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This Old Man, He Played One....

 



I actually wrote the following in April, 2009, on a fitness blog I kept up with for many years. Ironically, I can't really remember why I was feeling so dispirited. Maybe because I was facing a hysterectomy, another move . . . I can't remember. And maybe, in another 10 years, I will read THIS blog and wonder why I felt so dispirited too. I can only hope.

Inn of the Sixth Happiness

Thursday, April 02, 2009

There's an old movie called Inn of the Sixth Happiness with Ingrid Bergman. A bit hokey but I always cry at the end. She plays the role of a woman working in a mission in China when the Japanese soldiers invade her area. She has to get 100 orphaned children across the Chinese mountains to another mission where they'll be taken to safety. 100 children of all ages, little food, across mountains crawling with Japanese soldiers. 

Not surprisingly, they start to fall behind their schedule. They're following a map and she knows they're going to have a very hard time making it on time. They're cold, tired and hungry. But she keeps going on and encourages the children by singing "This old man, he played one...." Which is silly of course but sometimes maybe we need to do silly things to take our minds off our troubles. 

Meanwhile, at the other end, the leader of the other mission delays as long as possible their own evacuation, waiting for the children. I suppose you can guess how it ends--they make it. It's actually based on a true story but Hollywoodized of course. But the bones of the story are true, you can check, just Google "Gladys Aylward."

And as this movie came to mind this morning, I think it's another metaphor--I seem to be into metaphors this week--for how I and several of my friends are doing this week. We're tired. We're dispirited. Things in life seem scary [2020 update: because of the upcoming U.S. elections, COVID, fires, floods....] and we're not sure we're going to make it to where we're going. Heck, sometimes we're not even sure where we ARE going. But we said we were going to get there and there's only one way to do it--keep moving forward and keep being hopeful. 

This old man, he played one, he played nicknack on my thumb, with a nicknack paddy whack give a dog a bone, this old man came rolling home.... 

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