The Calendar Says Ice Cream

The calendar says ice cream, but the weather says soup.

Me and the boy.

So, soup it is, on this mid-summer August day.

Carrots, corn, crowder peas, green peas, chicken stock, garlic, celery salt, thyme, grilled chicken, buttermilk (why not?!), brown rice and onion, is now simmering on the stovetop, and I just slipped a sample into a bowl to eat with my peanut butter and apple butter sandwich. Yum.

Calendars, I’m discovering, are a problem.

This deep-South morning started in the mid-60s. The weather man said he had to look way back to 1940 to find a similarly cool start, and the forecast says it’s supposed to stay like this for a few days. Forget the calendar. It’s soup weather.

The calendar also says I’ll soon be 50, but I’m not buying that either.

At 50, my parents were battling diabetes, weight gain and emphysema. At 49, I’m down 40 pounds, healthy, except for a pesky blood pressure issue and incredibly blessed.

The calendar says a broken leg heals in 8-12 weeks, but the doctor says we’ll know more in September–10 months after my boy took a rope swing into Armuchee Creek.

Calendars don’t lie. They’re just confusing.

They’re a man-made invention to track men’s lives. Man noticed patterns and tried to match them to years, seasons and months, but calendar makers don’t take into account that patterns are patterns, not rules. So, naturally, they are susceptible to imperfection. It’s not always hot in mid-August. You’re not always infirmed at 50. Legs don’t always heal in 3 months.

That confounding leg has been a family focus since the last time soup was on. Through it all, my boy has soldiered on–far better than I have. As the calendar pages have turned, he has had three surgeries, umpteen X-rays and I don’t know how many doctor visits. And through it all, I have watched him mature and soften.

He wrote a paper for his literature class last week, a letter response to the novel The Things They Carried. It’s the story of soldiers and the emotional and physical baggage they carried into and away from Vietnam. The assignment was to write about your own baggage.

A logical response would be a broken leg lament, but that is not what my boy wrote:

I enter this year with high hopes to strive and be the best I can be this year. I strive to be a good example for all of my friends so that they may become a better person by the end of each day. I hope to impact anyone I come around in a positive manner. One of my life missions I feel is to make people happy. Now this doesn’t mean I am a people pleaser, because I certainly am not. But I carry the need to make someone’s day better each and every day. Whether they realize it or not, I want to be the reason that that specific person had a good day or even just a smile on their face. I hope to carry this baggage my whole life. It’s a baggage that I love to carry. I love to see people happy, and to have a good attitude towards situations. I want to make others optimists just as I am. For example: I may never be able to run or even jog for the rest of my life. It’s a big statement that makes people feel sorry for me. My view is completely opposite. I don’t think anything of my bum leg. “No big deal.” I’ve said that from day one. I try to be an optimist about everything, and get others to have the same mindset as I do. This is something I carry, and something that I always hope to carry.   

Calendars have their purpose, but they can’t predict the weather, where the years will take you, broken legs or what your response to them will be, and that’s a good thing.

A life too predictable wouldn’t be much of a life.