The Wheel
Long ago, my father made an insightful observation. This was back in the days when everyone was reading newspapers. He noticed that we start out in life reading the comics pages … then we eventually move on to the sports section … later on, it's the business section … and finally, when we've reached a certain age, we start reading the obituary section to see if any of our old acquaintances have died.
This observation from my father is something that's always stayed in my mind.
My Dad was equating newspaper readership with the cycle of life: the wheel that turns from the day we’re born until the day we die.
His words have certainly held true in my case.
As a kid, I headed straight for the comics pages where I read Peanuts, Nancy and the rest of my favorite cartoons. By 5th grade, I was hungry for the sports pages where I cut out pictures from Buffalo Bills football games to paste in my scrapbook. After college, I worked in an advertising agency and I started combing through the business section for news about our industry.
Now that I’m older and retired, I’m still following the pattern as my Dad described it. Every now and then, I find myself thinking about an old friend or colleague I haven’t seen in years. This leads to an online search, which all too often takes me to an obituary.
But here’s the beautiful thing about it: Like every wheel, the circle of life comes around fully and we can find ourselves right back where we started. So while I’m now checking obituaries – the last stop in my father's tale of newspaper readership – I’ve also returned to the comics in a joyful new way.
I've introduced our older granddaughter to the Peanuts comic strip – the same cartoon that captivated me as a child. She fell in love with the antics of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, just as I did, and we began reading classic Peanuts books together. She also got a kick out of Calvin and Hobbes, which is a comic strip I would read with our son Ben when he was little.
It’s not surprising that the circle is such a commonly used religious symbol, seen everywhere from Celtic crosses to Native American Sacred Hoops to the Buddhist Wheel of Life and Zen enso brushstrokes. The circle, with its perfect closure, represents eternity and wholeness, that which has no beginning and no end.
From one section of the newspaper to another, from youth to old age, from one generation to the next, the wheel never stops turning.
Photographer's Footnote: The featured photo shows the interior of an old barn which was built in the late 1800s or early 1900s in Matthews, North Carolina.
