Wear the World Lightly

There is a story I heard once about two relatives who were attending the funeral services of a wealthy family member. One of them, with a greedy glint in his eyes, leans over and whispers; “how much did he leave?“. The other looks back and responds…”All of it“. The point of the story was that when our time comes, we don’t take any of our possessions with us.

St. Francis of Assisi, who was born into a wealthy noble family, left his life of possessions and privileges to start a monastery and live a life of simplicity. His advice to those who wanted to join him was to “Wear the world like a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there but lightly”. 

St Francis Statue

The Alcoholic Anonymous organization adopted this teaching of St Francis and shortened it to the simple phrase: Wear the World Lightly. Their 12-step program for overcoming addiction uses lots of sayings to help people detach and overcome their addictions, phrases like: live and let live, let go and let God, turn it over, easy does it, and one day at a time.

All of these statements of detachment are not intended to send a message that we should be indifferent or dead to the world, or have no feelings at all. Rather their purpose is to teach people to face the world with a kind of mindful disengagement.

It is this “detachment with love” philosophy that can help motivate people to create a peaceful space within themselves, separated from the never-ending incoming arrows of uncertainty, fear, anger, and other painful events that plague our life. Practicing detachment helps people look past the daily shocks that occur, producing a change of attitude in the mind and a physical release in the body.

To wear the world as a loose garment is to acknowledge that the world and our life will always press at us and around us, but that it does not have to touch us but “lightly”. Most things are either outside our control or ultimately unimportant. 

We do not need to grasp, manage, dwell on or react to everything that happens to us. We can choose instead to keep the world at an emotional distance so we can stay focused on doing the next right thing. It is an attitude that can relax the body and relieve the mind of the poisonous emotions that overcome us when we are confronted by the people, places or things that beset us.

To be in the world but not of it, is to live and move through life without being emotionally attached to everything that happens. Life can get hard, but those who wear the world lightly learn how to live in the world with their hardships, neither fighting them nor being crushed by them.

St Francis was essentially encouraging us to not sweat the small stuff. To not get annoyed or depressed when life does not go your way or when you do not get what you want. When you have lived long enough you come to understand that most of the things that bother us are small potatoes. Even death apparently, which the Dalai Lama described as a simple change of clothes.

I’ve heard it said that the secret to happiness as we age “is to care less and less about more and more“. The wise elders I have been fortunate to know in my life carried that attitude with them; they tended to let fewer and fewer things bother them as they got older. It’s not because they didn’t care, most likely it was just that they discovered through their life experience that it is possible to walk away, without anger or agitation, from some things they felt passionate about – and still live.

I happened across an on-line sermon about this same topic of wearing the world lightly by Bishop Robert Barron. From a spiritual point of view, Bishop Barron also believes that St Francis’ famous statement was an attempt to teach his followers about the importance of detachment – especially from the goods and achievements of the world.

Not because the world itself is bad – there are all kinds of good, true and beautiful things in the world – but because the things of the world are not the ultimate good and we are not meant to cling to them as though they were.

There are stories throughout the Bible about the futility of clinging on to earthly power, riches and glory. King Solomon is one of the greatest figures in the history of Israel from a standpoint of wealth and power. He was somebody who had it all; nobody was richer, nobody was more famous, nobody had richer palaces or clothes. But, as an old man, looking at all the possessions he has acquired over his lifetime, he says: “Vanity of vanities, all things are vanity!“.

The word vanity in Hebrew signifies something that is insubstantial and momentary, like wind or vapor or bubbles; something that is here for a brief time and then it is gone. Solomon has experienced everything: power, sensual pleasure, wisdom, honor and wealth. He has built up a reserve of wealth through his knowledge and skills and yet when he is gone, he must leave all his property to others who have not labored over it and do not deserve it.

It is not uncommon to hear complaints like this from men as they become old and infirm; “I gave my whole life to my business, I worked hard and I made a fortune. Now I’m an old man and I’m surrounded by ungrateful children and grand-children; and I’ve done all this work and yet these people are going to inherit all my wealth. What’s it all been about“?

If you live to be old enough, at some point, you finally come to realize that everything in this world has a quality of evanescence – it disappears and does not last. It is a good thing if you have been successful and built up a fortune – but it’s not going to last. Because you are going to fade away and it’s all going to go to somebody else.

Should we just be depressed then? Father Barron says no, not depressed, instead we should be detached. Our wealth, power, pleasure and the esteem of other people. It’s good. We should take it in and then let it go. We should enjoy it the way you enjoy a firework going off. Learn to live in the present moment, savoring what we can, but then letting it go.

Why? Because we come to realize that the truly good and beautiful things belong to a higher world. We can sense them in the good things of this world but none of our earthly things last and so if we cling to them, what happens is they disappear, they crumble as we try to grasp at them. Rather see them, appreciate them and then let them go.

We can get caught in an addictive pattern when we cling to the goods of the world. You worry about them so you say to yourself, oh no I better get more. Instead, we would be wise to remember the cautionary parable of the rich fool told by Jesus:

“The ground of a certain rich man brought forth abundantly. He reasoned within himself, saying, ‘What will I do, because I don’t have room to store my crops?’ He said, ‘This is what I will do. I will pull down my barns, and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. I will tell my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.”‘ “But God said to him, ‘You fool, this very night your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared— whose will they be?’

Luke 12:16-21

St Francis asks us to cultivate an attitude of detachment in our life. To stop clinging and hanging on to the things of the world. The more we cling to them, the more we become imprisoned by them. We’ll become bitter, angry , empty if our only focus is on the acquisition of ephemeral things. But if we practice the proper spiritual attitude of detachment and keep our eyes on the true and beautiful things that do not fade away then we will know how to handle the goods of the world as they come to us.

Fr Barron closes his sermon by emphasizing again that wealth in itself is not the problem. He points out that wealthy people can be saintly when they know how to use their wealth, how to wear it lightly and how to become generous with it. The only thing we take with us into the life to come is the quality of our love and what we’ve given away on earth. So, we should forget about trying to fill up our lives with bigger barns; true joy in life comes through building up our treasure in heaven.

The publication of this particular blog represents a milestone for me and the achievement of a goal I set for myself way back in 2013 when I posted my very first Words to Live By blog entry. I have been publishing this monthly blog for almost 10 years now and and have managed to author 100 different blog entries in that time.

I have attempted in this collection of postings to communicate ideas and philosophies that have helped me along the way and given my life direction and meaning. It has been a wonderful mental exercise for me and a labor of love that has helped me recognize things that make life interesting and wonderful. I hope my readers have discovered some of their own words to live by that will be of specific value to them in their own life.

In the spirit of “wearing the world lightly”, I plan to cut back on my blogging activities moving forward so that I am can devote more time focusing on doing the next right things in my life that will increase the quality of my love. I don’t plan to walk away from blogging completely though, as there are always more words to live by to be discovered and examined.

So, keep an eye out for the occasional future posting from me; and until then, may the blessings abound in your life.

Can Do Attitude in a Can’t Do Body

One of the things my wife and I like to do together is attend performances at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre. We consider attending plays one of our better date activities because it provides us with an opportunity to break out of our normal routines and have engaging conversations together about the moments in the performances that stirred our emotions or stimulated our minds.

Recently we attended a two-man play called Best Summer Ever that was written and performed by Kevin Kling – an accomplished playwright, storyteller, and contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. Kling is an ebullient personality and there is something childlike, mischievous, and endearing about him that works to win over his audiences from the start.

