Humility ... fault or blessing?

Came in from a meeting last evening and was confronted by a sort of loudmouthed woman on TV who was maybe the 100^th person announcing for President of the United States. She had a voice that would peel wallpaper and seemed to be saying that her only fault was too much humility.

Ah well, I understand that. Humility has been heaped on me like sugar on a pudding lately. I even got a good dose of it at the meeting I attended. Some fellows want to build a sports facility for a city where I work. We discussed it at length. Looks like a good plan and they seem to be honest, conscientious men. The city will profit from it. Still, it brought back some painful memories.

See, if you’ve ever played sports, you’ve probably been involved in the picking of sides.

If you’ve ever been involved in the picking of sides, where one team gets to pick a player and then the other does, you may remember it.

If you are athletically-challenged, you may remember the process with some degree of pain.

If you have ever been left standing, the only one not chosen, you may remember the process with a great deal of humility.

If you’ve ever been asked to be the spectator instead of a player, you may grow up to detest sports.

Ah well. I drown those pains with thoughts of a renewed friendship of late with a high school running-buddy.

Oops. There goes another heap of humility. Not only was he smarter and more academically gifted than I, he was a star athlete. Not only was he as star athlete, he bore a resemblance to Paul Newman. Yeah, the Paul Newman. The one who gave Southern girls a case of “the vapors.” A close relative still gets a tear in her eye if I mention his name, which I won’t here. It would embarrass him and erode any sense of humility he might harbor.

We’ve been swapping tidbits of the stories of our lives, and it’s quite an enjoyable pastime. Of course, we’re not in high school anymore, so our remanences are more diversified than they might have been back then, chatter among boys in high school being mostly confined to one topic. That topic wasn’t the writings of Kant on moral imperatives, if you can imagine. Oddly enough, we never mention the high school topic at all anymore. But we do mention the writings of Joseph Campbell from time to time. Isn’t it funny how one’s perspective changes with the passing of years?

Thank goodness for time and humility. One ripens us and the other keeps us earthbound. Together, they allow us to treasure things like old friends, decent wine, sweet memories, and the wisdom that grows with old age.

I never made the football team and I never dated the cheerleaders. Later in life, though, I learned to play the banjo. There’s a leveling of life that keeps us humble, rough-hewn though it may be.

I did marry a
beautiful girl, though.