Riding Off From It

DISCLAIMER

I don’t do jokes on this blog, mainly because I can’t tell jokes very well and often leave my listener scratching their head and wondering just what it was that was supposed to be funny. But for some reason, the story of the Scottish Regimental Sergeant Major that I first heard sixty years ago is an exception to those woeful facts. For one thing, I remember the whole joke (amazing). For another, when I tell it in conversation I can bring to bear what I believe to be an absolutely irresistibly humorous Scottish accent. ( I summon my inner Billy Connolly). All of this is to preface an off-color joke which might offend tender sensibilities, and for that I apologize in advance.

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A Scottish Regimental Sergeant Major in full dress marches into a drugstore and asks for the pharmacist. The Sergeant opens his waist pouch and pulls out a neatly folded cotton bandanna, opening it to reveal a smaller silk square which he unfolds to reveal a severely battered condom.

“How much for repair?” the Sergeant Major asks the pharmacist.

“Six pence,” he replies.

“How much for a new one?”

“Ten pence.”

The Sergeant Major folds the condom into the silk square and the cotton bandana, places it in back in his kit bag and marches down the aisle and out the door.

Next day the Sergeant Major walks back into the drugstore and asks for the same pharmacist. He pulls out the folded cotton 
bandanna, then opens the smaller silk square which once again reveals the ill-used bit of latex. He then declares:

“The regiment votes for repair.”

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Having mentioned Billy Connolly, I feel obliged to share one of my favorite bits of his, taken from a concert in New York.

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One of my daughters once said that in our family when something bad happened you were given 5 minutes to grieve, and then you had to make a joke about it.

It’s true that there have been times that my discomforts whenever I have come face to face with the appalling in life made me into a stuffer, someone who puts his feelings away until there is a more convenient time to deal with them. Being a time which may or may not ever come along. I do that less now at this season of my life, but a lifetime of such putting-things-off is not an easy habit to break off completely.

This clip from Lonesome Dove illustrates pretty well what I’ve been talking about. A boy dies of snakebite while on a cattle drive, and his compañeros are burying him. As Woodrow F. Call says, the best thing to do with death is to “ride off from it.”

And there are times when “riding off from it” is necessary. In another time and place when I found myself (believe it or not) in charge of running codes on children who had arrested, my mind all on its own would click into a cool and quiet groove where the alarmed and frantic behaviors of those around me were only static, and what I needed to do was laser-clear to me. There was a need to bring order to this clamor and I took that as my role. The other personnel in the room needed to be rapidly given assignments without raising their panic level, and I found that I could do that.

Finding that I had this facility came to be a useful thing in my emergency room work. Looking back, though, I can see where a problem gradually developed in that I began to apply it to everyday life, in relationships and situations where it wasn’t appropriate or constructive.

Because sometimes the best thing is not to “ride off from it,” but to sit down and weep. Not in some vague tomorrow but right then, on that very chair in front of you. With friends, if you are fortunate.

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.It’s one more case of life’s attempts at humor which falls flat. Life isn’t very good at humor, actually, being much more adept in the role of sorrow-bringer or day-screwer-upper. We met a very pleasant surgeon who was not completely full of himself, which I have found to be quite an unusual thing. He was an excellent communicator as well, and what he communicated was that if possible he would like to avoid surgery altogether, but if it became necessary how that would be accomplished. We left the clinic with a plan and we’ll see how things go from here.

En route we saw three small herds of antelope pronghorns, each group containing about twenty individuals. It’s been several years since we’ve seen even one, so it was a banner day in that department. Some light snow had been predicted, which did not materialize.

We stopped in Grand Junction on the way home to do some shoe shopping that the surgeon had suggested, and visited the Mesa Mall to do just that. It was like stepping back into 1980, because here was a vibrant mall with a great many stores (and nearly completely absent those ghostly empty stores), a bustling food court, and gaggles of teenaged girls wandering about in what seemed aimlessness, but was probably not. There were teenaged boys as well, and one sturdy group of four walked by us as we consumed some fast-food Chinese cuisine, all four young men being tall and strong and wearing identical haircuts.

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Each year at this time I try to find a particular table grace of Garrison Keillor’s and I fail to do so. What I do succeed at finding each year is yet another prayer that cuts through the gourmandic fog of the day. Here is this year’s.

O, heavenly Father, we thank thee for food and remember the hungry. We thank thee for health and remember the sick. We thank thee for friends and remember the friendless. We thank thee for freedom and remember the enslaved.

There are so many people on this planet that it is quite likely that somewhere in the world there is a man who was born on the same exact day that I was and at exactly the same hour and minute. He may be living halfway across the globe and have had the hardest of lives, such trials that if I knew them they would make my own problems seem positively trivial. In this season of Thanksgiving I think of him and my wish is that in the years to come the blessings would be distributed more evenly between he and I.

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