One of Kevin’s most admirable qualities is his attitude towards overcoming the physical disabilities that are a part of his life. He was born with a congenital birth defect that shriveled his left arm and left it without a wrist or thumb. Then, at the age of 44, Kevin was in a motorcycle accident that completely paralyzed his right arm and disfigured his face.

Kling is open about his disabilities and tries to explain, with humor, the blessings he has derived from his misfortunes and the benefits that can come from tackling life’s obstacles with faith and a positive attitude. His family and friends stood by him while he recovered from his motorcycle accident and years of rehab.

“It’s hard to deny the power of prayer when you’re on the receiving end of it. I know it helped me heal. At times it was like skiing behind a power boat — all I had to do was hang on… As terrible [as my injuries were] and as scared as I am sometimes, I still feel blessed. And when I get discouraged I just look at my two wiener dogs because they are the best example of a ‘can do’ attitude in a ‘can’t do’ body.

Kevin Kling

Kling separates the disabilities that we are born with from those disabilities we acquire later in life and he points out that being so-called “able-bodied” is always just a temporary condition – sooner or later we are all likely to suffer from life’s frailties. He feels that when you are born with a disability, you grow from it, but when you experience a loss later in life, you have to grow toward it; you need time to grow into the new person you haven’t yet become.

Kevin wrote “The Best Summer Ever” as a way of growing toward the new person he was becoming after his accident. He does this by going back and telling the heartwarming story of his 9 year childhood journey growing up as the son of Norwegian immigrants in rural Minnesota. Exploring his childhood from this perspective became a kind of therapy; helping him to find pieces from his past to fit, not the person he was, but the new person he was becoming.

There were two moments from the play that stood out in my mind as reflections of the kind of positive wisdom Kevin had to share about life with his audience:

We all have a deep desire to feel connected, no matter what age

There is a scene in the play where 9 year old Kevin tries his best to comfort his aging grandfather who is grieving the death of his brother. Kevin is trying to understand why his grandfather is so sad and comes to the realization that his grandfather must feel like an orphan now because his mother, father and all his siblings are now gone. He is the last one of his family left.

How must it feel when the people you had the strongest connection to throughout your life are no longer here? I wonder about my 93 year old mother. After living through the deaths of her mother, father and seven siblings, does she feel like an orphan in some way? Despite her many children and grandchildren, is she happily looking forward to re-establishing connections again with her family on the other side?

Kevin talks fondly about his grandparents and the role they played in his life, saying his relationship with them was one of his strongest connections and one that most shaped who he became:

“I connected with my grandparents. And I think we were in the same light. I mean, I was in the dawn, and they were in the twilight, but we were in the same light. And because of that, they were heading to the creator, and I was coming from the creator. And it seemed, because of that, we spoke a very similar language.“

Live so that your Light outlives you

At the conclusion of the play, Kevin is looking at a nighttime sky full of shining stars and marvels that since the stars are so far away it takes hundreds or thousands of years for their light to reach the earth. This means that those of us left on on earth will continue to receive light from the stars even after they are long dead.

Kevin believes that the light from people can live on after they die too. The good that we do, and the light we share will outlive us if we act to make a positive difference in the lives of the people we love and take meaningful action against the injustice we see in the world.

When Kevin looks up at those stars at night he is happy to feel the presence and memories of his grandparents and parents shining down on him. I hope when you look up at the stars, you too can take comfort and feel gratitude for the connections you had with your loved ones. But more important I hope you are living the kind of life that will continue to shine light long after you are gone. When you think about it, being a light for someone else is one way for us to become immortal.

Dancing Our Sorrow Away

When I was in College, the Jackson Browne album “Late for the Sky” was in heavy rotation on my apartment turntable. The album’s introspective songs had a certain appeal to a young man growing up and just starting to make his way in the world because they asked big questions about the purpose of life and how to think about all the tricky emotions that come with adulthood.

His song “For a Dancer” acknowledges one of the sad truths about life: that one day everyone and everything we love will be gone. Knowing this, Jackson sings that we owe it to those we love to make a joyful sound with our lives while we are here – and to do our best to spread seeds that will blossom long after we are gone.

Listen on Youtube to: Jackson Browne: “For a Dancer”

The final verse of the song reminds us that we all know people who have had a positive impact on our life (a teacher, coach, parent, friend) and who helped us to become who we are. Those people did great things for us, usually without knowing it. We are likewise called, Jackson sings, to have a positive impact on the lives we touch – even though we may never live to see the fruit of our labors.

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you’ll never know

Jackson Browne “For a Dancer“

The song was written as a moving meditation on the death of Browne’s friend; who died in a fire at a young age. Browne explained that his friend was an interesting guy; a great dancer; a great tailor who would make his friend’s clothes; an ice skater who skated for the Ice Follies. “He was a Renaissance man and when I wrote him the song – I was trying to express the idea that your life is a dance”.

I like that image of our life as a dance and that we never know when it will be our last time on the stage. When I think of dancing, I think of being uninhibited, of letting my body react to the beat of the music, and of sharing a joyful personal moment with my dance partner.

When you are busy dancing, you are not worrying about your troubles, or the problems that that you will face tomorrow. Dancing is one of life’s rare human rituals; a moment of pure expression when you are able to forget about your ultimate fate and just focus on making a joyful noise.

A recent Youtube video created by the School of Life Company echoed a similar philosophy about the benefit of living life in the moment. The video was a commentary on the cultural expression “…rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic“, that is often used by people when they want to convey the futility or meaninglessness of a task.

Those familiar with the fate of the Titanic know that the hull was damaged and that the ship was destined to sink; so for the passengers on that ship to concern themselves with the position of the deck chairs is a failure on their part to recognize the true hopelessness of their situation.

Our life situation can become a little like passengers on a doomed liner. Our larger hopes in life have not come to fruition. We have come to see that our career won’t ever flourish; our relationships will always be less than ideal; we’ve passed our peak in terms of looks; our bodies begin to fall prey to ever more humiliating illnesses; society is becoming more dysfunctional than ever and political progress looks highly improbable.

It can start to feel like our ship is going down and that it would be silly trying to improve our condition, let alone find pleasure and distraction in our daily life. It would be to live in denial of the facts. Our instinct instead is to become pessimistic and gloomy about our ultimate end.

However, there is a crucial element which makes our predicament different from that of the passengers who lost their lives on the Titanic. Those passengers only had a few hours to contemplate their fate before the ship broke apart and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Our ship is going down too, but much more slowly. It’s as if the captain has let it be known that our ship is sinking and we can’t be rescued… but it will likely be a decade or more before we meet our final fate.

So, though we can’t be saved, though the end will be grim, we still have options as how to use our remaining time. We are involved in a catastrophe, but there are better and worse ways of passing the time and filling our days. Under those different circumstances, expending thought and effort on ‘rearranging the deck chairs‘ is no longer ridiculous at all, it becomes a logical step; one that can be turned into a higher calling.

When the larger hopes for our lives become impossible, we can learn to grow inventive around lesser, but still real, options for the time that remains. Keeping cheerful and engaged, in spite of everything, can bring some light through the dark storm clouds that you know are ahead.

Consider, for example, that you are on a very gradually sinking luxury liner in the early 20th century, you might every evening strive to put on a dinner jacket, dance the Foxtrot to the music of a string quartet, sing a cheerful song or settle into the ship’s library to read a good book – even as the water begins to pool at your ankles.

