Author: Sharron Burnett

From time to time I have written about real people that I have known. Sometimes it’s an essay on a former student who has accomplished something grand. Other times I recall the lives of friends and family members who have died. I always enjoy celebrating my grandchildren and boasting of their accomplishments as well. I find it easier to compose blogs about individuals I have known than to editorialize or attempt humor. There is literally nothing more interesting to me than my fellow humans. 

If I were to actually write a biography of someone, it would be a person with whom I have interacted, an ordinary soul. I’ll leave the rich and famous to more professional authors. I love stories about the guy next door, the woman down the street, the co-worker or the long time friend. There are so many wonderful individuals in the world who are nameless, whose stories are worth hearing, but never are. 

When I was still a college student a professor asked everyone in our class to write an essay about someone that we knew who seemed to have an interesting background. I chose my husband Mike’s best friend, Egon Osterloh. Mike and Egon had met each other at the University of Houston through Egon’s uncle Dr. S. Henry Monsen, a professor of Sociology. Egon had come from Bremen, Germany to study and knew few people at the time, so he and Mike struck up a friendship very quickly. 

I learned that Egon was the son of a German father and Norwegian mother. His father had been a soldier with the German army when they occupied Norway, and that is when he met his future bride. After the war they settled in Bremen and had one child. Egon told us that his birth city had been battered by bombs during the war. He shared tales of playing in the concrete and brick rubble of the buildings. Since healthy food was sometimes scarce he developed scurvy like many other German children in his town. Eventually things got sorted out and he went to school where his teachers discovered that he was an exceptional student. He went to the Gymnasium which was a college bound learning track. After fulfilling his obligatory military service he enrolled at the University of Houston so that he might have a place to stay with his uncle and benefit from his guidance. 

I wrote about Egon in greater detail for my assignment. I only knew of his story up to that that time when he was still quite young. My professor was fascinated by his story and urged me to find someone who might be interested in publishing the brief bio. I was too busy and lacking in contacts to follow through on his suggestion, but I agree that Egon’s story and that of his parents was truly the stuff of a Hollywood screenplay. The rest of his life would be no less so. He would indeed be worthy of a long biography, but then who would be curious enough to pick up a copy of a book about an unknown?

A few years back I took a course at Rice University that was designed to help fledging writers learn how to publish and sell their work. In many ways the class was more discouraging than helpful. The teacher admitted that the world of writing had changed drastically over time. She bemoaned the reality that publishing houses were dying. She further complained that the easiest route to getting a company to accept a book idea was to already be famous. She insisted that the days of a writer being discovered and introduced to the public were all but gone. So we find ourselves in the world of self publishing and blogging and self promoting. 

I have been blessed in knowing some of the most remarkable people. I can think of several of my friends and acquaintances who who be excellent subjects for biographies that would be exceedingly thought provoking. I’ve even considered writing a collection of short essays about some of the more interesting people that I have known. The world is filled with stories that inspire and some that demonstrate the sadness of a life gone wrong. We can learn from any of them. 

I’d like to write more often about people rather than ideas. We humans are after all at the heart of everything. Each of us is unique and so our views of the world vary in individual ways that make even the seemingly most ordinary among us interesting. 

I suppose I’ve been quietly watching people for all of my life. My mother used to chide me for staring at the folks that I observed wherever I went. I have always been fascinated by our humanity and I have watched and learned from it. Some of my most favorite essays have been from Humans of New York, little snippets of life as it really is. Perhaps one day I’ll do something similar to showcase the amazing people who have passed my way. 

The Lord of the Rings series of books is an epic fantasy adventure. More than anything it is a study of our very humanity, the traits that make us heroes and those that turn us into villains. For me its importance lies in acknowledging that no single person is perfect, and our propensity for violence and evil is often only a single emotional outburst away. Nonetheless if individuals are determined, loyal and brave they might overcome the flaws in their personalities and accomplish great things. Our journey to do this will be complex and wrought with failures, but if people persist in doing what they believe to be right, ultimately good will conquer wickedness.

