My Greatest Fear in Life is Boredom
It all started when I was 9 at my sister’s high school graduation
It’s 1959 and Dwight Eisenhower is playing connect the dots with a puzzle of the United States.
Route 66 is still the way we drove through every village, stopping at quaint little places with outhouses. They were called wayside rests and we had picnics in their shelters.
That was soon to be in the rear view mirror of those lines connecting dots we now call Interstates, but we were oblivious.
Did I mention it’s 1959?
“Leave it to Beaver” and “I Love Lucy” were about to start on a 12 inch tv in our home in suburbia. Life was good!
Then my sister graduated from Renton High School. There were 700 or so boppers, beatniks, crew cutters and housewife hopefuls graduating with her.
700!!
And speeches!
And introductions!
And pomp and circumstance!
And seven hundred almost-adults marching slowly across a huge stage so far away they look like perplexing ants with square heads.
And untold numbers of already-adults dressed up in silly looking costumes handing them little books and shaking their hands, saying something solemn to each one.
Do you know how long that took?
A lifetime to this almost 10 year old boy.
It put fear in my heart!
This might never end!
It’s still baggage in this 73 year old geezer’s life.
I love quiet. I love silence. I love traveling. I love writing. I love visiting. I love making friends. I love bicycling. I love hiking. I love nature. I love being with my sweetheart.
I love anything that’s meaningful to me.
If I can’t see the meaning in it, all I want to do is escape to something meaningful.
I can still remember the thoughts of my youth concerning Heaven. Way different than now, when I’m not being framed by my Religious background.
I was then.
Heaven petrified me. Golden Streets. People playing harps. Standing around or bowing down praising a god who didn’t seem to think that life should be fun.
Eternally bored!
I was torn between eternal burn or eternal boredom.
What a choice.
I later started re-framing my ideas of God, but that’s a different story.
I’m still afraid boredom will lead to my insanity.
It’s that permanently damaged 9-year-old sitting at my sister’s graduation.
He’s still sitting in the Renton High School auditorium.
I need to let him go outside and play.