Or you might try to engage in a friendly game of shuffleboard on the slightly tilting deck; or decide to drop-in on a wild party in Steerage; help to comfort some despairing fellow travelers; or just try to have a deep and comforting conversation with a new friend – even though you can hear the sound of dishes smashing somewhere in a galley down below.

Of course your life would – from the big picture perspective – still remain a thorough disaster; but you might find that you were at least starting to enjoy yourself.

This kind of attitude and inventiveness is precisely what is need to help us cope with our state. Can we invest the days we have left with meaning even though everything is, overall, entirely dark? Our culture teaches us to focus on our big hopes, on how we can aim for everything going right. We crave a loving marriage, deeply satisfying and richly rewarding work, a stellar reputation, an ideal body and positive social change. What remains when those things are not attainable – when love will always be tricky, politics compromised, or the crowd hostile?

What is our equivalent to seeking the best spot for a deckchair on a sinking Ocean Liner? If marriage is far less blissful than we’d imagined, perhaps we can turn to friendship; if society won’t accord us the dignity we deserve, perhaps we can find a group of fellow outcasts; if our careers have irretrievably faltered, perhaps we can turn to new interests or hobbies; if political progress turns out to be perennially blocked and the news is always sour, we might absorb ourselves in nature or history.

In doing this, we would be turning to what our society might dismiss as Plan-B’s (what you do when you can’t do the things you really want to do). But there’s nothing wrong with that! It just may turn out that the secondary, lesser, lighter, reasons for living are, in fact, more substantial and enjoyable than we imagined.

And after a while we might come to think that they are what we should have been focused on all along – only it has taken a seeming disaster to get us to realize how central they should always have been.

My mother has always been a model to me of this kind of inventive thinking and an example of someone who has always been able to discover new things to do when she can no longer do the things she loves doing.

Now in her 94th year, she has good reasons to be gloomy about her present condition. Her ship has been slowly sinking over the last two decades. She is the last surviving member of her large, close knit, family; she lost her beloved husband after 66 years of marriage; she reads about the passing of friends and acquaintances almost every day in the obituaries; she has lived through several strokes and cardiac operations to place stents in her arteries; she struggles with gradual loss of hearing, eyesight, teeth and memory as well as the humiliating indignities of incontinence and lack of mobility that come with aging.

Despite these life difficulties, it is not in my mother’s nature to be gloomy. She laments what she has lost, yet she finds a reason to be optimistic about her situation and to be happy with the things that she can do. Here are some of the ways my mother has learned to stay cheerful, smiling and engaged in her diminished old age:

• She has learned to navigate an iPad so she can keep track of the Facebook lives of her eight children and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
• She has become a late-in life sports fan, following with anticipation the exploits of her favorite New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox teams.
• She volunteers for her Church prayer line ministry, spending time each day praying for those in her parish who are in most need.
• She visits her husband’s grave regularly to sit in contemplation and tend to the flowers and plants.
• She tries to include some form of bodily exercise every day. Short walks with her walker outside on nice days, elderly chair exercises, rubber band stretching exercises.
• She communicates with her smart speaker to listen to music or hear the news (even though she worries about Alexa eavesdropping on her conversations).
• She stays engaged by reading books and bingeing her favorite TV shows.
• She visits French Youtube language web sites so she can enjoy hearing and practicing the French language that she grew up speaking.
• She has become the project manager of her house, assigning her children work to do around the house that she has historically done in the past and overseeing it to make sure it is done to her standards.
• She takes short field trips with her children to places from her past and shares happy memories of the people and events that shaped her life.

I co-share caretaker duties with my siblings and I feel blessed to spend one or two days every week with my mother. It has been a privilege for me to watch how she accommodates the frailties of old age without sacrificing her spirit. She knows the end is near, but she is not afraid; and until the end comes she is determined to wake up with a reason for living – and make sure the deck chairs are properly arranged on the deck.

May we too always find a way to dance our sorrows away.

Keep On the Sunny Side

It seems like everyone I talk to believes that 2020 was a terrible year. It’s easy to understand why given the COVID-19 pandemic, the global recession, numerous episodes of racial injustice, refugees fleeing their homes, continued global warming, and to top it off, a bitter election year battle for the soul of the America.

Every day we are assaulted with negative news about wars, shootings, protests, pollution, inequality, poverty and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. These stories suggest that the world is in bad shape and many people living today are convinced that things here on earth have never been worse.

Despite all the depressing news coverage, people ought to be told that the world has actually never been better than it is right now. As hard as it is for us to believe – humans, as a species, are doing a lot better than we ever have.

That is the conclusion that Harvard professor and acclaimed science writer Steven Pinker comes to in his 2018 Ted Talk and in his book Enlightenment Now. Pinker argues that the world is not that bad. In fact, he says when you look at all of the objective data, our world is in the best shape it’s ever been and humanity is improving every day. He concludes that now is the best time in the history of the world to be alive.

We know that people did not live well in the distant past, regardless of how much money they had. For the vast majority of human history — if you were lucky enough to survive childbirth, life really was nasty, brutish and short. It was lived at the edge of starvation, and to modern eyes it looks unpleasant, boring and sometimes terrifying.

Pinker uses numerous categories as a yardstick to measure the variety of ways that the world is better for humans now compared to the past:

We’re all Living Longer

The average life expectancy of people today compared to the past clearly shows that humanity is flourishing. Just 250 years ago, one-third of children in the world’s richest countries did not live to see their fifth birthday. Today, even in the world’s poorest countries, more than 94% of children survive past their fifth birthday.

The life expectancy of a person born in England in the year 1558 was 22 years old! It slowly increased over the next few hundred years but it wasn’t until 1907 that the average life expectancy reached 50.

Today the average worldwide life expectancy is 70 years old and in developed countries it is over 80. There is nowhere on Earth where life expectancy is less than 50.

The advancements we’ve made globally in the last 100 years, even in our poorest, most war-torn countries, are incredible. The life expectancy in Somalia today is higher than the highest life-expectancy of any country in the world 100 years ago. In this respect even the poorest of third world countries is better off today than the richest, most powerful countries were in the early 20th century.

It is hard for those of us living today to imagine living during a time when so many people died so young. But all you have to do is walk around an old cemetery of people who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries to get an idea of how commonplace it is to encounter the gravestones of infants and children who died at a very young age; and how remarkable it is to encounter a gravestone of someone who lived past 80.

As an example, during a recent hike I came upon an old cemetery and was struck by the tragic family gravesite of Ansel & Esther Howard. They had three daughters: Sally born in 1825, Silvia born in 1827 and Nancy born in 1834. All of them died young. Nancy in 1836 at the age of 2, Silvia in 1845 at the age of 18 and Sally in 1846 at the age of 21. What heartache their parents must have suffered.

Family Gravesite of Ansel & Esther Howard

We’re Healthier Now

A big factor behind the gradual increase of human longevity has been incremental advancements made by the medical field over time. The discovery of antibiotics, vaccines, targeted medicines and proven disease treatment protocols – along with the increasing availability of clean tap water – have kept us alive and made our lives less miserable.

Our increasing knowledge of the human machine and how to keep it healthy has directly led to more people adopting healthy lifestyle regimens (diet, exercise and sleep) that when followed prevent or delay the onset of aging related diseases.

Thanks to the discovery of antibiotics like penicillin, developing an infection does not have to mean death or the amputation of a body part; and thanks to vaccines, virulent contagious diseases like Smallpox (which was responsible for the deaths of more than 300 million people in the 20th century) no longer terrorize the earth.

