I debated over ordering anything and decided I was hungry enough to risk airport food. Turns out they serve a good burger here. I practically inhaled it. Should have savored it, as I now have another hour and fifteen minutes before my flight. So with time to kill and nothing shaking here but a USC/UCLA game on the television behind the bar, I decide to see if there is enough battery left in the Mac to get some writing done. So far so good.
One of the servers is giving the bartender a hard time over the game. UCLA scored first and is up right now by 5. I feel I ought to care who wins so I ask someone nearby which team is favored and the answer I get is USC, so I’m rooting for UCLA. I always root for the underdog. I’m sure a psychologist would have some insight into that particular decision on my part but I won’t concern myself with the deeper meaning.
A number of years ago, when Brandon was maybe 4, he and I flew to L.A. to meet with my brother’s family for a couple days at Disneyland. We stayed at the Westwood Marquis, which as it turns out, is not far from the UCLA campus. I had borrowed a bicycle from my brother during our stay. He also loaned me a Burley bicycle trailer….. so one day I packed Brandon into the Burley and we went for a ride that ended up on the campus track complex. We watched the track team working out and soaked up the southern California sun for a few hours (it had rained the day before, clearing the sky of the usual L.A. smog). It was one of those cherished, peaceful respites in the midst of the unrelenting rush of life. I remember lying back on the lawn on the periphery of the track and letting the sun’s rays warm my skin while Brandon charmed some of the college girls nearby. He has always easily managed the social scene.
So I have a connection to UCLA. Another reason to root for the Bruins.
Not long ago I found some journals I had kept during those years. It had only been a year or so before that L.A. trip that I had both taken a job at the Washington bureau of the Associated Press and then, a month later, quit that very same job to move to Colorado to work at KHOW, the radio station I had listened to growing up. I remember agonizing over the thought of packing up to move across the country. Three weeks after settling in Denver my general manager came into the studio with a copy of Broadcasting magazine in his hand and a mischievous smile on his face. He plopped it down on the desk opened to an article, complete with a picture of me, telling of my having taken a job at the broadcast desk of the AP in Washington D.C. So much for accurate, up-to-the-minute reporting.**
Lately I have been reflecting on what I have been “building” these past many years.
Lucy and I rented “Life as a House” the other night. I highly recommend it. It will have you thinking about how you are spending your years. Are you tending to the important things? Are you building something that is significant? In the film, George (Kevin Kline), gets a wakeup call. Toward the end of the story, as the sun sets, casting golden hues along the edge of a cliff where it drops into the ocean, he says this: “With every crash of every wave, I hear something now. I had never listened before.” His “house” is almost complete, and he says to his son, Sam, “If you were a house, this is where you would want to be built. On rock. Facing the sea. Listening. Listening.”Jesus talked of the wisdom of building your house on “the rock.” The rains come down and the streams rise and the winds blow and beat against the house, but it will not fall.
It is good to stop sometimes and take inventory, to think about where you have been investing, where and what you have been building. I’m wandering around the construction site a lot lately, trying to better see what is taking shape.
Am I standing on rock? Am I listening?
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