Frodo Baggins is the unlikeliest of heroes. He is a tiny man who questions himself continually and often misjudges the people around him, thus making critical mistakes that lengthen his hero’s journey. In spite of his many setbacks, he understands the gravity of his responsibility for carrying the ring to Middle Earth and continues the quest even when he would rather give up. Samwise Gamgee seems to be the wrong choice for a champion on such a dangerous mission and yet it is his folksy wisdom and unrelenting loyalty that pushes Frodo forward. Without Samwise it is doubtful that Frodo would have been successful in his endeavor. Sam seems always ready to set Frodo back on the right path. 

Gandolf is a powerful, mystical figure who sacrifices himself for the fellowship by literally laying down his own life so that the others may continue the journey. He returns as the White Wizard, as a kind of resurrection figure. A host of other quite different individuals support Frodo’s cause as well for the sake of humankind. From Aragorn to Legolas to Gimli. They too falter from one moment to the next in a world turned upside down, ultimately coming together in spite of the cultural and geographical divergences that might have generally separated them from one another. They represent the ability of humanity to join forces for a common good, but also the human tendencies to disagree with one another as they attempt to fight their battles with evil. They must overcome petty differences, jealousies and questions about what is really the best path to follow. This requires trust and forgiveness even when grave blunders result in setbacks and death.

J.R.R. Tolkien was a very religious man so his saga has overtones of spirituality, but his main intent was to tell a story of courage in spite of our human failings. He wants us to know that no great accomplishment is ever achieved without setbacks, strong supports and determination. We would do well to understand the tale not just as an exciting adventure, but also as a guidepost for living. It is important for us to understand that fellowship is more important than corrupt power. It may seem overwhelming when evil stalks us, but if we are willing to make sacrifices, be honorable, avoid jealousies and remain loyal to each other for the common good we will overcome even the most horrific situations. Frodo reminds us that sometimes the most unlikely among us is called upon to do very difficult things.

I suppose that all of history demonstrates the truth of Tolkien’s analysis of human kind through the lens of his epic story. We are at our best when we attempt to work together, to make sacrifices, to forgive blunders, to accept responsibility, to remain loyal. Sadly we also have strong proclivities toward just the opposite. We become obsessed with our own personal concerns, seek power no matter how it hurts others, allow envy to rule our decisions, are unwilling to compromise. We spend more time lamenting mistakes and placing blame than getting things done. Ultimately our pride leaves us in a state of chaos. 

I suppose that it is a Herculean task to bring together the many facets of the world. Nobody has ever been successful at achieving that. These days it’s difficult to find any place on earth where all of the citizens in a particular locale get along.  When challenges occur we spend so much time disagreeing and seemingly less working together. We are often reluctant to make sacrifices or to admit that sometimes blunders are simply a sign of at least trying something. We should use them to learn, not to bring down those making an effort. We never know how we would react in the same situation, so playing the blame game is a wasted effort. 

The saga of humankind did not end with the return of the ring to Middle Earth. It has continued for all of time. Somehow we seem to repeat our mistakes over and over again. Perhaps it is because not a single one of us is perfect. Maybe we need to learn to sacrifice like Gandolf, be brave like Aragorn, and be wise and loyal to each other like Samwise. It certainly would be a better situation than what is so prevalent now.   

I know that it is not quite officially fall yet, but because it is my favorite season of the year I always rush it just a bit. I start decorating my home with pumpkins and wreaths and lots of fall colors as soon as September arrives. I light the candles that bring scents of spice and apples into my home. I enjoy the slightly cooler days and the shorter hours of daylight. September is the herald of things and people that I most love. 

