Oh, how we miss being out here…
To be human is to have a collection of memories that tells you who you are and how you got there.
-Rosecrans Baldwin
We had a respite from the heat and humidity for about three days, with temps in the very lovely high 60s, and then it all came back as if the cooler days were meant as a prank. This entire past week has been untrekable. Waldo and I have had to stick to our local environs. We could have shortened our walks on the rail trail, even in the high heat, limited them to a mile or so. But it’s been so bad that even after taking Waldo for a fifteen-minute, half-mile poop and pee, I’ve soaked my shirt in sweat. Waldo romps around like it doesn’t bother him, but when we get back to the apartment, he crashes on the floor, panting like a steam locomotive climbing Mount Everest, with his tongue lolled all the way out. Only after he recovers a bit does he get up and drink water.
All this heat is causing me to think some more about that trip to Agra India I mentioned in the last blog. I was twelve and with my family as we traveled to Ethiopia, where we would live for 18 months. The plan was to go by way of the orient and return through Europe. We left the US from San Francisco, stopped at Honolulu, then Tokyo and Bangkok before we flew into Delhi. For a twelve-year old, the culture shock was stimulating and I developed a yen for adventure that lingers on today. Each day, I was a stranger exploring a strange land. And it has left an impression on me that cannot be erased, even if I wanted it to.
Sometimes, what I witnessed was shocking and life-altering. I remember, on that drive from Delhi to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal, seeing people so poor that they slept in the drainage ditch alongside the road with nothing more for shelter than a large leaf of some sort. At twelve years old, that wasn’t something I could quickly assimilate and it left a lasting impression. Other things were not so confounding, but left a mark just the same.
As we drove the many hours to our destination, our driver asked us if we knew where the expression okay came from. It turns out, okay is universally understood and used in most, if not all, cultures. We said we didn’t and he explained that he heard that it came from an American president who was poorly educated. When bills came across his desk for his signature, he didn’t want to reveal his ignorance, so, instead of writing “all correct”, which he didn’t know how to spell, he abbreviated it, O.K., for “Oll Korrect.”
I suppose the driver meant it as a joke, but still, some sixty-four years later, I remember it and was curious enough about the origins of okay to Google it. It turns out that the driver was correct, up to a point. The most accepted theory of where okay came from is from Boston, Massachusetts, of all places, in the late 1830s. It turns out that it was a fad, at that time, to playfully misspell phrases like “oll korrect.” This was then abbreviated O.K. and later spelled phonetically as “okay.” There is a record of its use in print in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839. The meme reached national prominence during the 1840 presidential campaign of Martin Van Buren in 1840. He was also known as “Old Kinderhook,” and O.K. was used as a campaign slogan, with a double entendre.
This anecdote is interesting, but more than that, I find it striking that some seemingly trivial event that happened to me in my childhood left a deep enough footprint in my psyche to last into my seventies. It was strong enough that I was curious to take action on it sixty-four years later. I can’t help but wonder the extent to which the person who I am today was shaped and molded by the tiniest of events in my distant past. It’s not just the big things that leave a mark. In fact, I’ve come to believe that it’s the little things that happen to us all the time that really matter. That’s where the rubber meets the road.
These days, when out walking with Waldo in the woods, I pay attention to the seemingly insignificant things in life. I converse with Emmy birds, listen to the chattering of squirrels and the rustling of leaves in the wind. I won’t have sixty-four more years to carry these things with me, but I do have the rest of my life.
And they make my life what it is.
…being bathed in the natural world.