live! live! live!

Live! Live! Live!..Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.

- Auntie Mame

 

Fast away the old year passes. Boy does it ever. I’ve noticed a number of people choosing a word for the new year, a collection of consonants and vowels to row toward in the often tumultuous seas of days ahead. I like that kind of thinking, not trying to dictate where the year takes you but digging around in the cellar of yourself and pulling up a word to give shape to the possible hopes of 2012.

 

A holiday tradition in our marriage is a viewing of Auntie Mame starring Rosalind Russell. Its a wonderful movie, really top drawer, one I highly recommend. The life motto of Mame Dennis, be it good times or bad, is ‘Live! Live! Live!..Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.’ You don’t have to have the context of the movie to appreciate those words, but I assure you it certainly helps.

 

In the spirit of always slightly adjusting the rules, I’m choosing a phrase for 2012 instead of merely a word – Live! Live! Live! I’ve already used it on several occasions, generating a sly grin from my wife and looks of mild embarrassment from my kids (I’m comfortable with both). I have no idea what that phrase will mean in light of the weeks and months ahead but I’m hitching my wagon to those stars to see where they lead. Those words excite me, they elicit the same feeling I get from poet David Whyte’s line – ‘everything is waiting for you.’ Those words also embolden me, causing my spine to straighten in the face of the idiotic cockeyed nincompoopery I too often encounter that views life as something to conquer/a problem to be solved or something to get over with so as to get on to somewhere else.

 

I noticed the other day that some bloggers were polling their readers, asking them what they wanted to see on their blog in the coming year. I’m not going to do that, not because I don’t care about you because I do, but because hopefully you’ve found something here odder than ‘wants.’ I’m going to keep writing poetry, hoping that practice makes good, and I’m going to keep posting/pointing out the splendor in the mundane…because I believe, like Auntie Mame, that yes, life is indeed a banquet and most of us are starving to death. So, ye lads and lasses, here’s to savoring our own unique incarnation with all of its delectable aromas…giving this poignant gift called life its beautiful due. Live! Live! Live! - otherwise known as ‘don’t be a sucker.’