Tina Lewis Rowe

“Normal Day” Was Written By Mary Jean Irion

“Normal day, let me be aware
of the treasure you are.”
Mary Jean Irion wrote that!

You are about to discover that I’m on a mission! There is a well-known quotation–usually incorrectly identified as a poem–that has meant a great deal to me. It has meant even more as sad, painful, frustrating and frightening things have happened in my life.

You may have seen the quotation too. It begins….”Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are.”  It’s the second of two paragraphs at the conclusion of a two page essay. It reminds us that at some point in our lives we may yearn for a mundane, typical, normal day–with its usual frustrations and irritations–to take the place of the painful, tragic or anquishing day we are experiencing.

Here is where my mission comes in: Almost always those lines are attributed to Mary Jean Iron. Hundreds and hundreds of sites have that attribution. I was interested in Ms. Iron, because I wanted to read the excerpt in context. That is when I discovered that there is no Ms. Iron. There is Mary Jean Irion (Ear-e-yon), who, as near as I have been able to research, wrote it in the late 1960s. After it was published in McCalls magazine she included it in a book of essays published in 1970: Yes, World. A Mosaic of Meditation.

Ms. Irion lives in Pennsylvania, wrote for The United Church Herald and was a teacher of English Literature at the Lancaster Country Day School–I think she’s still writing!

She may not care that her name is misspelled on sites that use this quote–in fact I’m sure she doesn’t, given her expressed philosophies. But, I’m on a mission to get her correctly attributed. So far I have contacted 116 sites and asked them to correct it. Most have. I’ll recontact the others and keep going. There have been some interesting results to my contacts and maybe I’ll share those sometime. 

Read Mary Jean Irion’s wonderful prose, straight from the book. It’s the conclusion of thoughts about her day, which had both good and bad elements–a normal day.

If you see it incorrectly attributed, let the website know that the correct author is Mary Jean Irion, in the essay, “Let Me Hold You While I May”, in the book, “Yes, World. A Mosaic of Meditation”, published in 1970 by Richard Baron Publishing. And it’s on page 53.

April 23rd, 2012 Posted by TLR | Life and Work | 6 comments

Share Some Memories

This was a romance magazine from about 1968. I was reminded of it when I was describing to a class for new police sergeants, the way Denver looked on a weekend afternoon in the late 1960s. I said the area from City Hall to the Colorado Capitol building was “wall-to-wall Hippies.” One of the younger people in the class laughed and said, “Oooh, you mean Beatniks or Peaceniks or just Long-Hairs?” Several held up their fingers in the “peace” sign and swayed back and forth.  They were just joking and I realized that since they were nearly all born after 1985, the term sounded antiquated.

I think I called them Rat-Finks and Young Whippersnappers. But for just a moment I wished there was someone in the class who had shared that memory of Denver with me.

When my Dad was in his final days he talked about family members who had passed away, many of them decades before. He said, wistfully, “All the people I could talk to about times when I was younger have been gone for years.” I knew how he felt, but have come to understand it more every year since then.

That is probably one of the biggest values of reunions (both high school and family), retiree associations, and casual get-togethers with those we used to work with. Sure, some of the memories are a bit (or a lot) exaggerated, but at least it brings back shared times and reminds us of the way we were, individually and together. Even if you’re not so very old, there are times past that won’t come again and that are fun or interesting to recall with someone who was there.

This week, send an email, make a phone call or go visit someone who might enjoy remembering some the of the things you remember. Pick a time or situation and start the old-fashioned way: “Do you remember when…..?”

April 9th, 2012 Posted by TLR | Life and Work, Personal and Professional Development | 11 comments