We’re Safer Now

If you only paid attention to the news, you would probably think that crime is at an all-time high, when in actuality the American crime rate is at a 50 year low and roughly half of what it was in 1990. In the last thirty years alone, the homicide rate has dropped from 8.5 per 100,000 to 5.3 per 100,000.

There is also less conflict between countries today. Before the advent of modern democracies most of the world was run by fanatics and madmen like Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan who would destroy entire cities and murder their populations over the slightest provocation.

During the 1950s, there were an average of six international wars per year going on, with approximately 250 people per million dying war-related deaths. In the last ten years the world has averaged only one war per year with less than 10 people per million dying per year. There has also been a reduction in the number of nuclear arms from more than 60,000 in 1988 to 10,325 in 2017.

There are still far too many conflicts in the world, but as hard as it might be to believe, there are much less of them than there ever have been before.

And let’s not forget that a great Civil War was fought to eliminate the scourge of a robust slave trade that abducted millions of Africans, shipped them to foreign shores where they lived in bondage and were subjected to the atrocities of rape, beatings, family separations, lynchings, racial hatred and political disenfranchisement.

Other developments over the last 50 years years that have served to make us safer include:

• Labor laws ensuring greedy businesses do not exploit children or force workers to toil under unsafe operating conditions.
• Civil rights laws preventing discrimination against employees and job applicants on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or age.
• Department of Transportation agencies establishing codified safety standards for automobiles, highways, railroads, aircraft, boats and the safe transport of hazardous materials.
  • Because of our adherence to these safety standards over the last century we’ve become 96% less likely to die in a car accident, 88% less likely to be killed on the sidewalk, 99% less likely to die in a plane crash, 95% less likely to be killed on the job, and 89% less likely to die from a natural disaster.
• Environmental Protection regulations protecting the nation’s air, land and water from being polluted by the waste generated by the Industrial Revolution.

Prior to these environmental protections laws, the industrial waste generated by factories was allowed to be dumped directly into the environment poisoning the air, land, and water and sickening the people who came in contact with it. Thirty years ago in the US, there were 35 million tons of hazardous particulate matter in the air, today that has been reduced by 40% to 21 million tons.

As a young boy growing up in the 1970’s I remember there were rivers that were considered too polluted to fish because they were downstream from a paper mill or factory. Other rivers had no fish because they had been killed from the sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide compounds that poured into the streams in the form of “Acid Rain”. Today, these rivers run clean and the fish thrive.

There is Less Poverty Now

Global poverty is one of the worst problems that the world faces. The poorest in the world today suffer with diminished health because they are often hungry, poorly educated and have no reliable access to electricity, plumbing or medical care.

For much of history, only a small elite enjoyed living conditions that would not be described as ‘extreme poverty’ today. But with the onset of industrialization and rising productivity, the share of people living in extreme poverty started to decrease. Over the course of the last two centuries, one of the most remarkable achievements of humankind has been the reduction in the share of people that are living in extreme poverty.

Two hundred years ago 90% of the people in the world suffered from extreme poverty, today less than 10% do. As recently as 50 years ago, half of the people in the American South lived in extreme poverty and had no hope of improvement – but today no southern state has a poverty rate higher than 20%.

Cutting the global poverty rate in half since 1990 has translated into approximately one billion less starving, desperate people in the world today.

The trend continues to be positive due to globalization of the world’s economies and government social programs that provide aid to the needy. It is important however, for us living today to recognize how incredibly privileged we are to live at a time when, thanks to technological advancements, even the poorest citizens live in more comfort than the richest kings of yesterday.

We’re more Educated Now

When my mother was a young girl growing up in the 1930’s she was lucky to attend elementary school through the 7th grade. She was part of a farming family and her father thought it was more important for her and her seven siblings to stay home and help him run the farm.

That was the norm back when children were put to labor at an early age on the farm or in the factories. Educating children was not a priority or a requirement, so many children never participated in formal school training.

Before the 17th century, only 5% of Europeans could read or write. Today, more than 90% of the world’s population under the age of 25 can read and write. Literacy is at an all-time high and a more educated populace has had a direct effect on lowering the global poverty rate.

In addition, patriarchal dominated systems around the world are now being pressured to offer equal education opportunities for the women in their country that were denied in the past.

We’re more Productive Now

Constant advancements in science and technology have been the foundation underlying most of the reasons why humans are better today. Poverty, life-expectancy and quality of life are all better because science is being harnessed to make us more productive.

Take hunger as an example. Back in the 1970s, many people were concerned that the world would not have enough food to keep up with the growing population. That fear was portrayed in the old movie Soylent Green. Food shortages would have been a major problem indeed, had not science made remarkable advancements in the areas of agriculture and food-resource management which enabled the food industry to exponentially increase their crop yields.

People also have more free time today to devote to productive pursuits because new labor-saving gadgets have been invented that dramatically reduce the amount of time we spend doing housework. In the last 100 years, the average time spent doing housework has fallen from 60 hours a week to fewer than 15 hours a week! That gives modern humans an additional 45+ hours per week to spend pursuing productive activities, making it possible for women to leave home, join the workplace, and make positive contributions to society.

Finally, the advent of the world-wide Internet and global cellular communications has had a tremendous multiplying effect on society’s productivity. We take it for granted today that most everybody has a smart phone genie in their pocket that, within seconds, can connect them to anyone at any time, give them precise directions on how to navigate to any destination, play any song ever recorded or answer any question that they can think up.

None of this technology existed 20 years ago. Think about how amazing it is that you can find just about anything you want within seconds – a book, a movie, a new pair of boots. We get to live in the kind of world that used to be imagined only in science-fiction novels. My 92 year old mother, who we are training to use an iPad, stares at us in wide-eyed wonder when we show her what she can do with the device. She can attend her Church service, visit with her grandchildren and watch her soap opera all without leaving her chair!

Of course, constant communication and information overload also plays a part in explaining why everyone is so convinced that things in the world are so bad now. Everything is so immediate, the entire world laid out in real-time before us – and that can be scary and stressful.

But the information overload may actually help save us because it makes us look the world in the face and confront all the evil that has nowhere to hide anymore. We can’t pretend George Floyd wasn’t unjustly killed because we all watched him slowly murdered by the police on our TV screens and Twitter feeds. In a sense, the outrage, horror and disgust that gets generated by exposing these heinous events actually helps keep the world from spinning further out of control by bending the arc of the moral universe further toward justice.

Contemplating all the ways that the world is better for humans today compared to the past was a good exercise for me because, as my wife reminds me, I do have a tendency sometimes to focus on the negative (when I do this, my wife calls me Eeyore because my behavior reminds her of the gloomy sidekick character portrayed in the Winnie the Pooh children’s books).

You can always fool yourself into seeing a decline if you compare the constantly bleeding headlines of the present with the rose-tinted memories of the past.

Pinker concludes that while the world still has plenty of problems to solve, it’s healthier for us to look at the big picture and see the glass as half full. “We will never have a perfect world, but there’s no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing and if we think of issues like climate change and nuclear war as problems to be solved instead of apocalypses in waiting.”

I have a new appreciation for all the blessings that come with living in the present age, I feel grateful to be a beneficiary of all the progress the world has made, and I look toward the future with optimism, in the hope that it will be an even better world for my grandchildren.

