You Rush a Miracle Man, You Get Rotten Miracles

I don’t think either one of my grandfathers ever watched The Princess Bride but man oh man do I wish they had.

There is no special reason behind that other than I think they would have enjoyed it. More importantly when I said things like “Inconceivable” and “I hate waiting. I could give you my word as a Spaniard” they would have smiled and played along.

Sadly we couldn’t do that with too many movies, believe me I tried. I once said, “It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark… and we’re wearing sunglasses” but no one responded with “hit it.”

Granted they both suggested that at some point in my life I should make a point to live in Chicago. It was where they spent their childhoods and where much of my family still lives. I promised that I would do something about that one day and most of the time I am pretty good about my promises.

Been thinking about my grandparents for obvious reasons and not just because of the unveiling. It still hasn’t completely sunk in that they are all gone now and that every generation has moved up a notch.

It sounds kind of silly, but I sort of think of them as being on vacation.

The Cemetery is About Life

If you watched my vlog you heard a couple of moments me talking about the cemetery and how quiet it was. I don’t mind quiet. I am comfortable in silence but there are moments where I want to hear something, where I want sounds of life.

The cemetery brings that out of me sometimes. It is not because I am scared or uncomfortable, but because it feels like there are a million people lying around me and everyone of them has a story to tell.

I am interested in people and that includes the dead. They have stories and as someone who loves a good tale it is hard not to be able to hear them told. So sometimes I wander around and read the tombstones and imagine what their lives might have been like.

I look at the dates of their birth and their death and think about how in some ways it doesn’t matter when they were born, they weren’t much different than us. It doesn’t matter if they are a hundred or a thousand years older than we are, they still had many of the same basic desires.

They wanted a good life. They wanted companionship. They wanted friends. They wanted family. They wanted to love and be loved.

If there were differences between them and us some of them might have been in the details, but not the big stuff.

The Big Stuff Never Changes

If you are a curmudgeon like I am you might be persnickety about that last subhead. You might say that times and technology have impacted people and our desires.

I suppose there might be some truth to it but I am still willing to argue that people always wanted companionship, that they wanted to be in love and to be loved. Read the books of the past and see what they talked about and you’ll see that some things never change.

It is why you find that certain slogans are good for business no matter what time period we live in. It is why businesses work so very hard on telling their stories because humans love stories. We love storytellers.

My grandfathers were among the best storytellers I knew. It is part of why they were good salesmen. They knew how to listen and they knew how to speak.

It is too bad they aren’t still here. It would be nice to have an MLT sandwich with them and to catch up. They’d tell me stories about what they are doing now and describe the bosses they had when 50 years ago.

Inevitably I’d listen to a tale that confirmed that the more things change, the more they stay the same.