action and activism. Protesting in the streets because we
can is good news. The majority of people wearing masks to help stem the spread
of covid-19 is good news.
I dropped off my ballot today, like millions of
people across the country. Some predict that more people will vote before Election
Day than on Election Day itself. In some states that make voting difficult,
thousands of people stood in line for hours the first day the polls opened.
That is good news for our democracy.
Both Yogi and Frost were prescient about dealing
with the fork in the road. You can take the one less traveled by or the other
to get where you want to go. On either one, the good news can drown out the bad if we let it. So much depends on how we shape the water, for ourselves or for
others. The search, truth be told, is easier than expected. It’s out there if
we look. Good News!
