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RJ Hamster
The Joy in the Journey
The Joy in the Journey
She sat in 14E, and I sat in 14D.
She was rural, and I was urban. She was backward, and I was sophisticated. She was homey, and I was “professional.” But she could see, and I was blind.
“They sure do put these seats close up against each other, don’t they,” she said as I sat down.
Her face was ten inches from mine. She had basset-hound cheeks; her eyebrows peaked over her nose; and her jowls sagged. She wore a Dutch-bob haircut and a blue, velour pants suit. I don’t know if she was old or just looked old. But I do know one thing: She’d never flown.
“I don’t do this too much, do you?”
When I told her I did, her eyes widened. “Oooh, that must be fu-un.” (She could add a syllable to any word.)
I groaned to myself. I already had a bad attitude. My week had been hectic. The plane was late and overbooked. And now I was sitting next to Gomer Pyle’s mother.
“Oooh, boy, look at that one!”
She pointed at the plane ahead of us on the runway.
“Is this one that big?”
“Yes.” I hoped my brief response would show her that I wasn’t up for chitchat. It didn’t.
“I’m going to see my boy in Dallas. Do you ever go to Dallas? I hope he’s OK. He had a stomach flu last week. He’s got a new dog. I can’t wait to see it. It’s a Labrador. Do you know what that is? They are big and lovable and … ”
She was uncanny. Not only could she add a syllable to every word, she could answer her own questions.
As we were taking off, however, she got quiet. For several moments she said nothing. Then she suddenly let out a sound that would have called the pigs for dinner.
“Oooooeeee, those trees down there look like peat moss!”
People seated around us turned and stared like I was E. F. Hutton.
“What river is that?”
I told her I didn’t know, so she flagged down a stewardess.
When I pulled out my laptop computer, she was enthralled. “Now isn’t that clever.”
And that went on … the whole flight. She didn’t miss a thing. If she wasn’t staring out the window, she was amazed by a magazine. If she wasn’t talking, she was “oooh-ing.” She played with her fan. She turned her light on and off. She toyed with her seat belt. She savored her lunch. When we went through turbulence, I looked over at her to be sure she was all right, and she was grinning. You’d have thought she was riding the Ferris wheel at the county fair!
It occurred to me, about mid-journey, that she was the only person enjoying the trip.
The rest of us, the “sophisticated,” were too mature to have fun. I was staring at a computer screen—eyes tired, stressed-out, trying to find a message for stress-filled people and never noticing that the message was sitting beside me.
“Wasn’t that a fu-un trip?” she asked as we were leaving the plane.
I didn’t say anything. I just nodded and smiled. Off she walked, bouncing down the concourse as curious as a six-year-old. I watched her as long as I could, then turned to go to my next flight with a lesson learned.
I resolved to keep my eyes open.
It does little good, I decided, to make the trip and miss the journey.
RJ Hamster
Memorable Quotes From IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD…
Memorable Quotes From IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD:
“Even businessmen, who rob and cheat and steal from people everyday, even they have to pay taxes.” — Jonathan Winters as Lennie Pike
“Now look! We’ve figured it 17 different ways, and each time we figured it, it was no good, because no matter how we figured it, somebody don’t like the way we figured it! So now, there’s only one way to figure it. And that is, every man, including the old bag, for himself!” — Buddy Hackett, as Benjy Benjamin, starting the competition.
“But this is a girl’s bike. This is for a little girl.” — Winters, as Lennie Pike, having to find some form of transportation when he loses his truck.
“Now what kind of an attitude is that, ‘These things happen?’ They only happen because this whole country is just full of people who, when these things happen, they just say, ‘These things happen,’ and that’s why they happen! We gotta have control of what happens to us.” — Ethel Merman, as Mrs. Marcus.
“Trouble? Having any trouble?”
“Yes, and we don’t need any help from you!”
Pause
“Well!” — Jack Benny, as Man in Car, offering unsuccessfully to help Merman, as Mrs. Marcus, and her family.
“I’m coming. That’s what I’m here for. That’s why you had me, Mama, to save you.” — Dick Shawn, as Sylvester Marcus, riding to the rescue.
“Exactly like your father: a big, stupid, muscle-headed moron!” — Merman describing Shawn, as her son, Sylvester.
“You know, I’m not entirely uncertain you haven’t damaged this machine.” — Terry-Thomas, as J. Algernon Hawthorne.
“As far as I can see, American men have been totally emasculated — they’re like slaves! They die like flies from coronary thrombosis while their women sit under hairdryers eating chocolates and arranging for every second Tuesday to be some sort of Mother’s Day! And this infantile preoccupation with bosoms. In all my time in this godforsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don’t you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture: in literature, advertising and all fields of entertainment. I’ll wager you anything you like that if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight.” — Terry-Thomas, as Hawthorne.
“Old fashioneds? Do you think you oughta drink while your flying?”
“Well stop kidding willya, and make us some drinks! You just press the button back there marked ‘booze.’ It’s the only way to fly!” — Mickey Rooney, as Ding Bat, and Jim Backus, as Tyler Fitzgerald, discussing air safety.
“Dingy, don’t let this worry you. We’re gonna get killed.” — Hackett, as Benjy Benjamin, trying to fly the plane.
“Even if it is a democracy, in a democracy it don’t matter how stupid you are, you still get an equal share.” — Winters, as Lennie.
“Listen, anything you got to say about your mother-in-law, you don’t have to explain to me. You know what I mean? Like, if she were the star of a real crummy horror movie, I’d believe it.” — Winters, on Merman.
“My wife is divorcing me, my daughter is applying to the courts to have her name changed, my mother-in-law is suing me for damages, my pension has been revoked. And the only reason you ten idiots will very likely get off lightly, is that the judge will have me up there to throw the book at….I’d like to think that sometime, maybe ten or 20 years from now, there could be something I could laugh at. Anything.” — Spencer Tracy, as Capt. C.G. Culpepper, bemoaning his involvement in the plot.
Peter A. Hovis for President in 2024
Ben Stein’s Final Column
Ben Stein’s Final Column – Worth the Read. Definitely!
For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column called ‘Monday Night At Morton’s.’ (Morton’s is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.
Ben Stein’s Last Column…
How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today’s World?
As I begin to write this, I ‘slug’ it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is ‘eonline FINAL,’ and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.
It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world’s change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton’s, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to.. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars.. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton’s is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.
How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today’s world, if by a ‘star’ we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.
They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.
A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.
A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded… He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.
The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.
We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.
I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton’s is a big subject.
There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament: the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.
Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.
I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin or Martin Mull or Fred Willard–or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.
But, I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister’s help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.
This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human
Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.
By Ben Stein
RJ Hamster
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