So, I salute 2020 as the best year ever! Henceforth, whenever I feel my inner Eeyore rising, I will remember how good I have it and remind myself to always keep on the sunny side of life.

There’s a dark and a troubled side of life
There’s a bright and a sunny side, too
Though we meet with the darkness and strife
The sunny side we also may view

Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side
Keep on the sunny side of life
It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way
If we’ll keep on the sunny side of life

Lyrics to old Folk Spiritual “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life” as sung by the Carter Family

An Appreciation of my Wife on her 60th Birthday

Kathleen was born in 1960, the first-born of a third generation English/Irish couple scratching out a living in the gritty suburbs of Boston. Her mother and father were young parents who never possessed adequate parental skills to properly nurture their children.

In public her parents tried to present the picture of a perfect family; but behind closed doors it was a different story. They were routinely cruel to their children, inflicting harsh punishments for minor infractions. They were driven by their own selfish desires, letting the needs of their children take a backseat.

Despite the dysfunctional home and parental episodes of verbal and physical abuse, Kate was fortunately also exposed to glimmers of light: grandparents who lived nearby to look after her when things got out of hand at home; a favorite aunt who would spoil her; treasured books that helped her to imagine a life different than the one she was living; younger siblings to protect and bond with; and a catholic elementary school education that gave her the moral foundation to understand the difference between right and wrong.

Her parent’s disowned Kate after she graduated from High School because she refused to continue letting them bully her or acquiesce to their unreasonable demands on her life.

With no family support, she managed to get by with jobs as a checkout girl at the Supermarket and as a snack distributor. She shared a tiny apartment and went to school at night when she could afford it – eventually graduating from Bentley University with her business degree.

When she got married her parents expressed their disapproval by refusing to attend the wedding and by strong-arming most of her relatives to boycott the wedding as well.

Nevertheless she persisted, integrating well into her husband’s family – who gladly embraced her, loving and treating her like a daughter. She learned important lessons about how to be a loving parent from her father and mother in law that she never acquired from her own parents.

Someone had once told Kate that in this life you can either choose to be a victim or a survivor; and she was determined to be a survivor – refusing to let her past misfortunes define her or rob her of present and future joy.

It is said that when a child is born, the mother is born again also. Kate got a chance to be born again – being blessed with two daughters and a son over a period of 4 years. She vowed not to let history repeat itself, insisting that she would be a different kind of mother to her children than her mother was to her.

She succeeded in this vow by focusing on her family, working long hours to create a beautiful home and doing everything in her power to make sure her children had everything they needed. She sacrificed personal and professional goals to ensure the well-being of her children and to support her husband’s rising career.

When the marriage broke apart after almost 20 years, Kate was devastated. Overnight she became a single mother of two teenage daughters and a teenage son, struggling to pay, on a greatly reduced income, all the bills that came with maintaining the lifestyle to which her children were accustomed.

She did what she could to cut expenses and protect the children’s lives as much as possible from the turmoil and disruption that typically comes when parents divorce. Though the husband and wife relationship ended up in failure, Kate did her best for the sake of her children to ensure that the mother and father roles would be a success.

It was during this time that Kate and I began dating. We found each other via an online dating app, but were surprised to learn how much we actually had in common. We were both the same age, we lived in adjacent towns, our kids attended the same Catholic school and we were both grieving from the sudden death of our imagined lifetime dreams.

We met for a bicycle ride on our first date and I was intrigued by her honesty and seeming lack of effort to impress me with her clothes or appearance. She told me right up front that I should run away from her because she had three teenage children and an ex-husband that was a cop.

Her honesty came as a refreshing change compared to my other limited dating experiences and even after one brief date I could tell there was something substantial about her under the surface that called for a second date.

I enjoyed discovering over subsequent dates the beautiful qualities about her that were just waiting to come out – her intelligence; her sense of humor; her compassion for others; and her selflessness in trying to protect and provide for her children.

I saw in Kate a unique blend of toughness and tenderness that was very appealing. She shows her personal toughness by her refusal to be defeated by the obstacles and adversities that life throws at her; but at the same time she is very tender and compassionate with the people she encounters who need love, understanding and a helping hand.

I often wonder how it is that some people can grow up in dysfunctional families and live through life changing hurts but still bounce back from those adverse conditions to live happy and fulfilling lives. I so admire my wife for being one of those people who are blessed with that kind of supernatural resilience.

It seems to be a divine gift or maybe the answer to a prayer like the one Emily Dickinson made when she was struggling with the vagaries of her life:

“Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind – Thy windy will to bear!”

Emily Dickinson from the poem “Besides the Autumn Poets Sing”

The Lord granted Kate with a sunny disposition for sure. It is not in her nature to dwell on her troubles and disappointments or to wallow in self pity. Her tendency is to see the good in other people and to take actions that will lead to a hopeful future.

Somehow she has turned the lost battles of her life into fuel that has helped her to grow more understanding, more spiritual, more forgiving and more generous. She has managed with divine help I suppose to transform all her afflictions into a blessing. What others in her life intended for evil, she has turned into good.

She is a living testament to the adage that we are not the product of what we were, but the possibility of what we can be.

If power is defined as the ability to do good for others, then Kate has been a powerful force in the world by enriching countless lives. Her heart is happiest when she is performing acts of kindness that make life better for other people, especially her children, step-children, grandchildren, husband, siblings, nieces, nephews and community friends.

Even her job as a hospice liaison is spent comforting and assisting patients and families who are overwhelmed by the emotions of planning end-of life care for their loved ones. She was an angel to my extended family as she guided my father through his last days with dignity; and now helps my mother gracefully age-in-place in the home that she loves.

If it’s true that a life is made by what we give, then Kate has truly lived a wonderful life – and the lives of the people she has touched are so much richer for her being a part of it. Every time I hear the lovely lilt of her laughter I am reminded how much I love her and how fortunate I am to call her my wife.

So I toast my wife as she celebrates her 60^th birthday and begins what the Chinese like to call “the beginning of your second life“. I pray that the youth of her old age will be filled with love and happiness and that this blessing of her Irish ancestors will come true for her.

May joy and peace surround you,
Contentment latch your door,
And happiness be with you now,
And bless you evermore.

‘Tis a Fearful Thing to Love

I recently facilitated a memorial service for my mother’s sister who lived to the goodly age of 100. My Aunt Jeannette Marie was a loving daughter, mother to 6 children, a grandmother, great grandmother and wife to two husbands.

The Last Photo of my Mother with her Sister

She was one of those people who would light up and make you feel good whenever you were in her presence. She always had a good word for everybody and even though she suffered tragedy in her life – her first dying in a train accident when he was just 24 – it was not in her nature to complain, choosing instead to focus on her many blessings.

With her sister’s passing, my mother, at 91 years old, became the last surviving person of that close 10 member family clan she grew up with. My mother was close to her sister and loved her dearly so it is natural that she is experiencing feelings of sadness, loss and grief. Especially because she no longer has anyone in her life who she can talk to about the “old days” and all the good and bad times they went through together as a family.

To begin the memorial service, I asked my wife to recite the poem ‘Tis a Fearful Thing’ that is believed to have been written by a Jewish Rabbi sometime in the 11th century. It is a moving poem about the intersection of grief and faith and love and it is often shared by Hospice teams with the families of those who are grieving a loved one who is nearing death.

‘Tis a Fearful Thing

‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.
A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –
to be,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
And a holy thing,
a holy thing
to love.
For your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched.

