This week’s post won’t be as long as my previous posts.  I have been going in different directions since last week.  Some weeks the words come easily.  This week I’ve been preoccupied, but you never know what’s around the corner……

I have been a fan of westerns since a very early age.  The cowboys, the Indians (I know the proper term is Native Americans, but when I grew up they were Indians), the horses, the wagon trains, and the cattle drives.  It was often good versus evil.  To this day, I will watch John Wayne in The Cowboys still hoping that he will not get bushwhacked and die.  In the early 1980’s TBS otherwise known as Turner Broadcasting System came on the scene where my family was living.  Wagon Train was a favorite show of mine, and I would watch it every week on TBS.  Bonanza, Gun Smoke, and The Rifleman were also favorite shows of mine.  To say they just don’t make westerns like they used to is an understatement.  Westerns gave me a foundation of right and wrong.  I also came to understand that good does not always win out.  Sometimes the good guy dies.  Some of the best life advice can come from a western.  During these crazy times we are living in, I think we could all benefit from circling our wagons to watch some Saturday afternoon westerns.  

Tombstone featuring Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliot, and Bill Paxton was released in 1993.  I remember watching it, and have watched bits and pieces of it over the years.  I guess AMC was running a western marathon this past weekend, and  Tombstone was on Saturday and Sunday.  I caught the tail end of it on Sunday.  Something Doc Holliday, played by Val Kilmer, said caught my attention.  He said, “There’s No Normal Life. There’s Just Life. Now Get On With It.”  He said this to Wyatt Earp while he was lying on his deathbed.  He was trying to make his one true friend, Wyatt Earp, understand that we will all end up on a deathbed, but before we get there we better find happiness.  That conversation really jumped out at me.  A normal life?  Now that was something I have been chasing my entire life.  Yet here I am at 50, and I realize like Doc Holliday said in Tombstone, “There’s just life.” Yet, what a life it can be.

I think many of us grew up on the outside looking in wishing our life was like Sally’s or Billy’s.  Their family seemed to have it all.  Nice car, new clothes, and all the latest toys.  My parents divorced when I was very young, and from about six years on I was raised by my single mother.  There were not a lot of extras.  I realized once I was grown that I was not the only one from a family that didn’t have money for the extras.  I remember when Atari first came out with Donkey Kong and Centipede.  Of course, my mom couldn’t afford that, but I had a friend that always had the newest toys or fashions.  I was the chunky girl with frizzy curly hair that desperately wanted Farrah Fawcett wings.  I even have a picture of my feeble attempt.  A popular hairstyle when I was growing up.  Hair products for naturally curly hair were very limited back then if not almost non-existent.   I look back now, and am grateful that I didn’t have everything I ever thought I wanted.  I was living a normal life, and didn’t know it.  I was way into adulthood when I realized the perceived perfect lives that I thought my friends and the popular kids had were often a farce.  Perhaps, like most pre-teens and teenagers, I was so immersed in myself and in my own world, that  I didn’t know that my friend had an alcoholic father or the girl I thought had it all lived in an abusive household.  I might have had chaos at times in my home, but I was never physically abused, and I did know that I was loved.

As I got older, just like most people, I had in my head what I wanted out of life.  What a normal life would be.  A nice house, new vehicle, handsome husband, beautiful children, and the white picket house.  That’s all good on paper and in the movies.  There is pressure more than ever to constantly strive for this idyllic life.  There is no perfectly normal life.  We all have craziness going on during different chapters of our life.  Then, there are days that go on and on.  Same thing day in and day out.  There is no perfect ending.  You are born and one day you die, but in the in between there is life.  The title of one of my favorite books sums it up.  The Magic of Ordinary Days.  We have this perception that everything in our life needs to be in place to have a normal life.  Not going to happen.  You think one day it will, but then you will be like Doc Holliday on his deathbed, and realize there is only life. There will be ups, downs, sideways, but it’s all part of living.  And you know what?  My idea of normal might nowhere touch on your idea of normal.  So….let’s get on with it.  Let’s live our lives and constantly seek out moments of joy and happiness.  But….let us also embrace the normal rhythm of life, and may it soothe our soul.

All the best,

Stella Elaine