Do Right, But Not Right Now
Odd Company -- June 16, 2025
Dear Friends, Relatives, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Welcome to this issue of Odd Company, on the verge of summer 2025. Summer will officially begin on Friday, June 20, when we will enjoy the longest day of the year. Here in Northern California, we’ll get a luxurious 14 hours and 47 minutes of daylight. The sun will rise at quarter to six, and won’t set till eight-thirty. The coyotes won’t come out till almost ten.
I have probably already said this, possibly many times, but summer is my favorite season of the year. Many people don’t care much for the heat of summer. I confess, I didn’t care much for it myself when we lived in New Jersey. It’s all about the relative humidity. In dry climates where sweating actually keeps us cool (like here), summer is a marvel of bare feet on cool lawns and good books enjoyed in the shade with minty cold drinks. Well…in my imagination, anyway.
In the real world, summer or not, my to-do list is infinite. Literally. No sooner have I ticked one item off the list than two new ones pop up. There are always multiple plants crying out for water; multiple cats trying to convince me they’re starving; letters from the IRS; messed up prescriptions; the inbox from the Black Lagoon; you know the drill. It’s an endless list, and I will never get it all done. Which is an oddly freeing thought. I mean, if it’s an impossible project, then why not take a break to work on a poem, or go out and pick some berries and make something delicious out of them? Or put my feet up for a while with that good book and the minty drink? I mean, I would water the plants and feed the cats, and possibly take care of the prescription. Life and death, after all. But I certainly wouldn’t wash the windows or clean out the pantry. Or respond to the IRS. Like Miss Ohio in the song, I wanna do right, just not right now.
This is not procrastination. It’s mental hygiene. Sad though this fact may seem, we do not live forever. Our time on Earth is finite, and human flesh has its limitations. So, given that, how are we supposed to deal with an infinite to-do list? There’s only one way, and that is to pick and choose the things that truly matter to us and let the rest float sweetly into the limbo of “someday, if I have time, maybe.”
Oh yeah, like that’s so easy. I do think it’s easier for some people than it is for others, and it might have something to do with the our upbringings. I grew up in spotless houses, and frequently got in trouble for making messes. That thing with the chemistry set, for example; and the thing with the rake and the new chest of drawers. Don’t ask. The general effect of this negative reinforcement was to mold me into a person who feels uncomfortable with messes. I learned a lot from my mother-in-law, who raised five kids and their pets and 4-H projects while working as a nurse. She kept a reasonably orderly house, but seldom got flustered over things she patently could not control — such as her bright, curious children and their many animals making messes. I mean, she really didn’t have time to fret much over anything that wasn’t extremely important to her.
The last issue of Odd Company gleaned a comment from a reader who wanted to know more about my honeymoon, which I said was full of unexpected and surprising stuff. I could start with this. I think I was 20 and John was 19 when we decided to go to Europe and have an adventure together. When we announced this to John’s mother, Ruby, she smiled sweetly and said, “That’s nice, dears. When’s the wedding?” There was no raised voice. There was no moaning or gnashing of teeth. Just the expression of a preference, and a tacit hope that we would not run off to Europe and live in sin for two months. She then went on to more pressing matters, such as making sure the horses had hay, giving us plenty of space to think it over. Which is how the trip became a honeymoon. We decided we were probably going to get married sooner or later anyway, and we might as well please her.
It really was a big adventure. The trip, I mean. The wedding was a big adventure, too, but that’s a different story. I think I mentioned last time that we took our very modest savings and used it to buy two round-trip tickets to Frankfurt and two Eurail passes. We had about $500 left over, which we put into AmEx traveler’s cheques. Seems odd now, but it was 1973. Credit cards were a new thing, and ATMs hadn’t been invented yet. There was also no such thing as a cell phone, and international phone calls were unthinkably expensive. So we sent John’s older brother (who was serving in the U.S. Army, stationed outside Frankfurt) a postcard letting him know when we’d be arriving so he could pick us up at the airport. But, of course, the postcard did not arrive till two hours after our plane touched down. The only address we had for Steve and his wife was an APO, and we didn’t know their phone number. So we had the delightful experience of wandering around the Frankfurt airport for some hours, severely jet lagged and culture shocked (I had never been east of Elko, Nevada, had never tested out my conversational German, and we didn’t realize, for example, that it cost money to use the toilets). Eventually we found a USO office, where they helped us find Steve and Bonnie’s phone number. And then, for a while anyway, things went more-or-less as planned, at least till we got to the White Cliffs of Dover, where I had a massive allergy attack; I don’t know…something that was growing in the grassy field up there on the overlook where we camped, disagreed with me.
Someone asked me once why I like to travel. I had trouble putting together a reasonable answer, because I had never thought about it before. But now I think it’s mainly about the enormous freedom of not knowing quite what your day will be like. When we travel for pleasure, the to-do list disappears. Thrown into an unfamiliar place full of strangers, where you have much less control over things than you do at home, you come to realize that expectations are like fences. They make us feel safer. But the truth is that life without them is a marvel not to be missed. Do right, but not right now.
Tonight’s music is one of my favorite summer songs of all time. To me, nothing says summer quite like the Beach Boys. I’ve been thinking about them a lot the past few days, due to the recent death of Brian Wilson, who wrote almost all of their songs and was responsible for most of their extraordinary harmonies and musical arrangements. “Good Vibrations” is one of their most influential and well-known songs. It came out in 1966 on the Pet Sounds album, cementing the group’s status as the inventors of what came to be known as “the California sound.” By the way…I’ve always wondered what that weird sound in the chorus verses is. It’s a modified theremin! (See Odd Company March 12, 2024) Thank you, Brian, for your many gifts.
Till next we meet, relax a little and enjoy life between moments of terror.
What a great installment! It rang a number or bells in my hippocampus. When my now wife and I started living together, out of wedlock, my mother-in-law would tell people we were married "California style." When we bought our house we asked the banker if not being married was an impediment to getting a loan. He looked a bit surprised by the question, but the answer was an emphatic "if you have the income, no problem." I do have to take issue with the comment about heat in summer. Having grown up and spent my first 28 years in the northeast I agree about the humidity. There is nothing like a New York City subway in August, sans air conditioning, at 5:30 PM. But the lack of humidity, as we tend to have in Santa Clara county, only goes so far. I spent 4 days in Tucson once when the highs were around 120. It was certainly a dry heat, just as an oven is. Planes couldn't take off because the air density was too low. I have always maintained that cold is better than extreme heat as there is a limit to how much one can strip, but, given the proper clothing, one can withstand a lot of cold. Perhaps the adage that moderation is the best approach holds with temperature. But hot or cold, it's always good to be pickin' up those good vibrations.
Thanks for the hearty belly laugh about Mom’s “when is the wedding?” question! I remember that!