Something About Understanding

As a child I just didn’t understand.

I recall crying to my mother when

I was five, telling her I wasn’t ready

for kindergarten. I couldn’t go be-

cause I couldn’t read or write. That’s

all right, my dear, you’re going to

learn how to do such things, she

smiled trying to console me with her

compassionate logic. So much I had

to learn over the years. And too, so

much left unanswered, I still can’t

comprehend. No way to this day could

I have sailed the ocean to locate Indo-

nesia on my own. (I have a difficult time

just finding it on a map.) Not in a hundred

lifetimes, could I ever have the where-

withal to launch and land safely on the

moon. Oh, well, after time I suppose I

have learned enough to get by. I did,

however, excel creatively, had an eye

and the touch for the arts which many

of my contemporaries have admired.

Not everyone can be another Picasso,

Magellan, Hawking or Gates, you under-

stand. I am living proof of that. One doesn’t

manage to reach old age being completely

clueless about everything. Seems to me,

though, that some folks do survive on a

string of dumb luck throughout their lives.

And there have been times when I figured

I was one of those. On a trip to Santorini,

Greece years ago I saw an old fisherman

repeatedly slamming an octopus on a

concrete pier. Since the creature was

already lifeless, I deduced his intense

flogging was meant to tenderize, and

make his catch edible. Made sense to me

even though I had never considered such

a thing before. I figured this necessary

measure had been handed down to the

old fellow from his father, his grand father

and hundreds of generations before him.

Had my mother told me that sometimes

learning takes more than one lifetime, I

may have given in right there and then,

and gone back to my crude little drawings

of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. Those

for me were far easier and much more

reasonable to understand.

Chris Hanch 11-20-18