FIFTY-NINE
The Palins watch Track play hockey
On p. 59 of GR, Sarah is talking about her young Track. She says, "I thought I'd seen every bike trick and skateboard flip ever attempted and sometimes wondered why he needed me to see yet another one. Now, if I had it to do over, I'd stop every time he asked me to, give him my full attention, and cheer as if it were the first time."
I would like to follow two paths of thought in commenting briefly on these words this fine morning.
The first and more obvious lesson we can draw and derive from this citation is that we should never take anything for granted in this fleeting and fast-fading world. Time, cruel and inexorable Time, is always mounted on his swift-footed, gray steed, and is thundering ever, ever forward. We must cherish every precious and beautiful and dear and sweet thing that we have in our lives.
A Lady like our lovely Sarah comes along only once in maybe many lifetimes and generations in a nation's history. Please, let us never take her for granted; let us treasure these extraordinary hours, days, and months through which we are privileged to live right now. When we are very old, we will recount to a younger generation that we lived through and witnessed the Great Days, the unforgettable hours when Sarah Palin launched the great campaign to oust the commie usurper from the White House and to liberate our land from oppressors and tyrants.
These days shan't come again: Let us live them to the fullest!!
Now, I shall present a second line of meditation.
From the moment we are conceived, we are subject to a dual tension and pull. We are creatures made subject to gray Time's grim dominion; we are at the same time creatures called to an ultimate destiny that transcends Time's sway and rule.
So much of what we observe in human nature and behavior may, IMHO, be traced and tracked back to this tension.
Why, for example, do we take such delight in reading over and over a beloved literary work, such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, or watching over and over a classic of the cinema like "Casablanca"? It is certainly not because we want to find out how the play or the movie ends. This we know already, after the initial reading or viewing. No, I think it is because, in immersing ourselves in works like these, we are liberating ourselves for a time from Time, and elevating ourselves into a timeless realm of ideas and values and verities.
Young Track's striving to perfect himself on bike and skateboard can be seen on the same lines. There is a deep craving in the human spirit to transcend the grudging, jealous bands and bonds of Time by achieving perfection in something. Even if it is something as simple as a skill in bike riding, perfection and completeness carry the savor and foretaste of eternity about them.
Notice how, when someone says something as well and as perfectly as it could ever be said, the words carry an essential force of time-defying, golden, incorruptible beauty. Words, "winged words," as Homer called them, fly from heart to heart to heart, from generation to generation to generation. The words of our founding documents, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a thousand other immortal monuments of the human spirit that we could cite possess this quality (I will not even enter here into a discussion of God's Word, which is even more truly timeless!)
So, I believe, the simplest little selection from Sarah's book contains fruitful food for reflection, to accompany our morning coffee, toast, eggs…or whatever our taste and preference in breakfast may be today!!
Let me conclude these reflections with a thought that will little please any Lefties who may happen to see this, but that is, IMO, true…simply true.
I believe that, just as great literary geniuses like Homer and Shakespeare and others have authored words that live forever, so the Lord, the Eternal Author, is creating right now, by His grace, a work that is even greater than any literary monument. He, for many a year now, has been nourishing, guiding, sustaining, a beautiful, brave, heroic, kind, gentle, tough, relentless, gracious, indomitable, loving, fearless heroine to help save our beloved America.
PRAISE FOREVER TO THE LORD, WHO MADE OUR DEAR SARAH "FOR A TIME SUCH AS THIS" !!!!