One of the Five Remembrances that Buddhists contemplate during their meditation practices is this one:

I will be separated and parted from everyone and
everything that is dear to me

Anyone who lives long enough knows the pangs of sadness that come with loss. From the moment we are born and bond with our parents, grandparents and siblings; fall in love; marry; have children of our own—we are destined to endure the pain of losing someone we love—over and over again. My mother, at this point in her life, has had to say painful goodbyes to her husband, parents and 7 of her siblings, not to mention many close friends.

It’s enough to make you think that life is just an elaborate setup for suffering. But somehow we still manage to choose life. We choose to make friends, marry, bring new life into the world. We lose a spouse or partner and we decide to give our hearts to a new companion, opening ourselves up to more eventual sorrow. Are we in denial to think that death will not touch this new love too?

Why do conscious and highly intelligent beings make themselves vulnerable to the eventual pain and sorrow that comes with losing the one you love. Is love really something for fools? Is it not insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result?

What is it that makes us choose to invest in love and life? The poem teaches us that it all comes down to love – because it is ‘a holy thing to love.’ Love, life, death and love again is what it means to be human.

The poem’s closing words reflect a profound truth that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit and the best character traits of the human species:

It is a human thing, love
a holy thing, to love what death has touched.

Love survives death. Death destroys the body but it does not touch love—or erase love. The body is impermanent but Love is eternal. We somehow know at the deepest level that life is about love. It may be that our divine purpose is to love, no matter how painful the loss of a loved one will be, and to send that love out into the heavens.

We choose to deeply love someone because we believe and trust that it will always keep us connected. Love becomes the unbreakable tether between those of us “here” and those who have passed on. It is knowing this that enables us to overcome our fear of the certainty of death and separation.

To love deeply is holy. Holy. Love keeps us connected to the Creator of all Beings, to all of those we have loved and all those to come.  Even though my mother is sad when she thinks about all the loved ones in her life who death has touched, she still feels a holy connection with them which helps season her grief with painful joy and a spiritual component of hope that leads her to believe she will be reunited with them someday in the afterlife.

Let us embrace that love which is not severed by death. Painful, fearful, a thing for fools? Perhaps. Perhaps for some, at first. But it is also a holy thing… A holy thing to love.

“And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths”

An essay written by Susanna Schrobsdorff  and published in the January 22, 2018 edition of Time Magazine tells the story of two widows who found solace with one another despite the grief and sadness they felt over the loss of their spouses.

The two widows were Lucy Kalanithi, wife of Paul Kalanithi, and John Duberstein, husband of Nina Riggs. Both Paul and Nina published memoirs in 2016 (titled When Breath Becomes Air and The Bright Hour) – about the emotions they were experiencing while struggling to cope with their terminal illnesses.

The essayist described how the ache of loss runs concurrently with gratitude in the two complementary memoirs. The author of each book expresses a thankfulness for the love they have accumulated but at the same time describe the acute pain they feel at the thought of leaving it all behind. One emotion enables the other.

Edel Rodriguez for TIME

Susanna wondered how the two widows, Lucy and John, who became acquaintances and close friends throughout the process of publishing and promoting their partner’s memoirs after they passed away – and who are now planning for a future together, must feel as they tour together reading the words written by the two people they loved so profoundly.

“Perhaps their old lives seem woven into their new life, one love spilling into the next, families merging, past and present overlapping. All of it can exist almost simultaneously. The laws of time are so easily warped.”

A lot of people attempt to make a clean start when beginning a new relationship, trying to leave old baggage behind. They worry that holding on to the past will prevent them from living fully in the present or that it will hinder them from strengthening the emotional bonds of a new relationship.

I have learned from experience that leaving your bags behind is not really an option nor should we want it to be. My perspective is informed by the parallels my life has had with the story of this surviving couple.

My first wife suffered from Breast Cancer and passed away at the age of 45 leaving me and my two young daughters to mourn her loss. By good fortune and divine grace another woman came into my life, kind and loving, with three young children who was recovering from a different and maybe more traumatic kind of loss, the painful divorce and breakup of her family.

We met at a time when we were both hurting and vulnerable but we began to heal our emotional wounds gradually by consoling one another, by being generous and understanding, and by concentrating on things our partner needed instead of focusing on our own sorrows.

Rather than trying to erase the baggage from our past – and the more than two decades of loving memories spent raising our families that went along with it – we embraced it, weaving the lessons of our past lives into our new love and using our past experiences to form a stronger bond together.

Walt Whitman recognized that we are the product of everything that came before us when he wrote “And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths“. I am the person I am because of the people that came before me. They struggled and they prospered and they transferred their life’s lessons and blessings to the next generations so that we could benefit.

They are no longer here but a part of them lives in me and in you. “Death” is merely another word for former life—or, more precisely, another word for forms of life that have now sprung into endlessly transforming other forms of life.

What a shame it would be if we failed to propagate the beauty and sadness we have experienced during our past lives into our daily life. Doing so would make us less alive. Life is richer when we share the joy that we experienced from the past and we become more grateful for our blessings when we think back to the aches of sorrow we experienced in our past life.

While talking about mourning for her mother, my daughter once said to me that “Learning how to accept endings is an essential part of living“. There is much wisdom in that sentiment I think. We must accept endings as they are inevitable – death and life are an endless process, inseparable from each other. By taking the essence of those we have lost and making it an essential component of our daily living we honor best the lives of those who have passed on.

So if you are wise, you will take the accumulated baggage from your past, weave it seamlessly into the fabric of your present life and share it with others – so that when it comes time for you to leave, you will know that you contributed to growing new life.

In the spirit of the upcoming Holiday Season, I will close with a passage written by Paul Kalanithi, the dying father, who knowing that his eight month daughter would not remember him, wrote her this touching note to read someday in the future:

“When you come to one of the many moments in your life where you must give account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that doesn’t hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied.”

May your presence too always bring joy to the world and may those you love carry it forward with them to fertilize new life.

 

Fall always carries with it a touch of sadness

Autumn has always been my favorite season. There is something other-worldly about Fall in New England; some golden spell lingers over the brilliant colors, crisp air and falling leaves that penetrates my soul with its mysterious power. Unlike Spring, Summer, and Winter, which unfold year after year in similar fashion, each Fall season seems completely different and unique – a once in a lifetime experience for me to enjoy!

Being outdoors on a glorious Fall day, and seeing the explosion of colors wherever I turn, brings to mind the words from the hymn “Canticle of the Sun”:

“The heavens are telling the glory of God,
and all creation is shouting for joy…”

Just breathing the Fall air and marveling at the foliage seems to have a rejuvenating effect on me and makes me feel as if I was a 12 year old boy again – and seeing the world for the first time.

Fall is the harvest season, the time of the year when nature’s beauty is in full display; the time of year when I can put away my lawn mower and be glad to pick up a rake; a time when I can walk and run without being overcome by heat or insects; a time when I do not need my home heater or air conditioner.

Despite the magnificence of Fall it is also a season of melancholy for me. I have thought about the reasons for this:

• Fall is the season that most demonstrates the passage of time – it encourages us to think upon the swiftness with which our days are passing away.
• Strange as it seems, the source of the power behind the spectacular days of Autumn is the death and decay of the living – which carries an idea of sadness with it but also a lesson for us to consider about what beauty we can bring to the world when it comes time for us to decay and die.
• It signifies the start of shorter days and longer nights, the beginning of a dormant period for nature and reminds us that we too are part of a cycle of life that is beyond our control.
• It is a time for looking back. Fall days past, because of their brilliance, come easily to mind and take me back to memorable times spent with loved ones that I will never get back.

