August 30: All Right with Billy, Self Pity, Chicken Sandwich

Billy was brought down Sugarbush Mountain on a toboggan.  The golliwogs controlled it with ropes and yodeled melodiously for right-of-way.  Near the bottom, the trail swooped around the pylons of a chair lift.  Billy looked up at all the young people in bright elastic clothing and enormous boots and goggles, bombed out of their skulls with snow, swinging through the sky in yellow chairs.  He supposed that they were part of an amazing new phase of World War Two.  It was all right with him.  Everything was pretty much all right with Billy.

I wish I could be more like Billy Pilgrim.  No, I don't want to be a survivor of a plane crash.  I don't want to be abducted by aliens and placed in a zoo on a distant planet to mate with a porn star.  Don't want to be a soldier in a war.  Don't want to be an optometrist.

What I want is Billy's ability to be all right with everything.  Not get upset when his life crashes into the side of a mountain.  That's how I wish I could be like Billy Pilgrim.  I want to be much calmer about the vicissitudes of my daily existence.  I think that would make me a much happier person.

At the moment, I'm feeling pretty sorry for myself.  And I hate it.  Self pity is one of my least favorite emotions.  Sure, I get sad and mad and confused.  That's normal for every human being, except maybe Donald Trump.  But he's delusional.  A person cannot be happy every second of the day.  Even Jesus Christ wept every once in a while.  Ask Lazarus.

Billy Pilgrim knows when he's going to die.  He knows when and how the universe is going to end.  He's experienced his birth and childhood and adulthood over and over and over.  No surprises.  The terrible things in his life aren't so terrible because he knows what's coming.  Death isn't an ending.  It's one bead on a string of beads.  Like a rosary, where you can come back to the same moments in Christ's life again and again.

I have no major wisdom this afternoon.  All I have is a chicken sandwich and some apple juice.  That's my happiness.  Maybe, if I were Billy Pilgrim, I would know that this chicken sandwich will change my life in some way.  I would know how teaching my class will go this evening.  Would know what's going to happen this weekend and next week.  And I could be all right with it all.

Saint Marty needs a nap and a time machine.