Thoughts from Andy
On our recent trip to San Francisco, Heather and I were standing at the bottom of one of the city's famous hills waiting on a cable car when a woman approached us. She was tall with blonde hair and a southern accent, dressed in a black party dress and an expensive-looking long black coat.
“Hey,” she said. “I don't think the car is coming. I saw a bus parked over there, and I'm thinking the cable car must be broken and that bus is taking people around.”
“That's not good.” My theory is to state the obvious when I can't think of anything else to say. “Wonder what happened?”
“I don't know, but I can't wait forever.” She was getting more and more jittery. “I don't even know where a bus would turn around down here.”
I saw that she was right. If a bus came to pick us up, it couldn't possibly take is in the direction we wanted to go. And since the cable car was broken, how were Heather and I going to get to dinner on time? Now I was starting to get jittery. “Heather,” I said when the woman was out of earshot, “do you think the cable car is broken?”
“NO, it's not broken,” she replied as if I had asked her to clip my toenails or watch football with me. “That woman just needs to have patience. We've been standing here, what, three minutes? The cable car runs every ten minutes. It'll come.”
When I looked around behind me, the woman had gone, no doubt walking as fast as she could to the next bus stop. A minute or two later I saw the cable car, one lonely headlight at the top of the hill, descending toward us.
The human brain is one powerful glob of tissue. It can create scenarios, worlds, that don't really exist outside the mind. Broken cable cars, friends who don't like us anymore, bosses who must like our co-worker better, all creations of the brain. Maybe it's best to wait a while, talk to somebody, before we just head off to the next stop.
--Rev. Andy uuccrev@comcast.net
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