My thoughts today relate to the picture. Jaques the monkey is not King Kong. He isn’t even a 600 pound gorilla. There is a notion that bigger is better but that is not always the case. For a tiny monkey a regular sized banana is like winning the lottery. And Jaques is feeling like the luckiest monkey ever.
Pop will never have his memoirs published. He won’t ever have a life remembered by millions. I think that he would want it that way. This week, Pop would have turned 89. In nearly 9 decades he didn’t change the world, at least not in any flashy manner. He didn’t do anything that would end up in the 24-hour news cycle for weeks on end. His life was quiet and mostly unassuming. That doesn’t make it a life not well-lived or worth living.
Pop would never have been an influencer. That being said, he was substance not appearance. While the things he did will be unknown to the world at large, they weren’t inconsequential. For much of his life he worked with teenagers. Perhaps that alone should win him accolades and fame. Many of those young people who he worked with have grown into fine responsible adults. And some of them have shared those lessons that they learned from Pop. One Halloween, one of the young men that Pop advised as a scout leader shaved the top of his head. His costume was Pop. He said he was dressing up as his hero.
Pop spent many hours making scenery for church productions. He build numerous floats, award winning floats. In the days before social media, and the three second attention span, he was able to put things in a healthy perspective. While working on a set, one of the other volunteers was worried about whether they were doing a good enough job. He took them aside and they stepped back from the set where he pointed out that the details that they worried about weren’t even visible from the audience. It was the bigger picture, the overall thing, not the minuscule details that mattered. With floats he pointed out that people would only see them for 15 or 20 seconds. This wasn’t meant to imply that good work wasn’t important; he always did good work. It was a lesson that there is a point where things are good enough for the purpose for which they were meant and worrying about things being perfect is unnecessary. In fact, sometimes the things you are stressing about aren’t even noticeable by the outside observer.
When working with youth he tried to make them successful. He got permission to work a few hours a week with some at risk youth. The project that he worked with them on was a model of a bridge. He spent the time building jigs for the pieces so that the kids couldn’t fail. It was a project that ended up as something that not only the kids, but his company and the school were all proud of.
Pop didn’t know anything about fiberglass, but that didn’t stop him from figuring it out and helping build 8 canoes. Canoes that were used for over 20 years for numerous river trips, family vacations and weekends at the lake. He helped maintain them for years so that they could be enjoyed by generations of people. Few people know the amount of time and effort that were spent on that project.
Perhaps the most important thing that Pop did, though, was that he was a true friend to many people. He was widely loved by the people in the neighborhood in which he lived. When he couldn’t look after them, they took it upon themselves to look out for him. Neighbors often mentioned how they saw him out walking, and if he ever seemed to be in trouble, someone was always there to make sure he was looked out for. It says a lot about a person when a whole community keeps an eye on them. He befriended the girls in the hair salon who said that when he started being a regular visitor that it made it feel like a real shop.
Little things matter. A good life is made up of little things. Day after day they add up. While there may not be fanfare for those who only do thousands of small acts, perhaps those are the lives that are most significant. They touch others in a positive way and leave marks that are unseen, but are passed on to others and live on long past the original act. Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things but we can do small things with great love.” In the end, isn’t doing the latter thing the key to doing the former?