Illusions

I truly appreciate my patients who tell me to stay in Guymon because they fear for my safety and they don't want me to get disillusioned with the ugliest face that politics can bare and believe me, it is so easy and so simple to become beguiled with this picture while you are in the panhandle of Oklahoma that is so unseasonably verdant.

They tell me to do it for my kids, so they might have the proper vaccinations, top-notch orthodontic care, Ivy-league schooling. They tell me to do it for myself so I can spend as much time with my wife and play all the golf I want at the pride of G-town, the 18 hole municipal golf course.

Partly out of jet lag I have spent the previous two nights thinking and thinking. So many reasons, all of them right but this is when I recall Pico Iyer's "The Lady and the Monk" "... I had often thought that the mind was, quite literally, a devil's advocate, an agent of diabolical sophistry that could argue any point and its opposite with equal conviction; an imp that delighted in self-contradiction and yet, though full of sound and fury, ultimately signified nothing. None of the truest things in life - like love or faith - was arrived at by thinking; indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder"