The Beauty of Life at the Alignment Shop

This morning, I was getting an alignment for my car, and a young father and his daughter sat down across from me.

The daughter was 4 – maybe 5, and deeply engrossed in reading a children’s book to herself.  She was smiling and reading to herself, almost singing.

I had wanted to take a picture of this, then felt it to be almost intrusive on something so simple and beautiful.

But if it were a painting, Norman Rockwell would have come to mind.

As I left, I told the father what a cute daughter he had, and he smiled and thanked me. You could tell that he was very proud of her.

And I told the daughter that it was a pleasure to have made her acquaintance.

She smiled.

 

Life’s Predictability

As I have gotten older, I have become aware of the sudden changes we all have in our lives – all coming unforeseen and unexpected.

Perhaps our lives are more like a raft ride down a strong river – you can usually  guide your course but you can’t dictate it…

 

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“The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.”

 Paul Auster

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“Everything’s subject to change”

Drill Sgt Claiborne

Ft Ord, CA 

Sep 72 

The Beauty of Simplicity

I’ve often thought that in the world, some of the most profound truths are really simple. Virtually every major religion in the world has their version of the Golden Rule.

In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the
prophets.
Jesus, Matthew 7:12

What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it.
Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a

 

The failures of the world can be summarized by failure to adhere to this simple rule.

Beware Of The Cheerleader

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

—Mark Twain

 

A bully confronted this young lady and got more than she probably expected.

Bullies generally prey upon those they perceive as weak and vulnerable. I came across this video today and immediately thought of the character Claire Bennet (The Cheerleader) in the old NBC series Heroes.

Traffic Tickets

I’m not what you’d call a reckless driver, despite getting a speeding ticket now and then. And in over a million miles of driving (probably closer to 2), never had an accident other than some guy in West Virginia running a stop sign and my broadsiding him in my aunt’s ’66 Ford LTD station wagon.

When I was 16.

With some experience I probably could have avoided that too.

The College Cheating Scandal

What has surprised me is not the cheating – there have always been those who have cheated to gain an advantage – but the depth of this scandal. And it was in 2 forms. Someone would take the entrance exams for the applicant, and that person would bribe those who administered the tests to allow this fraud.

Singer arranged for a third-party — usually Mark Riddell — to take the test secretly in the students’ place or replace their responses with his own….

Exactly 7 years ago…

We lost a good friend. I wasn’t a Neptunus Lex reader that morning; I hadn’t even heard of him. I will have learned about him tomorrow, when reading the notice from Chicago Boyz.

MarineMom probably described the reaction of his readers best, when she reported the news to her Marine aviator son.

He said that “I feel like somebody just punched me in the gut“.

OldAFSarge has a good post describing that day here.

The very first post I read, recommended by David, really told me all about the kind of man Lex was.

Immensely talented in his chosen line of work.

A man of faith.

Humble.

Kind to others.

A wicked sense of humor, even at his own expense.

I started devouring his posts on his now-gone website.

When that went down, I started reading the files advokaat fortunately created (for his later reading, he has said).

I thought that for such a good man who described many of his readers as “the best friends I never met”, giving his  readers so much of himself, to be silenced simply because of a password would not do.

He turned out to be the best friend I never met..

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Update: 03/07/19 – If you have just come across this via search engine, and want to know more about Carroll LeFon, here’s a good place to start. For one, you will learn a lot about Naval Aviation. But he wrote about so many other things – life and current events.

My Epilogue is here.