Does Anyone Ever Realize Life While They Live It?

I should feel terrible about complaining about the weather we've had for the first part of spring here in Southern New England. Thank goodness I have a sense of entitlement visible from space and a highly developed sense of triggered grievance rivaling that of an orange orangutan occupying the White House,

If you, too, experienced most of the first ten days or so of Spring shivering and checking and then rechecking the calendar then you know exactly what I mean, but you know what? I don't feel any better knowing your weather was lousy like mine. And if your weather was better, I really dislike you a lot. And if yours was worse (a plague of locusts, a rain of frogs, that sort of thing) then it sucks to be you but I still don't have very much from that.

I think what's frazzled me is when it hasn't been raining or being very blustery (which wasn't very often), it was just cold. I'm such a myopic ingrate I seem to have lost sight that it was the end of March and now it's just the first of April and we have had snow this late in previous years and later on this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this (New) England and may well have it again. And still, I kvetch.

I don't think I'm alone in being spoiled stupid or perhaps stupidly spoiled (I often cannot tell them apart and even close-up they look about the same) as we are well on our way to becoming a nation of self-centered somnambulists (and that might be an understatement). I'm just trying to keep up (that's my story and I'm sticking with it).

And then we realize, "that's what it's like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know. That's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and Blindness."

You're thinking I'm quoting one of our political leaders (fat chance; pun intended) or perhaps an inspirational and internationally known religious figure. Nope. Think smaller.

Think Simon Stinson. a fictional character in Thorton Wilder's Our Town. Think each of us, think all of us except in moments of extreme duress when we have to be nearly coerced into finally thinking of others. We cry over what we don't have and weep in vain for the moon, oblivious as we reach and fail, that from our grasp slip the stars.

-bill kenny