Let us embrace both the joy and sadness of Autumn – both emotions have served me well on my journey and have helped me to honor the past while appreciating the beauty of today. Blessed are we to witness the “year’s last loveliest smile…”

“The best way for a father to love his children, is for him to love their mother”

I have learned that writing is one of the things that helps me to cope with the grieving process. In that spirit I offer up this blog on the occasion of the passing of my father – a reflection and appreciation of my Dad’s life.

Mom & Dad

Ronald E. Albee 1928 – 2015

Reflection on a Life

Ronald Edwin Albee was born in 1928 – at the tail end of the “Roaring 20’s” and just before the Great Depression began to blow across the country. – It was the year that Charles Lindbergh became the first man to fly across the Atlantic Ocean and Television started broadcasting its first channel. He was the second of three children born to Nellie and Ray Albee.

His earliest memory came when he was 3 years old. A sparkler he was holding during an Independence Day celebration ignited his shirt. His father saw his young son in flames and jumped down from a second story porch to help smother the fire – but not before young Ronnie suffered serious burns on his chest.

His Aunt Gly Tallman helped to nurse him back to health, giving her a special place in his heart throughout his life. In later years Ronnie would show his children the burn scars on his chest as a way to teach them about having a healthy respect for fire.

He was an active kid growing up and he made friends easily with the kids of his South Gardner neighborhood known as the “Patch”. They played sandlot baseball and football and would usually beat the teams from the other sections of the city. He forged lifetime relationships with his “gang” of kids (which included Billy Meehan, Tony Stone and Tony Manca) who kept in contact with him throughout his lifetime and who would call him every year – even into his 80’s – to wish him a happy birthday.

He liked to go to the Saturday movie matinees with his older brother, Clyde, at the old Gardner Uptown theatre. He would spend his 15 cent allowance to see a Double Feature of Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Roger’s movies – he paid 10 cents for the movie tickets and 5 cents for a large bag of his favorite Peanut Butter kisses.

Walking home from one of those Saturday matinee movies, 10 year old Ronnie and his brother got caught up in the great Hurricane of 1938. They tried to fight the high winds but for every step they took the wind pushed them back 2 steps. They ended up huddled under a concrete stairway at the Royal Steam Heater Co on Main St to wait out the storm. Luckily, the owners happened to notice the two boys under the stairs and offered them shelter in their house. After the storm passed the owners drove the two grateful boys home.

Although Ronnie made friends easily, he enjoyed solitude mostly– perfectly content to amuse himself and be on his own – especially if it had anything to do with nature. When he was a young teenager he bought a “Make Your Own Kayak” kit that he put together by himself. It wasn’t the most seaworthy of boats but it served his purposes. He would carry that kayak down the street on his back to Bent’s pond where he would spend many happy hours fishing and paddling around.

He was fortunate to have an uncle and a lifelong friend in Eddie Tallman who taught him the ways of nature – especially how to trap and fish – when he was a boy. He was always grateful for the time his uncle spent teaching him and he made it a point to return that favor throughout his life; teaching his sons, daughters, grandchildren, and even his Parish Priest (Fr Martinez) how to fish and enjoy nature.

One of the first things he caught trapping when he was 13 years old was a skunk. He was so proud of that first piece of fur that he put the skunk in a shopping bag and rode the bus to Uncle Eddie’s Templeton house to show it to him. I’m pretty sure that the others riding on the bus that day were not as excited as my father was about his first catch.

In 1944, many of my father’s friends were drafted to serve in World War II – Ronnie enrolled for the draft at 16 but was given a deferment so that he could finish High School. By the time he graduated two years later the war was over.

In the Summer of 1946, the Boston Red Sox celebrated Gardner Day at Fenway Park – 18 year old Ronnie was part of a committee representing the citizens of Gardner that went on the field to present Ted Williams with a gift of a telephone pole sized baseball bat from the citizens of the “Chair City”.

Dad would boast with pride in later years that he was on the same field with Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doehrr, and Dom Dimaggio. I remember visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown NY 65 years later in 2011 and seeing that same gigantic-sized baseball bat displayed prominently on the museum wall.

Ronnie was always a good student and a dependable worker. He began working at 15 on a chicken farm for 25 cents per hour, then he moved on to an upholstery job, doing piece work where he could make up to $3 hour – which was a lot of money for a young kid in those days. After graduation from High School he began work as a laborer for the city highway department.

It was about this time that Ronnie’s cousin introduced my Dad to the beautiful Claire Meunier. Claire fell in love with Ronnie’s blue eyes and quiet nature and made it a point to show up at events she knew he would be attending. Ronnie didn’t have a chance against Claire’s many charms and he fell head over heels in love with her.  The two would date and Ronnie would take her home on the last bus from Gardner to Templeton. He didn’t mind running the six miles from the Meunier farm back to his home in Gardner if it meant he could spend an extra hour with his sweetheart.

When he asked for Claire’s hand in Marriage, her parents surprised them by saying no. You see Ronnie was a sometime practicing Protestant and Noe and Bernadette could not permit their daughter to marry a man who was not a Catholic. Ronnie was heartbroken, but he decided to talk to a Priest and sign up for catechism classes and become a Catholic. It was in this way that Ronnie came to win his prize bride, and the riches of his Catholic faith also, which gave him great comfort throughout his life. He once told me that marrying my mother and becoming Catholic “were the two best decisions he ever made”.

He married Claire Aline Meunier on her birthday in September 4, 1948 when they were both 20 years old. The Newlyweds began a charmed life together, filled with work, Saturday Night dancing to the music of the Sparky Lane orchestra and the arrival of their first son Robert.

Over the course of the next 16 years, Diane, Danny, Gary, Aline, Linda, Alan and Lisa followed: a blessing of eight happy and healthy children. It was a home where the children thrived because the love of our parents was at its core.

There is a saying that the best way for a father to love his children, is for him to love their mother. And my father loved, cherished and respected my mother all the days of his life – and through loving her, he did the most important thing he could do to love his children.

Our family was never rich in material things, but it didn’t seem to matter – we were happy. Seven kids were squeezed into that first 2 bedroom house. Brothers and sisters often wore hand me down clothes, and we knew better than to be late for dinner lest the food disappear before we could get our share. But the love was abundant and by their actions they taught us a lesson to live simply, work hard and share what we had with others.

One way they saved money was to give their children haircuts. My father would corral his four sons in the basement where we would each take turns sitting in the haircut chair. Dad only knew one style, very short crew cut. Not being fans of that particular style, we were glad once we got our first jobs because it meant that we could earn enough money to go to the barbershop and escape Dad’s haircut chair.

My father was never too much of a disciplinarian; he would do it if it was called for – or if my mother twisted his arm to do it. His heart was never in it but somehow it was still effective because just knowing that our Father was disappointed in something we did made us feel terrible and it hurt more than any punishment he would give us.

In the early years my parents took on small second jobs to make ends meet. My father would take his whole year’s vacation time during the month of November to go trapping. He would spend 17 hour days, 7 days a week setting traps and taking care of the muskrat, mink, beaver, otter and Fisher cats that he would catch. He would sell the fur he caught at an auction in December and then give all the money he collected to my Mother so she could buy Christmas gifts for the family. Christmas was always magical because of the sacrifices he made.

