GREY MUTTER lance fredericks Following where others led

IT IS MY culture, in fact it’s deep within my DNA, to avoid human contact in the morning until I have had at least 45 minutes to an hour to do some quiet meditation and reflection … ALONE.

This time is precious to me and I do not appreciate disturbances or earthquakes during my quiet time. There is time for everything later.

I spend my morning quiet time reading, scribbling notes and, sometimes, listening to things I choose to hear.

Hearing jingles from commercials, or that crushingly irritating morning show theme is not my idea of a way to start my day.

Occasionally hearing an uninvited tune can infect one with that malady to beat all maladies … the earworm.

An earworm is simply a catchy song or tune that runs continually through someone’s mind. It becomes unbearable when it’s a familiar tune that you despise!

For the past few weeks I have been suffering with an acute earworm infection. However, this strain seems to be more virulent than others I had caught in my life, because this one is not a tune … it’s a poem.

The Calf Path by Sam Walter Foss, who lived between 1858 and 1911, tells the tale of a young calf meandering home, taking no heed nor care of the path it took through the woods.

“One day, through the primeval wood, A calf walked home, as good calves should; But made a trail all bent askew, A crooked trail, as all calves do.”

The poet then takes the reader on a journey through time and speaks about a lone dog that walked in the calf ’s footsteps the next day, through the bent grass. Later a wise bellwether sheep found this trail and followed it too … the rest of his flock in tow.

The poet continued: “Through those old woods a path was made, And many men wound in and out, And dodged and turned and bent about, And uttered words of righteous wrath Because ’twas such a crooked path.”

Later you read of how the path became a lane that bent and wound and turned around; and later the lane became a road. A century and a half later the road became a village street, and later, much later, the thoroughfare of a great metropolis.

As the poet puts it: “And men two centuries and-a-half, Trod in the footsteps of that calf.”

In the end Foss speaks about how men were losing so much time walking this crooked way – trod by a calf that died centuries before – when they could simply have made a straight road through the bustling city … had the old path not been so well established, of course.

This poem got me thinking of how people blindly follow and uphold traditions that, if you really thought about it, sometimes actually make no sense.

Are we so loyal to our culture that we do not care if it hurts, harms or offends others who see things differently, or who were born into another way of thinking?

Don’t get me wrong, culture has value, great value even, but it is not something that anyone can force others to adopt.

And pardon me for saying it, but if you believe that your culture gives you license to harm or abuse someone else, I can respect neither you nor that culture.

Perhaps the ideal is not to present our cherished beliefs as the ideal that everyone else should embrace, but rather allow our beliefs to form us – we ourselves – into good ambassadors of our various and varying cultures.

In this way others could be drawn to want to understand what makes us tick so pleasantly.

The other option is, in the words of Sam Walter Foss to: “… go it blind, Along the calf-paths of the mind, And work away from sun to sun, To do what other men have done. They follow in the beaten track, And out and in, and forth and back, And still their devious course pursue, To keep the path that others do.”