Every morning I stand on my porch and toss peanuts to four squirrels that live in the trees in my yard. The squirrels listen for my door to open and scurry out of the bushes and climb down from the trees and come and sit in a line and wait for me to toss each of them a peanut.
This morning I only had one peanut left in the bag and I tossed it into the yard expecting the fastest squirrel to grab the nut and run with it. Instead the four squirrels got into a fight and while they were chasing each other around and rolling in the grass, a crow that had been watching the squirrels, swooped down out of the tree and grabbed the peanut in his beak and flew away.
If the squirrels hadn’t fought over the peanut, at least one of them could have grabbed it but while they were fighting, a crow flew away with the nut and all the squirrels had to go without breakfast.
I guess it is a case of “you snooze . . . you lose.”
My friend Robert is a very quiet, shy fifty-year old man. He has worked in a bank most of his life and he spends most of his evenings reading books eating sandwiches because he doesn’t like to cook.
Once a year the city of Seattle has a week long celebration with parades and re-enactments of pirate ships attacking the city and pirates running wild in the streets and disrupting the parade and kidnapping wenches (willing members of the celebration). While Robert was on his way to work he stopped to admire the pirate ships docked at the pier flying their Jolly Roger flags while men in pirate costumes swung from ropes when some of the pirates yelled “Come and join us! Be a pirate for a day!”
Robert, who never does anything impulsively, suddenly found himself climbing aboard the ship, dressing in a pirate costume and was soon running down the street waving a plastic sword and tossing fake gold Doubloons and Pieces O’Eight to people lining the parade route. He said it was probably the most fun he’d ever had in his life. For one day he was a pirate. He could have gone to work that day like he always did, but in that one moment he had a choice to make, going to work as usual and sitting at his desk or being a pirate for a day.
He made the right choice.
Sometimes we wait too long, we miss the boat and sometimes we wait too long and miss our chance at true love.
I had an old neighbor named Ollie. He was a nice old fellow. Everybody knew him and liked him. Sometimes I’d give him a ride to church. We drove past a certain place where there had once been a house but now only a stone foundation remained and it was overgrown with blackberry bushes. Ollie would always gaze at the abandoned road and the ruins of the house and sigh.
“When I was young,” he’d say, “A real pretty girl lived in a house down that road. She had curly blonde hair and freckles like cinnamon had been sprinkled on her face. We went to the same church and I always walked her home after church. We’d walk down the hill and then walk down her dirt driveway. I always tried to make her laugh because her laugh was so soft and pretty. Every time I walked her home I wanted to reach over and take her hand. I dreamed about walking down that path holding her hand. A few times I sorta reached out and almost took her hand in mine but never quite made it. Close, but not close enough. We were such good friends, we liked the same things, we went to the same school, the same church. I’d known her since we were in the second grade. I used to dream about marrying her and I even thought about the house I’d build for her. She liked to sew and I was going to build a room with big windows that would be sunny and bright and that would be her sewing room.
I never got up the nerve to reach out and hold her hand, and then her dad got a job in Oklahoma and they moved away. She said she’d write but she never did. I always hoped I’d see her again but I never did. I don’t know what happened to her. I wonder if she got married. I never got married, I always meant to get married but didn’t have the heart for it after she left. My whole life would have been different if I’d just reached out and taken her hand.”
Ollie must have told me the story twenty times but I always listened like I’d never heard it before. It was sad. A shy boy so much in love but unable to reach out and take a girl’s hand. She was the love of his life. Maybe he was the love of her life but they missed their chance.
We should reach out, take the risk, leap even if we might fall, say “I love you” even if we know we won’t hear “I love you, too.”
We must be brave because sometimes, if we reach out...we can change our lives.
Crying Wind is the author of Crying Wind and My Searching Heart, When the Stars Danced, and Thunder in Our Hearts, Lightning in Our Veins. All her books are available from Indian Life.