When I was only five years old I used to accompany my mom and dad on visits my grandparents every Sunday afternoon. Often my grandfather would be raking leaves from the yard when we arrived while my grandmother was in her kitchen cooking a bountifully dinner for all of us. Since she was busy in the kitchen Grandpa shoveled those leaves into a ditch that ran between his yard and the street. This was the drainage system back then, a way of collecting and removing water before underground sewers were built in neighborhoods. I always stayed outside to watch him do his work, but my parents went inside the house. As the pile grew Grandpa would mischievously ask me if I wanted to jump into the accumulation of green and brown and yellow fronds. Diving into them was like landing in the middle of a forest. I would be surrounded by a soft bed of many colors with a fragrance that was delightful. Besides, it was just plain fun and a secret that me and Grandpa never revealed lest the other adults chastise us and tell us not to do that again. 

I repeated the process multiple times and them Grandpa would remove all evidence of my escapade from my hair and my clothing. Then he would light the vegetation and burn it. I’m not sure how environmentally good or bad that was, but I am certain that the aroma of those leaves was incredibly nice. Often there would be other neighbors performing the same task and so there would be little fires filling the air with a smoky perfume. The people called out from next door or across the street to say hello to me and my grandfather or to ask how the family was doing. It felt quite special and made me proud that so many folks seemed to really like my grandfather. 

Eventually Grandma would finish her cooking and call us inside. We’d gather around her big mahogany table and devour her dishes while talking and laughing. She was a remarkable cook. Everything she made tasted so good. I still compare her dishes to those of others and few have ever seemed better than hers. We’d follow up our dinner with homemade pie or strawberry shortcake and then retire to the living room to talk some more.

I don’t know why those visits in the fall were my favorite. The summers were always so hot that we rarely ventured beyond the cooling breezes of the big box fan on the front porch. The winters were cold and kept us inside. In the spring everything was blooming again but there was no work to do like gathering leaves, and so in every season besides fall the special moments of fun with Grandpa were fewer and less exciting than when I got to jump into a bed of leaves. 

So many good things seem to happen to me in the fall or the weeks leading up to it. My father and my husband and my first grandchild were all born in September. October celebrates four of my grandchildren and a nephew and one of my very dearest friends. It is also the month of my wedding anniversary. The Houston Garden Club Bulb and Plant Mart and Halloween are regulars on my October calendar and the weather really begins to bring the kind of chill that I prefer over the usual tropical warmth where I live. In November I celebrate my birthday and treat myself to a slice of pumpkin cheesecake. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days of the year. Through it all I often think of being five years old again and playing in the leaves while my grandfather laughed at my antics.

Grandpa was generally a serious man. He certainly liked to laugh and tell a tall tale or two but he rarely behaved in the impish way that he did on the fall days of leaf burning. I suspect that he left his weekly task for Sundays because he knew that I was coming and he wanted to be ready for our little game. From the joy on his face I would surmise that he relished it as much as I always did. I wish I had thought to one day tell him how much those times had meant to me.

There is a meme that explains signs of love that are sometimes more powerful that voicing the words. Someone calling to make sure that one got home safely is surely a clear indication of love. Grandpa creating that sweet little moment for me was his way of letting me know how much he cared. 

I don’t recall my grandfather ever actually saying that he loved me, but he didn’t have to do so because I understood from everything he did for more that his love was deep. It’s funny how we remember the times when people made us feel special, no matter how young we may have been when they happened. Grandpa would become a source of wisdom and comfort for me over time, but more than anything else I’d still love to be next to him while he raked the hundreds of leaves that covered his yard and then see the grin on his face as he dared me to dive right into the middle of the pile. I still hear his laughter and feel his love.

Cartoon programs became popular when I was a child. I grew up in the early days of television and by the time I was seven or eight years old there there a slew of shows aimed at kids, many were cartoons. My favorite had to be Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. The show was rather irreverent and satirical, but I preferred that sort of humor even when I was young. I tended to prefer Goofy over Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny over Donald Duck, the Roadrunner over Mighty Mouse. Still, I sometimes think that I grew up during the heyday of cartoon shows, including The Flintstones and The Jetsons. Those Hanna-Barbera atrocities that were all the rage when my daughters were little were just plain silly and uncreative as far as I was concerned. Not even the most popular of them all, Scooby Doo, had any attraction for me. It would be years before I would find a cartoon that I thought was comparable in quality of writing to the best of my era. That’s when I found Dexter’ Laboratory on the cartoon network.