Many of those years on the trapline were spent with his son Danny. They formed a close bond that comes with being partners on a trap line and they developed a healthy competition trying to see who could catch the most fur. My father would proudly recall the day when Danny caught a mink on the last day of the trapping season to beat him out in the race to see who would catch the most mink. He was so happy that he lost to his son. That’s the kind of father he was – happier for his children’s success than for any of his own.

He worked his way up to become Foreman of the Highway Department and then Director of Public Works for the City of Gardner. He liked working heavy equipment and being outside but as he rose higher in the ranks he did not enjoy the paperwork and politics of the desk job.

When I was in High School, I discovered that my Father was the one who helped make the call as to whether school would be cancelled due to bad weather conditions. I would try to cajole and badger him into telling me if school would be canceled the next day, but his response to me was always the same “I suggest you do your homework son”.

In 1985, after 38 years working for the Gardner DPW, he decided to take a retirement package at the early age of 57. That freed him up to do the things he loved most during the last 30 years of his life: fishing, trapping, gardening, going to the dog track, watching sports, playing cards, doing crossword puzzles, napping and indulging his sweet tooth.

My father was never bored – even though in his 87 years he never left the New England area and never traveled more than 300 miles from his home.  He was a lifetime Gardner resident. He was content just walking in wooded areas and canoeing along rivers or ponds observing wildlife activities and signs.

I spent many of the happiest days of my life fishing with my Dad. We would usually catch fish but it didn’t matter to me if we didn’t – because just being with him made me happy. It has been said that the Lord does not deduct from man’s allotted span the hours spent in fishing. If that is the case, I estimate Dad extended his life a good nine years past his allotted time.

One particularly memorable fishing experience happened in early Spring at the Millers River. We beached the canoe we were fishing in at a small dam and began casting from shore. As we were standing there we noticed that the canoe had gotten loose and was floating unattended down the river. It eventually got hung up on some bushes on the other side of the river but we could not get to it because the water was deep, cold, and very fast.

We couldn’t figure out how to get to the other side without walking several miles to the bridge upstream. My father then suggested that we try to cast our fishing poles and “hook” the canoe and reel it in over to our side of the river. We figured it was worth a shot – my first cast sailed right over the canoe and got caught on the branches – which was predictable for me at the time. That put even more pressure on my Dad – he was cautious in his first two casts, landing in the water just short of the canoe, but his third cast hit the canoe dead center and wrapped around the support bar – an amazing cast!

He worried that the weight of the canoe and the swift current would break his line as he tried to reel the boat in, so I stripped down to my underwear and stood in the cold water just downstream prepared to swim after the canoe in case the line broke. Luckily I did not have to jump in, as Dad used the drag on his pole to reduce the tension on the line and gently guide the canoe over to where I was waiting. We often joked afterwards about that being the biggest catch of his life.

I remember tagging along with Dad when I was young boy and marveling at how many different places in the woods he knew and how he never got lost. He was at home in the woods and seemed to have unlimited energy bounding up and down the river banks as effortlessly as a mink. It was difficult for me as he aged to see how Father Time had slowed him down and how I now had to help him up those same river banks he used to help me climb so many times when I was a boy. Life comes full circle in the end, but even as his conditions worsened he never stopped showing us how to live a life of dignity and integrity – even to the end in the way he chose to die.

There is a saying that “One day all that will be left of us is the memories we leave with others – so make sure they are good ones”. I have shared a small number of the good memories that my Dad has left with me. There are countless others in the hearts and minds of all those he touched in big and small ways.

It is a testament to the kind of man he was underneath it all; someone who was honest and humble, someone who valued people for who they were and welcomed everyone with a smile, someone who enjoyed life’s simple pleasures and was happy with what he had.

Joy and success for him were not defined by money or things, but by the love of his wife, the gathering of his children and grandchildren around his table, and the opportunity to share laughs until his blue eyes were sparkling with delight. My daughter summed up her Pepere nicely when she wrote: “if you knew him, you couldn’t help but love him”.

So here’s to you Ronald Albee – beloved husband, father, grandfather, friend and best of men. You lived a life full of grace and made this world a better place. We will miss you but you leave us with a legacy we will carry in our hearts everywhere we go – to every stream, lake, wood, hill, field and far off place that we travel.

You will always be a light for us; guiding us in the right direction as we strive every day to live up to your high standards and make decisions we hope would make you proud of us. We love you Dad – Thank you for a job well done. May you rest in peace.

“The crow of anxiety always finds some branch to land on”

This is a quote I read by South African artist William Kentridge who was asked during an interview why his desk was so messy. He explained that the scraps of paper littering his desk represented the remains of different fragments of ideas that were moving across his mind – awakening him at 4 in the morning as his brain was jumping between 50 different anxieties.

The image of crows landing on the tree branches of my mind is a wonderfully descriptive way to capture the anxieties that I sometimes obsess over in my own life – the thoughts that stay in the back of my mind, preventing me from living in the moment and enjoying life to the fullest.

We can become our own worst enemies when we let the worries of tomorrow prevent us from enjoying the blessings of today. There is a lyric verse from a Tom Petty song “Crawling Back to You” that speaks about how worry just leads to exhaustion and futility:

“I’m so tired of being tired
Sure as night will follow day
Most things I worry about
Never happen anyway”

People can make themselves sick and tired worrying all day about things that will never happen. How much better and more productive we all would be if we could just let go of our anxieties and devote our energies to making the most of each day.

It is easier said than done though – and it is difficult to stop anxieties from lodging on the tree branches of our minds without employing one or more stress relief coping mechanisms. I find the following activities help me to keep my anxieties at bay:

• Prayer – daily prayer has a power to comfort me because it reminds me that there is a higher power who sees all ends and that I can take those concerns and worries I have that are beyond my control and place them in the hands of divine providence.
• Exercise – regular exercise seems to have a strong effect on reducing my anxiety and I don’t know why. It may be related to brain chemistry, improved blood flow, or just being too fatigued after a workout to worry. During prolonged exercise I often find myself working through my anxieties subconsciously which usually helps me to put them aside at the end of the workout.
• Meditation – I am a relative newcomer to the practice of meditation, but I have been surprised given my limited experience how effective this ancient technique can be. Meditation teaches you to empty your mind, to put aside concerns that enter your thoughts and just concentrate on your breathing. A mantra can be used to help concentration – I have used simple phrases like “Grass Withers”, “All is Vanity”, “Must Pass” because they help remind me of the transience of life and the insignificance of things that I mistakenly believe are so important.
• Music – this is my go to activity for clearing my mind of thoughts that are bouncing around my head and keeping me awake at night. I keep an iPod by my bed loaded with a special collection of peaceful and contemplative songs. Listening to these songs seems to break the cycle of thoughts in my mind, pushes my anxieties into the background and allows me to relax  enough to fall back asleep.
• Journaling – this is something that I do infrequently, but I find it especially helpful at times of greatest stress. When my wife of 22 years was struggling with illness and losing her battle with breast cancer I began a gratitude journal. Every few days I would write in the journal three things I was thankful for on that day. They were usually simple things like a shared family meal or the warming sun on my face on a cold winter day – but for a brief moment that journal activity forced me to focus on the blessings in my life and not just my struggles.

So, I hope any readers of this blog have discovered their own effective techniques for pruning the branches of anxieties in their life and in the words of that renowned radio Psychologist  Frasier Crane, “I wish you good mental health”.