Simple Lessons

No flowers mean happiness to me more than peonies. I love the way they bob on their stalks and how their huge, lacy-round blossoms fill a room with an almost overpowering sweetness. We have several bushes all over the yard that bloom at different times depending on their sun exposure, so we have plenty to cut over the period of a few weeks. These are this season's first.

We have a lovely spring day ahead before more rain arrives tonight. (I read yesterday that the mid-Atlantic region is now officially no longer in drought.) My job for the day will be to plant two new evergreens, accent trees at either end of the front porch, to replace arborvitae which have become blowzy and ragged with age. The new trees are called Himalayan cedars. They're gray, with a graceful "weeping" habit, and are not supposed to grow taller than 25 feet. They'll add a beautiful accent to the front. Then I go to a rheumatologist, who most likely will send me for more blood tests to tell us exactly which rheumatic autoimmune thingy I'm dealing with. That'll be fine with me as long as he gives me something non-steroidal to deaden the pain in my elbows.

I do prattle on about my so-important projects and the aches and pains I'm dealing with. And as I do so, my thoughts, unbidden, compare my own situation with that of literally millions elsewhere. We mourn the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives in China because of an earthquake, and of millions--millions-- of Burmese as a result of a typhoon whose effects are multiplied by endemic poverty and the petty political jealousy of their government. The people of Baghdad, also in their staggering millions, have not known a day without devasation for more than five years; they are grateful for a single day when they can simply take their children to a park, or eat some ice cream, without being murderously accosted or bombed. And these are just the things we hear about on a daily basis. We forget about the starving, terrorized Darfurians, and the East Congolese who live in a land of astonishing beauty populated by random armies of homicidal thugs. The more we reflect, the longer the list becomes.

Despite, or actually because of, my Peace Corps bona fides, I'm no bleeding heart and I understand my powerlessness to do anything directly to improve the lot of my fellow earth-travelers. But the least I can do is stay humble about my own charmed life, and if I think about the random luck that put me where I am rather than where the majority of my fellows find themselves, that's easy to do.

Majoring in French never gave me any practical tools for making a living, but what it does give me, daily, are gifts that inform my life and enrich it immeasurably. One of those gifts is Voltaire, who in his story Candide invented one unthinkable calamity after another to test the sweet optimism of his hero. After seeing the ugliness of the world and the people who cause it, Candide learns life's great lesson: you can find peace if you simply cultivate your own garden. I will now do just that.