Dexter was a boy genius even from the time he was a baby. His hero was Albert Einstein and he had created a hidden laboratory behind a bookcase in his home that even his parent’s did not discover. There he created various inventions but was often foiled by his sister Dee Dee and his villainous rival Mandark. I enjoyed the cleverness of the stories and the snappy dialogue. They reminded me of the old Rocky cartoons that I so loved. 

I’d love to see Dexter attempting to save the world from Covid 19. It would be fun to create a story in which he toils away in his lab ultimately finding a 100% effective cure for the virus. Of course the plot would include derailment of his plans along the way by his nosy sister and the jealousy of Mandark. In the end, inspired by Albert Einstein, Dexter would persist until one day he unlocked every secret of the virus including how it began and how to prevent it from ever again harming anyone. Isn’t that how the fantasy of cartoons is supposed to work? Someone always comes to save the day. 

My nephews are volunteers in a drug trial for children under the age of twelve. One of them told his brothers that they are lucky to be the heroes who will help to save the children of the world. That statement is not hyperbole at all. It will take lots of children like him to test the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. When it finally becomes available for widespread use in the coming months, it will have been youngsters like my nephews who helped to save so many children. 

We think of youngsters as being unaware of the world around them when many if not most of them are actually rather precocious like Dexter. They have an understanding of what is happening around them even if no adults are taking the time to talk to them or to realize what is on their minds. How much better it would be if every parent took the time to respect their children by engaging them in age appropriate discussions about what they may be seeing in the world. 

I love my Uncle Bob because when I discovered that one of his legs had been amputated he very honestly told me about his cancer. He explained why the doctor had to remove part of his leg. He did not lie when I asked him if he would be okay forevermore since the offending cancer had been removed. When he died I was only five, so nobody spoke to me about the details of his passing. Instead they whispered behind closed doors. They did not know that I was only okay because my favorite uncle had taken the time to answer my questions with great care. Even at a very young age I needed to have a tiny dose of honesty delivered in a very loving way. He gave me that precious gift.

When my father died three years late well-meaning adults tiptoed around me as though I might not even notice that he was gone. They tried to spare me from discussions about how my father had died. It was left to my best friend Lynda to give me all of the details that she had heard from her mother. It was Lynda who went to my father’s funeral and told me who was there and what had been said. I appreciated her for understanding that I needed to know those things. There was no way that my feelings could be spared. I was already devastated.

We underestimate children just as Dexter’s parents did with him in that cartoon. They were literally clueless that he was creating so many marvelous things. While his story was farfetched, real children are much more aware than we often believe. They need to talk about what they are seeing and hearing and fearing. A wise parent finds ways to settle their minds by allowing them to ask questions and then giving them real answers, not those that hide the truth. 

So much is happening right now. Children can feel the anxiety in their homes even if nothing is discussed in front of them. They hear things from other children that frighten them. Maybe they do not even know how to tell the adults about their concerns. A daily inquiry into what may be worrying them can really help. There is no telling what may be bearing on their little minds. I remember that I used to be stressed that my mother would die and I would be an orphan. I never told anyone about that, but I created a plan in my mind that brought me comfort because I believed that my Aunt Valeria would adopt me. 

Take time to really talk with your children. Be gentle. Allow them to express their feelings. When the fears surface handle them with honesty and reassurance. Children are watching and internalizing the anxieties and even the anger that is so prevalent today. Talk to them. They need for someone to hear what they have to say.

