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THE JOY OF LIFE - 07/09/2008
(by Gene Myers - Features Editor - July 09, 2008)
The joy of watching the wheels go round & round
Here comes my boy, hands up, holding on to mommy’s guiding fingers, running down the driveway shrieking with delight to my Jeep as I pull in.
It’s the end of a long day but the grief is forgotten watching Owen trying to run to greet me. At 13 months old, it’s not easy for him.
He alternates between looking at me and carefully watching his feet, one wobbly foot making its way past the other. To think that greeting me is worth all of this trouble makes my chest swell.
That is, until he notices the shiny mag wheels on my Jeep. Suddenly, his mission gets re-prioritized as he shifts direction. The greeting that was meant for me is instead given to my oversized tires.
Poet Walt Whitman starts off the “Deathbed Edition of Leaves of Grass” (his life’s masterwork), with 26 poems written over 30 years that were attempts to not only lead readers into his book, but also to stress the importance of beginnings.
“The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,” Whitman writes.
In “How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry,” Edward Hirsch uses Whitman to make the case that awe is at poetry’s core. But I’d go one step more and say that the feeling of awe is what guides a happy person through life.
Throughout my life, I’ve followed the feeling of awe like a trail of bread-crumbs. I didn’t know that my interest in music would lead to an interest in writing lyrics for my high school rock band, which led to an interest in poetry.
The interest in poetry led to an interest in reading in general. That interest literally opened up the rest of the world to me once I caught glimpses of the world’s exotic people and places. My fascination with culture and psychology led me to journalism. In turn, journalism gave me a career.
I had no idea when I was writing song lyrics as a boy that I was starting down a path that would make me a journalist. All I knew was that I was thrilled to be writing.
The sounds of the words and the excitement that I got from their possible combinations probably made me feel a lot like Owen feels when the bright shiny wheels that spin on daddy’s car catch his eye.
He also has no idea how things will come together and add up in his life. But finding something that interests him and running to it will eventually take him a lot further than the driveway.
For more of The Joy of Life, visit genemyers.com.
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