Jewish World Review Jan 5, 2005 / 24 Teves, 5765

Rheta Grimsley Johnson

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This year


http://www.jewishworldreview.com | Perhaps it's the historically sad story at December's end that makes this new year seem different from all the rest. This tsunami of a story had a moral:


Life is short. You can be enjoying a glorious beach holiday one moment, soaking up rays and enjoying a drink with an umbrella stuck in it.


Then, from nowhere, a giant wave rolls over you and those you love and all you own and changes your life, or takes it. The giant wave may be disease, a car wreck, a hurricane, a heart attack or a house fire. The end may come from a tiny mosquito's bite, or a wall of water.


It doesn't matter if you're a poor villager with only the clothes on your back or a carefree, frolicking tourist with an impressive stock portfolio. Suddenly, in the truest sense of that word, you are equally victimized. Life is changed. Life is gone.


I usually write a New Year's column resolving to lose five pounds, or to learn to play the saxophone, or to write more and talk less. Those perennial goals seem obscenely frivolous this January, pathetically egocentric.

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As I listen to one sad story after another on the nightly news, I haven't once heard a bereft husband say of his missing wife: "She was a wonderful woman, only five or 10 pounds overweight." I have yet to hear a grieving son or daughter express dismay that missing parents never mastered a wind instrument, or wrote a novel. As parents stand by the shoreline waiting and hoping their child's body will wash up, nobody frets about the small stuff.


In the end, so few things really matter. And, for many of us, it takes a lifetime to realize what those few things are.


As the tsunami death toll climbs with the calendar, already we have begun the emotional road to recovery that survivors -- that would be all the rest of us -- take. We go on with our lives because that's all there is to do.


The day before New Year's, the tsunami story -- the largest disaster story of my lifetime -- was relegated to Page 4 in the local newspaper. Not even the crocodile attack on rotting corpses could keep the story Page 1 forever.


I've been in the news business long enough to realize that the placement was not incorrect. Reader interest, at least locally, already was waning. An area manhunt for a murderer and a college-football bowl game were more the talk of the town, which rightly decides Page 1. A single local death equals 100,000 far away.


We march on because that is what humans do. Those who cannot look ahead are mired in deadly depression. Most of us have limited capacity for grief, which is good.


But the smart among us do learn from tragedies, our own and others'. We take the hint and embrace that cliché: the gift of life. For a while, at least, we really enjoy the sunset, the sunrise, the Sunday-afternoon quiet. We hear the music more clearly, pay attention to it.


We look at a simple glass of clean water and realize it's not available for everyone, everywhere. We feel the fresh bedsheets against our cheeks and know we are privileged to have a safe and comfortable place to live. We take our dog to the veterinarian and acknowledge that there are children in the world who have health care inferior to our parakeets' and guinea pigs'.


This year my resolutions are different from those in the past, but probably just as easy to break.


I resolve to live each day as if it were my last, enjoying to the hilt those pleasures I'm lucky enough to have. If it's an oyster po' boy or the latest potboiler, a bonfire or a banquet, I plan to attack it with relish.


I resolve to complain less, and only when a complaint serves some purpose. A cynic is only someone loudly admitting defeat.


I promise to work and play with a new ferocity, the way I did when I was younger. If passion can erode with time, perhaps it can be resurrected with the reminder that nobody has forever to accomplish or enjoy.



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© 2004, Rheta Grimsley Johnson Distributed by King Features Syndicate