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Group Writing: Blown About By the Wind
What better way to kick off this post than with an anticipatory Quote of the Day? (It’s back, Ricochetti! Please sign up for April, here.)
To illustrate this month’s “wind” theme, I thought I’d look to the sage and eminently quotable oeuvre of a man whose original turns of phrase and newly-minted colloquialisms enlivened English for all of his decades in baseball and beyond; Lorenzo Pietro Berra, better known simply as “Yogi.” Love the fact that his Wikipedia entry carefully states at the outset that he is “not to be confused with Yogi Bear.” And that the reverse is true, in the heading of the article about the ursine one. Can’t be too careful when it comes to clarifying what could be seen as misinformation (or even falsehoods trafficked under the guise of satire) if a person isn’t doing his due diligence in rooting out the malefactors and the misrepresentations.
Oh…wait! A bit of fake news in the annals of which there has not been much whicher. From the Associated Press, on September 23, 2015:
So, all in all, best that Wikipedia clarifies for those who are given to that sort of mix-up, especially those in the media who use the site as “show prep.” (Please, no Joe Biden jokes about Presidents who can’t distinguish their wives from their sisters, or who think the number-two person on the ticket is actually the one who’s running things today. Especially since I’m not actually sure he’s all that mixed up about the last bit.)
But I digress. Here’s the quote:
If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.–Yogi Berra
Perfect. Relevant. Topical. Wise. And on point. Mission accomplished.
Oh…wait (again).
She pauses for a rare moment of self-reflection, regroups, and belatedly spots a safe opportunity:
But isn’t it (She says), rather a good quote, in a Yogi Berra sort of way? Because, really, how many times have you embarked on a course of action with only a vague idea of how or where things would turn out, only to find yourself, at the end, somewhere completely different (for better or worse) from where you expected you would be–having been buffeted around by winds of war, winds of change, or just tempest-tossed by life, along the way?
I can answer for myself with dozens, and probably hundreds, of twists and turns of my own, many of which made no sense, or perhaps all the sense in the world at the time, but which aggregated into, and culminated in, who and where I am today. (I told the story of the end of my first career, and how I somehow serendipitously fell into my next, in my post, Historia Calamitatum.
Life’s an adventure, sometimes not all that well-scripted, and I never know where the next one will take me or which way the wind will blow; whether it will be for good or ill; or what I’ll need to do to accommodate and adjust. But accommodate and adjust is what I strive to do.
Most recently with this post.
It’s your turn to tell us a little about some of your life’s unscripted adventures. Please share.
A long as we’re quoting, I’ll quote myself:
I would have thought a quote from Yogi on wind would have had something to do with passing it. ;)
This was the plan..,.
Finish my PhD. Find a nice cushy teaching job…preferably in the Northeast. Not too far from the coast. Someplace like Bowdoin in Maine would be perfect. Teach. A little research. Write a paper every now and again. Buy a sailboat. At the end of every Spring semester I’d post final grades, lock my office door and head for the marina. The next 16 weeks would be an adventure exploring the Intracoastal. Wind. Waves. Sun. Fish. Beer. Ahhhh. Then back to school for Fall Semester. Repeat.
I suppose if I had read more Napoleon I’d have been familiar with the dictum – “No plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy.” Or if I followed boxing I might have heard the more contemporary warrior Mike Tyson’s – “Everybody’s got a plan ‘till they get punched in the face.” As it was, I was completely unprepared for the unexpected.
One summer I was home from grad school and one of my friends kept arranging blind dates for me. The girls were perfectly nice; pretty, smart, accomplished, but there was just no spark. I finally asked him to stop. A few days later he was back … “I can’t believe I didn’t think of her before. You have to meet her. Please…just one more.” I finally agreed – just to shut him up. And…we have been married for 36 years. I never finished my PhD. I left grad school to pursue a business opportunity and ran my own firm for 33 years. I never taught another class. Never bought the boat. Never sailed the Intracoastal. And I can’t imagine that I could ever be happier. The lovely Mrs E is far and away the best thing that has ever happened to me. But she was a bolt from the blue and a Godsend.
Just beautiful. Brings a little tear to my eye. Thanks for sharing this, and congratulations to you both.
There are two major monthly Group Writing projects. One is the Quote of the Day project, now managed by @she. This is the other project, in which Ricochet members claim one day of the coming month to write on a proposed theme. This is an easy way to expose your writing to a general audience, with a bit of accountability and topical guidance to encourage writing for its own sake.
As @she illustrates here, we are happy to have double-duty posts, hitting both the quote and theme categories. This post is part of our Group Writing Series under the March 2021 theme: “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Spring into action and sign up today!
Interested in Group Writing topics that came before? See the handy compendium of monthly themes. Check out links in the Group Writing Group. You can also join the group to get a notification when a new monthly theme is posted.