I have a friend whose precious little boy has a thing for watching soccer games and enjoying anything related to dinosaurs. He’s got dinosaur shirts, toys, books and games. He loves visiting museums that house dinosaur bones and replicas. At four years old he has more knowledge of dinosaurs than most adults. 

I suppose that dinosaurs have fascinated humans for centuries. It’s almost impossible to imagine how massive they were and what it was like when they roamed the earth. One of the greatest mysteries of all time is why they seemed to so suddenly disappear. I’ve heard all sorts of theories for what contributed to their demise. Some hypothesize that they might have developed some kind of virus or that a gigantic asteroid hit the earth causing a kind of cataclysm. Others suggest that there was a protracted drought or conversely a dramatic freeze. Whatever it was, they left forever but evidence that they were here has been found across the globe. I suppose that their ultimate extinction makes them even more fascinating

I often wonder if it would have been possible for dinosaurs and people to coexist. Of course the movie Jurassic Park makes that seem unlikely. Having those massive creatures around would most certainly have had a profound effect on our own evolution and development of civilization. How would we have kept them at bay given their often enormous sizes and, in some cases, violent natures? Even the fittest humans would have had to be quite innovative to survive around those creatures.

We tend to take our tenure on this earth for granted as though it is a given, and yet the story of the dinosaur demonstrates that even such grand specimens are not immune to extinction. Our advantage is our ability to think, but unfortunately we do not always use that special gift of brain power as well as we should. Our intelligence has made us seemingly the masters of the planet. We have a kind of dominion over all the other creatures. We have even learned how to tackle tiny microbes that create disease, but we have weaknesses that could lead us to the same kind fate as the dinosaurs. 

The state of the world as this moment is revealing many of the flaws of our human responses. We are often tribal when we should be united instead. We fall prey to ignorance, pettiness, jealousies that lead us to disagreements and violence. We often abuse our planet and each other without thinking much about the ultimate consequences of our actions. We are much more intricate, interesting and incredible than the dinosaurs with their tiny brains and inability to think about changing in order to survive. Still, we sometimes act as though we are not any more intelligent than the giant reptiles who succumbed to whatever disaster made them extinct. We have to realize that many of our destructive tendencies have the potential of destroying us. Luckily there are always seem to be enough humans thinking ahead to keep themselves and most of the rest of us alive and well on this planet, but we have to be willing to listen to what they have to say.

I’m not much of a scientist myself, but I have great regard for those who are. While we humans need our arts, our literature and our music, it is within the realm of science, medicine and engineering that we will find our way out of the challenges that are seemingly overtaking us. We will get past the current pandemic because of science. We will solve the problems of climate change with the knowledge and innovations of researchers and engineers. Those of us who are not on the forefront of inventiveness must help each cause with a willingness to change our ways as needed. If we simply lumber along obliviously eating and sleeping and not allowing our intellect to guide us, we are ultimately doomed as a species. If we keep wasting our energies fighting rather than working our way out of our troubles then the future looks dark and difficult.

We have a tendency to blame individuals for our woes when in truth we are the culprits who are undermining the efforts of those who have the knowledge to guide us away from harm. We’d rather quibble and boast than do the heavy lifting that our current situation requires. It’s easy to call a world famous virologist “Dr Doom” because he tells us truths about Covid-19 that we do not want to hear, but we are unwilling to do a simple thing like wearing a mask to protect ourselves and others. We will smoke and drink and desecrate our environment and then worry that the vaccines that have been developed to help us are putting poisons into our bodies. We waste our earth’s resources without thought of the future. We do not alway use the brains that have brought humankind this far, but when we look back through history it should be clear that our hubris has all too often led us to the brink of destruction.

Dinosaurs are our teachers. We my not ever know exactly what happened to them, but we do realize that it had to be bad. We must learn from them that life on this earth can be uncertain. The world changes and we must be swift and flexible enough to adapt. Wishing for the past, building fences around ourselves and ignoring the truth of data is not the answer. We have to do better than that.