Daily Grist; “No nation can be great unless its sons and daughters have in them the quality to rise level to the needs of heroic days.”–Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, October 1918
I have a shaving mug that one time was a real fancy china cup. It is embellished with a rose vine with five lovely roses on it. At one time I am sure it was the pride and joy of a gold prospector’s wife, probably the fanciest piece of dinnerware that graced their table. It has definitely seen better days, just like me. About a week ago a large crack manifested itself and a huge piece of it fell out one side of it. My son put it back together with some of the space-age glue that will glue anything together. As I sat there watching him putting it back together, I got to thinking of how my life parallels that of my shaving mug. 52 years ago while quail hunting in the hills of Calaveras County, I came upon an old prospector shack in a deep dark heavily wooded canyon. You could walk within 100 yards of it and not know the little cabin was there, and my finding it was purely chance. At one time it was a fairly substantial cabin because it had three rooms in it, a kitchen, living room, bedroom. By the construction of it I could tell it was close to 100 years old at the time. The only reason it was still standing was it had a metal roof, was waterproof to a point, which kept it from rotting to pieces. The wood plank floors were still fairly sound, but the inside of it was filled with trash and packrat nests. Pieces of broken furniture littered the floors along with rusty cans, jars, rusty stovepipe, a couple of old were out shovels and junk like that. Laying in the corner in a pile of trash was a china cup. I picked it up, wiped it off, and thought to myself by golly that’ll make a nice shaving mug, so I put in my hunting bag and when I got home I washed it up real good. It still had its handle on it then, but it had a crack in the lower part of the handle and a couple of years later it broke off, and it’s been that way ever since. There are four or five large chips around the perimeter of the bottom, and one large chip in the upper lip from which said crack emanated causing a large piece of it to fall off a couple of weeks ago.
The more I look at that cup the more I can see myself. In the last 78 years, at my last count, I have went through 18 major surgical procedures. You talk about getting chipped up! The most recent one was last March when I had my gallbladder out only to have major surgery a month later to have gallstones removed from my bile duct. In my lifetime I have been shot, knifed, and hit by a car but nothing ever hurt me like that damn gallbladder operation. I look at my chipped up shaving mug and say to it; old buddy I know just how you feel. Every morning when I take my shaving cup out of the cabinet I try and focus on the garland of roses encircling it, and not look at the major chips and cracks, then I look at that wrinkled old face staring at me in the mirror, and there goes the roses ! To be honest with you folks, I don’t know how many more years they can keep putting as both back together with this miracle space-age glue they have nowadays. I have never been back to that little cabin where I found this shaving cup that I have been using for 52 years. I don’t know if I could find it anymore because the country has grown up so much and there are houses everywhere now. It was probably torn down years ago to make room for a horse corral on a 5 acre”country estate”as they call them nowadays. I would like to think that the old cabin is still there hidden away from the world in that dark wooded canyon. If I knew that to be a fact, when my earthly need to use a shaving cup ends, I would have my son put the old cup back in the corner where I found it, lo these 52 years ago.