Here’s my “blown about by the wind” story for today:
The wind here has been blowing all day in what my sister, who lives in Scotland, calls a hoolie. Between ten and eleven this morning, I lost two trees, an elm and an ash, just above and to the right of, the house. Thankfully, neither came down on the house, and no sheep, goat, or other living creature was underneath either of them when they fell (my well head was about six feet away from one. Phew.)
Much to their chagrin, I’ve had the sheep penned up all day while the thing blows itself out (starting to, now, about 4PM ET).
One of the trees came down on a gate, and so was precariously balanced, so I called Al the Tree Man. He’s a prince among men and a true gentleman of the old school (they seem to abound around here), and he was at my place in about 45 minutes to take a look. I was leery of them doing anything around trees in this wind, but he assured me that my little project was much safer than what they’d started out to do today, which consisted of climbing up, and topping, several very large trees on a farm in Claysville. So, after lunch he came by with his guys (they’ve done some work for me before) and they got started.
Lovely people. I’d only met one of the young men before: his last name has resounding associations with English history, and he’s very well versed in it, having read a lot, in the hopes of visiting one day. The other fellow, who I hadn’t met, has a Norwegian last name. His paternal grandfather was from Norway, and he married a full-blooded Cherokee woman from Tennessee. I often think of what Mr. She used to say: “Walk through life. Talk to people.” It generally works. At least, the successes exponentially outweigh the failures, or so I’ve found.
It’s all tidied up now, I’ve repaired the gate, and the sheep are back out.
Really an interesting day that started out with a near-disaster.
Oh gosh that’s a lot of damage. The rain the last few days softened the ground making it easier for the trees to uproot. Thank God no one or creature got hurt. It’s really blowing here (NYC) too. I was out on a long walk with the dog. And it’s hot. I think it hit 80 degrees today.
Here’s a Breaking News example.
I fully intended to do something useful today. Instead I see this post, and being a great admirer of Mr. Berra as man, philosopher, and ball-player, well, I’m suddenly intrigued. As I get my sea-legs on the gist of it, I says “isn’t that ‘if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you’re lost.'” Which is the way I like the thought expressed.
So I Google it (and you will pardon my French). It is cited somewheres as the OP says it is. How about that? A twist on Yogi’s “I never said all the things I said.” Sort of like Big Bill Tilden’s second serve. But what’s this I see. Lewis Carroll (actually The Chesire Cat) says “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” But, no, that’s a paraphrase of the passage. Inaccurate, slightly. “If you only want to get somewhere, you just need to walk long enough.” More accurate, slightly.
This being the internet, my grasp on things loosens such that I leave the road entirely, careening through the finer points of VW-Porsche 914s, Glas GTs, and a Jensen-Healy, a restoration candidate and automotive object I have not pondered upon in a long while I saw parked on the street while walking to the PO the other day. And then I am writing this piece of deathless prose. Which entails trying to remember a certain James Thurber short story for language reference, the title of which I will not look up. You could look it up. I’m not going back in there today. Not even to find out if Big Bill Tilden’s second serve was an American Twist as I surmise it was, being an easy to place high-kicking top-spin that gives the receiver a problem to deal with.
Long story short, I’M STILL SITTING IN MY PAJAMAS AND IT’S 2 OH 5 P.M. PDST. GODDAMMIT.
That reminds me of an unpleasant Easter Sunday back in the 80s. It was a windy, blustery day, we were late and out of sorts getting to church, and when we came home the wind had blown gates open and our sheep and goats were out.
And you just now reminded me to call our local tree service guy, a young man who was in our youngest son’s graduating class in high school. I have a maple tree that is not healthy and needs to be taken down before it falls on our neighbor’s pole shed. I had thought I could do it myself, but on taking a closer look last winter realized that it was not going to be easy to get it to fall in the direction I wanted (away from the pole barn). In order to first do some trimming of limbs to make it possible for me to do, I would have to work around too many overhead electrical wires. I took down a lot of cherry trees last winter, including some that were bigger than this one, but for this one it’s time to call in the pro. I have some other work for him to do, too.
But regarding your ash tree, do you still have any ash trees of significant size in your part of Pennsylvania or Ohio or wherever you are? Usually when they die from damage done by the emerald ash borer, the root system soon becomes unstable such that tree service people don’t find it safe to use their climbing rigs to help get them down. One of my former bosses put off dealing with a large one near his house, and by the time he called a tree service company it was an expensive project to take it down.
All because someone didn’t put his phone in airplane mode.
Phew indeed. Glad no one was hurt. We are in the thick of it here in NJ just now … 7:00 ish. The lovely Mrs se and I were out for a pre-diner walk and it was an adventure.
I don’t think there are any ash trees of any size left in this part of the world. One of my neighbors mentioned, a couple of months ago that there’s some fairly useful research WRT taking trees that have survived and breeding seedlings that may be resistant.
I had been wondering about that. Our bigger ash trees have long been gone, but new ones keep starting up. They don’t grow too much before they are killed off, too. What is not clear to me is whether they are producing seeds before they die, or whether the new ones are growing from very old ash seeds that have been lying in the ground for many years.
I believe that was done with chestnut trees.