I am so blessed to have the nieces and nephews that I do – and as I’m sitting here at the Spencer-Berg dining room table, for some reason I find myself reflecting specifically on the contrast between my nephew Kaj (Randi and Matt’s youngest) and my niece Lorelai, the daughter of Polly and Mark. They are both so sweet – so fun – so talented – so tender-hearted . . . but boy are they so different from each other when it comes to fear. Lorelai has what I would deem a somewhat cautious attitude when it comes to anything new or risky- while Kaj’s level of fear ranks somewhere between negligible and non-existent.
But if I’ve learned anything in my 51 and a half years on this earth, it’s that there is not one single life script meant for all of us – one single recipe for a happy, meaningful life. Some people seem destined to make their way through life carefully, methodically – while for others life is one long mad dash of abandon. . . and either can be a ticket to joy. Kaj’s all-or-nothing, ready-or-not attitude sure seems to work for him (broken bones and all) – – – especially because Kaj is navigating through the world with malformed hands and feet, and were he hard-wired to be the least bit hesitant, Kaj might have spent most of his young life on the sidelines. Instead, Kaj hardly knows where the sidelines are, so exuberantly is he out on the field, paying his heart out and loving every minute of it. . . whether with wrestling or baseball or violin or meeting strangers or trying new foods. Kaj has a fearlessness that borders on recklessness from time to time, but mostly he just seems to have this unquenchable thirst for activity and excitement.
And on the other hand, Lorelai makes her way through the world a little more cautiously – which in some ways might work nicely as a balance to her incredibly brilliant mind – but that doesn’t mean there aren’t all kinds of delights for her along the way. I saw that for myself the other day when I took her to the park and observed first hand as she climbed on the dome-shaped monkey bars. . . and her quiet attempts to climb to the very top of the dome, which she had never before managed to do. She tried once but had to give up about halfway up when it felt too high. Then she tried again, and made it a little bit farther before once again having to give up. Then she tried a third time, and I heard her say under her breath “I really want to not be scared.” And lo and behold, she gritted her teeth and made it to the very top- and then smiled for my camera like she was Tenzing Norgay at the summit of Mount Everest. (And by the way, it wasn’t my idea for her to try and reach the top- that was all her idea.) Kaj would have scampered up to the top in the first ten seconds without thinking twice and then run off to do something else – which is great for him – but there’s also something to be said for the quiet, determined victory which Lorelai earned the hard way and left her in the end squealing with delight.
I’m pretty sure that Kaj and Lorelai have never met – but I’m so glad that they are both in my life, because they remind me that one-size-fits-all is not a good way to look at the world or each other. And the sooner we start to accept and even cherish the differences between us as much as the similarities, the sooner we will start to share this planet with each other a bit more lovingly. And this is a lesson I’m not just learning from Kaj and Lorelai and my other nieces and nephew, or from other friends and family. . . but most of all from my wife Kathy and my best friend Marshall. I don’t know how he did it, but Neil Simon had to have seen Marshall and I before he wrote his play “The Odd Couple” – because we are the original Felix and Oscar. And although I would never think of Kathy as a Felix Unger, there are a few ways in which she and I have an Odd Couple thing going that certainly makes our life together interesting and – from time to time – maddening. But we love each other, differences and all. And honestly, I cannot imagine life any other way… any more than I can imagine a world that didn’t have both Lorelai and Kaj in it, showing us what joy is all about and the different flavors with which it can be savored.
pictured above: My niece Lorelai at her triumphant moment reaching the top of the monkey bars.