Too Short

You've heard it before. Many times, too many times. Life is short. Life is too short. Life is too short for (fill in the blank). In fact you could say that life is too short to hear that life is too short. Life really is that short.

It is true, though, that life is short. And even if we didn't believe that or understand that as youths, we figure it out by the time we hit forty or so. Maybe younger. But I'm a slow learner. Experience teaches us and has taught even me that life sneaks up on us and then goes roaring by like a drag racing car leaving us scratching our heads and wondering where it went.

The other night while Penny and I were out with friends eating some of the fish I routinely swim with, I made the comment that life is too short to eat coconut. I was responding to the complaint that I don't eat that stuff. Why would that bother people? Why am I expected to like everything on planet earth when no one else does? when the truth is I probably like more food than just about everybody. But I do not like everything, and slowly I have realized that life really is too short to force feed myself disgusting substances like I've done as long as I can remember. 

For most of my life I have crammed things into my mouth and chewed things that I did not want, I did not like, and I did not ask for because somebody else told me I should. Under the influence of adults who grilled it into me that it was for my own good to eat so and so, I tortured myself with green beans, and green beans. Come to think of it, there is not a whole lot besides green beans I really dislike. But for long years, I have forced them down and sometimes still do because Mamma told me to, Daddy told me to, Aunts and Uncles told me to, and even my wife tells me to now. "You don't eat enough green stuff," my wife loves to scold. What?!?!?! And this to a guy who orders a salad at a Mexican Restaurant.

Besides green beans (I do like most vegetables) bread crust was the most common thing that I tortured myself with under the influence of lies told to me over and over by adults whom I think apparently didn't want me to enjoy food. "All the vitamins are in the crust," countless big people who should not have lied to me when I was a little person preached to me over and over. And the most incredible thing about that was that I only figured it out a few short years ago. 

Duh! 

Why would vitamins migrate to a certain part of the bread just because it was more cooked than the rest? If anything, the extra heat would kill off vitamins rather than add to them. By the way, I said something to this effect recently on Facebook and was told, "No, you are confused with fruit." The sad truth is, I am not confused, but was told both lies. Many times. By many people.

Finally, I stopped force feeding myself bread crust because I began to believe something else grown ups told me my whole life: life is too short. Wow, it finally backfired on them. It certainly is too short too ruin a good sandwich because all the vitamins are in the crust (NOT!) and people in other parts of the world don't have enough to eat. Incredibly, I still eat most of the crust just not all of it. My upbringing is still too powerful to completely escape its influence, so I consider it a great victory and a sign that I have grown up and become independent when I can leave a bite or two of bread crust on an otherwise empty plate.

And looking back I am amazed at how many times my dad played dirty when it came to food. Roger Hodge was a good man, a fine father, and an unending positive influence in my life. Though he is no longer in this land of the living, he impacts my life day by day. Yet as a child he routinely played the garbage man card to get me to eat stuff I didn't want. As a little guy, I idolized garbage men who in those days came around behind your house carrying big buckets that they dumped your garbage and trash into. The man who came to our house had huge rippling muscles and I wanted to grow up and be like that, be a garbage man with big biceps who rode on the big truck and manhandled trash cans.

"If a garbage man was here, he would eat that," Dad told me countless times. And it always worked because that was my life's ambition, my career goal, the most manly thing I knew at the time. Now I look back and see it as dirty pool. I would have been just fine without forcing squash into my mouth. And have I ever told you about my great-grandmother? She told us that if we ate squash we could fly. I remember my younger sister and me gagging on a bite of the yellow vegetable and then running up and down the hallway at 422 West Harding Street flapping our arms like wings trying in vain to fly.

And back to the fruit. Life really is too short to eat watermelon rind. Certainly you didn't really do that, you say to yourself as you read these words. Of course I did. At least I always ate it down until I gagged. Without that, I felt like I was being a bad citizen, disappointing my parents, and sinning against God, which was worse to me than the inevitable gag reflex and stomach ache that I always got form the otherwise enjoyable experience of eating watermelon. I quit that too. I'm a regular rebel now.

And then there is coconut. Even as a youth, I never caved on that one and my parents did not overly exert their considerable influence in trying to make me eat the stuff. I don't like it and unlike so many other things that I once hated and now love, I never outgrew my disaffection for it. I don't think its nasty, I just don't want it in my mouth. I don't want it in candy, I don't want it in cakes, I don't want it in anything. Did I mention I don't want it?

But besides all of that, life is not only too short to do some things, it is also too short NOT to do some things. Life is too short to not live our dreams, if at all possible, whatever those dreams may be. For me life is too short not to go on long runs with Buddy Bones. Life is too short not to swim in catfish ponds, to hug dogs, to pet cats, to take walks with Jeff. Life is to short not to trust God, to fellowship with believers, to sing for joy. Life is too short not to set goals, to take a dare, to seek adventure. I could go on and on, but I bet you get the point.

Life is even too short not to enjoy coffee. Amazingly my students constantly warn me of the dangers of the bean that God created to bless our mornings. 

"It's bad for you," they say.

"Says who?" I question.

They never have an answer but they are sure it must be bad, I suppose they think, because some people, namely I, enjoy it so much.

"I can't believe you drink that stuff," one or two of them will sometimes say.

And I defend myself again.

I've even been accused of being a hypocrite for making them write papers on diabetes and nutrition while I drink coffee.

What?!?!?!?

Life is too short, however, to be talked out of the bean, the dream, the goal, whatever that goal may be. Therefore I keep drinking, keep swimming, and keep dreaming up new adventures, keep hanging out with the cats, keep going on Google Maps looking for unexplored roads.  

Life is too short for anything less.