Patrick Jay Sullivan's Blog

At a party this past week we were singing television show theme songs and people were laughing. Hey, try it some time - it brings people together faster than the dinner bell. Any who, I jumped in with "From mountains high to valleys low, they speak the name of Jamie-oh" and there was silence. My friend, Ken, leaned over and said "I believe you and I are the only two people who saw that show and remember it." How can a show run from 1963 to 1965 and feature 26 episodes with young handsome Kurt Russel and no one remembers it. I wasn't old enough to stay up past 8 PM so I only was able to watch from my bedroom door peering into the living room and straining to hear. Every fourth episode or so my mother would feel sorry for me and let me stay up that "one time only" to watch. It was full of action and adventure and I longed to go back in time and be on a wagon train en route to California during the gold rush days. But alas, no one remembers the show except my buddy, Ken. That's the funny thing about television. Some shows are destined to be in reruns for ages and others evaporate from our consciousness.

I have lost friends in life and I have made new ones. This isn’t uncommon. I imagine everyone goes through it. Like a character in a movie such as Stand by Me, we set out on an odyssey and we get caught up in it. OK, so it isn’t a great metaphor. We don’t have a choice in life but to keep going. But the point is, we do get caught up in the journey and we travel with people along the way. I see the whole journey concept a lot more clearly after teaching high school for 31 years. I had a student teacher last year and it was a great experience. When she first came to our school, I was silently and within my self critically of her. She didn’t speak Spanish well enough for my standards; she was too much in theory and not enough in practical real life how do you deal with kids, with teens. But it ended up that I learned as much or more from her as she did from me. It turned out that as I journaled about things and went back to some of the journals I kept my first couple years in the profession, well, I realized that I was in the same place she was at that age. I ended up having the greatest experience with this young teacher. I realized by the end of those ten weeks that teaching (and probably most professions) are part of the journey we call “life.” We meet up with people on the road and they help us. They tell us how to survive conditions they have had experience with. We are all mentors. It is probably the reason why the human race has been so successful- well, that and opposable thumbs.
I think that the biggest lesson for me came when I lost my parents. I just had no idea how tough the journey would be when they crossed to the other side. There is no friend in the world who can measure up to a father or a mother. My mother, especially, was my advisor, my friend and a person who always made time for me. She actually made me feel more important than I actually am in the great scheme of things and for that and several other gifts she gave me along the journey I will love her and respect her eternally. I never had such a good friend and I don’t believe that I ever will. I am pretty sure that is the reason for the scripture: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” While writing in my journal last year, I remembered a conversation that I had with my mom and dad after I had been teaching a few years. It was about when I took off for Spain the first time to study there and how they had given me so much in life. I think it was my mother who said that in life as I go along I should reach out to others and give them a hand once in a while. That is the best way to repay this sort of thing she said. I often wonder if that is why she secretly gave things to people in need, or visited people in the hospital or nursing home all the time. She never got credit for the selfless things she did but I saw many of them and I knew. I never said anything and that is the reason why she didn’t worry about me being around when she did a selfless act. She was a strong woman and with great character so she had a surplus of people who were critical of her. I never heard many people sing her praises. She quietly went about her life raising her kids and doing what she felt was best. She was certainly an outstanding role model.
I guess the only way you can really repay that sort of compassion and genius in your life is to turn around and me a mentor for others who happen along the journey at the same time as you. In a small way, it helps keep the presence that people like your parents had still alive in your life. It gives both ways.

Have you ever been sucked into something and it was something that was a giant waste of time over which you had no control? You know what I am talking about, something about which you felt complete and total indifference. It is hard to get motivated about an event or a process that really means nothing to you. It is a waste of time. Wasting time is the one thing that is really unforgivable. If you stop and think about it, we just have this one life and the amount of time we have on the planet is finite. We can “grow up before our time” and we can “skip a step” and “come out ahead of where we ought to be.” The truth is, we still have the same amount of minutes in our lives. Like the song in Rent about the minutes in the last year of a person’s life, we may not realize just how important a day is until we are down to the last ones we will ever have. That is part of the reason why I don’t get the concept of Daylight Savings. You really do not save any daylight. It is a control measure that allows people to manipulate the clock so that daylight arrives and leaves at varying times. I find myself running around putting the clocks back an hour in the autumn and in the late winter in March putting them forward an hour. Then there is how it affects your sleep and your body the first week or two of the change. It just seems kind of strange to go through that when it means so very little. I still go to work. I still work out in the gym afterwards. Bowling is on Thursdays and I get home too late. Fridays I am tired. Saturday I clean house and go shopping. Life doesn’t really change. I just get put through a few hoops twice a year. I’ll bet there is some son of a bitch somewhere laughing his ass off and trying to think of another plan to wreak havoc on society in general. He must be a politician – probably a congressman.