Weary Pilgrim – Our Own Game of Thrones

Well, this has been the season of disasters – the summer didn’t start till August, for one thing…..although it was pretty great after that…..but I felt a little cheated….

On the other hand, we don’t live near Houston… or Florida….so we got off pretty lightly according to the evening news….

If you are a fan of Game of Thrones, it’s impossible not to see our lives as a reflections of that iconic series…..the good guys rarely win, we are up against it every turn, and the only thing that they have we don’t have, of importance, appears to be dragons…

First of all, winter is coming……I swear to you, God hits the universal thermostat on September 1 – the nights get cool, you start thinking about your wood supply, and you find yourself actually reading the LLBean catalog, in case somebody invented a better fleece…

So it’s tough to keep count of the places where folks are in a jam…never mind the rest of the world, I’m talking right here in the USA…..Harvey in Houston, Irma in Florida, wild fires in California……for all I know, it’s raining frogs in Nevada….

But here in New England, all is well. September is the best month of the year….warm and dry days, cool nights…..it’s like the ultimate weather credit card: enjoy now, pay later…..

Want to feel good about our country? Check out the reaction to our latest natural disasters……the preparation, the initial response, the follow-through, …..the whole darn thing, was, and is, terrific …..did you know, there are people from this town down there helping out? No country in the world does this response like we do on every level, from the national FEMA response to the state response to the local First Responders to the guys in the neighborhood with rowboats and ropes……we learned a lot from 9/11, and from Katrina….and it shows today…Man, is this a great country, or what?……

Let me tell you a story: back on the 70’s there was a terrible flood in Wilkes-Barre , PA…shortly thereafter, I was in the neighborhood, and my parents asked me to check on friends of theirs in the flooded area….I drove through a kind-of war zone – there were military personnel everywhere….. there was a flood line through the city – a mud-line, if you will: above it, all was normal, and below it, all was brown…….when I got to the house of my family’s friends, I observed the same line.

Inside, there was a line of brown mud that reached to about 6 inches below the first floor ceiling…from there down, all was brown – no nothing…the outlets on the wall were gone – there were wires hanging out of every former outlet…..their grand piano had gone out the front door along with their furniture…Walking up to their second floor, I turned on their landing, and ahead of me was a perfectly maintained house, just chock-a-block with furniture – they had saved what they could…….

In Florida, pretty much nobody has a second floor. Their mud-line reaches from their heels to their forehead….in other words, through their very homes, their very lives….they must dig out from the bottom up – their possessions, their furniture, their everything…gone.

In New England, we do worry about these things…..hurricanes, blizzards, Nor’Easters….but we always have warnings, and we rarely lose power…the other day, there was flurry of activity on Facebook over the loss of power in Marblehead for a few seconds….it’s difficult to put this into perspective, but for us, this was note-worthy…..imagine days and days of this loss of power……actually, I can’t ……

So trust me, we are all in our own version of Westeros (back to Game of Thrones)……a world of faith and hope, fear, and endless struggle…In Game of Thrones, the demons are called White -Walkers - in our Game , we have climate change and North Korea….things to worry about, rally against,….and survive.

My personal problem is that, in my Westeros. …I am the dwarf, and all the women are fully clothed.