The Scrimshaw Redemption.

The great journalist Molly Ivins, political commentator and, most of all wit, once wrote about George W. Bush, "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." 

As someone who grew up (if I did in fact grow up) with parents and sundry other 'care-givers' who beat me both physically and emotionally, I always considered myself having been born under the unluckiest of stars. I always saw myself as some poor-man's Dickens' ragamuffin, wearing patched britches and beaten about the head and shoulders and then being presented with a bill for the beatings.

Great expectations? 

No. 

More like great expectorations.

Ptui.

As I get older however, which I'm told is better than the alternative, I've begun the re-examine what I was born with. I've begun to think that for all my 'you get nothing but the lid of the ice cream' travails, maybe I'd been blessed with more than a young man can even realize. It's taken me until old-man-ness to realize it.

No, I didn't come recently into money. And I didn't all of a sudden wake up a find a silver spoon in my mouth. It wasn't for nothing that I considered my mother a combination of Lady Macbeth and Atilla the Mom and my father a mash-up of King Lear and Willy Loman, and not their good features. 

But of late, and I'm not exactly sure why, I've been re-measuring the circumstances around my existence. 

A lot of that re-measuring comes from my employment 'alone-ness.' At almost 69, I am working harder than I ever have, yet my energies do not flag. I said the other day to H, my Account Director and more importantly, my friend, that the difficulty with my business these days is I have to do so much getting of business, that it reduces the time I have to spend on doing what I really cherish, that is, the work.

Anne Bonny. One of the few distaff pyrates.

Still, since this is about having been born with certain blessings, I have an ethic to work to find work. In large measure because I love, yes, love, work so much that somehow it makes it all worthwhile to me. Sure, when I play with Sparkle on a long, wide beach near my Gingham Coast ramshackleness, I fantasize about tripping over Anne Bonny's buried treasure, but I know that ain't going to happen, and if you have to be left to your own devices, in fact, I've been left with quite a few.

Today, we turn everything to smut.

Another is my love of learning, which naturally, is related to my love of work. I love reading. I love digging down rodent holes. I love asking questions and wondering why. 

For all the darkness of our darkening age, there is at the same time an efflorescence of learning and literature and science that allows us--even intellectual dilettantes like myself--to see things humans have never before seen. We know things about our planet and its peopleing and its history that we could never have known before thanks to modern techniques that help us see the ancient world. I am blessed because that thrills me.

Another love is my love of language. I once said to L, my wife, that my vocabulary stems from my mother beating me over the head with the Oxford English Dictionary. As Terry Malloy said to Edie Dugan along the Hoboken waterfront, "those nuns thought they was going to beat an education into me, but I foxed them." I resisted my mother's pedagogy--what kid doesn't--as I resisted my hic haec hoc, but here I am almost seventy years later using words like pedagogy and I can still decline all thirty words in hic haec hoc in under ten seconds. Bonus bona bonum, too and amo amas amat.

Most of all, my blessings come from not having been born on third. From not having had a trust fund, any trust or even any fun. 

I learned at a precociously early-age that if I was going to make my way around the bases of life I was going to do so thanks to the steel in my spine, the sinew in my arms and the sweat of my brow. As Ricky Nelson sang in "Garden Party,"

My first at bat as a 13-year-old  freshman on the varsity baseball squad of my high school nine, I hit a slow roller down the third base line. I was out by a step-and-a-half. But our opponent's first baseman dogged it. He stood on the bag as he caught the ball, and as I was within my rights, I barreled into him like Pete Rose took out Ray Fosse in the 1970 Major League All-Star Game. I knocked him over and the ball to the ground and was safe on first, scoring just moments later.

Above all, that is the blessing borne from adversity. The blessing of TWTW (The Will To Win) or TW². I suppose Dylan Thomas characterized it better as "the force that through green fuse drives the flower." But Thomas drank himself to death when he was just 39 and I'm still percolating. Perhaps his green fuse wasn't as resolute as my TW².

I'll admit, and this is a chicken or egg thing, that I am often in arrears when it comes to writing this blog. I've written about 7,500 posts, and while not all of them have been stellar, qualitatively they're about the equivalent of old Inuit scrimshaw.

Like this blog, like my life, Inuit scrimshaw was done by amateurs, indiscriminately, idly even, as something to do as we pass the long days and long nights of life. We pick up the materials around us, we take our hands, and we try to make something that will last longer than we will. It not only passes the time, it gives us a beyond-time to aspire to. (And no, I am not endorsing killing walruses for their tusks or any other polar animals suited to scrimshaw carving. It's merely a metaphor.)

I'm sure in Inuit didn't regard themselves as talented or as craftsmen. They certainly didn't put on fur-lined berets and fancy themselves igloo artistes. They rarely smoked Gauloises and attended gallery openings, wearing sunglasses at night. Rather, they woke up in the morning and worked. Maybe they every so often thought about what they did and why they did it. Maybe every so often, they were pleased--even thankful.

That is my blessing.

I work.

I enjoy sweat.

I enjoy the oying and the veying.

I enjoy the idea when I find it.

Even more when I sell it.

Even more more when it works in the marketplace.

I'm ok with that. Even happy.

Kinda.