Blog Entry 5: Freestyle

I love watching the old black and white TV shows like Andy Griffith and I Love Lucy. I draw amusement from each episode as mundane lifestyles lead to unsuspected conflict, and sometimes mayhem, in order to effectively entertain the audience. In Andy Griffith's Mayberry, life is simple but stagnant. Not much happens on a day-to-day basis. Lucy is also faced with an uneventful lifestyle while cooped up in a high rise apartment building in a large city with nothing to do but brew up regular mischief. Often the characters in these shows create overblown drama resulting from inconsequential isolated interruptions in their otherwise humdrum life.

I found that a strikingly similar scenario played out in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Tale for Children. A small village of no more than twenty houses with very little space between neighbors encountered a dramatic sequence of events when a dead man’s body washed up on the shore one day. As the women prepared the body of the stranger for burial, they began to speculate as to the life this large good-looking man must have lead. They needed a hero of the mind who would rescue them from their uneventful existence, if only in their wildest imaginations. This man seemed to do the trick. They even named him "Esteban." The stranger with his mysterious appearance, unlike any of the others, became a threat to the men of the village as the women invented an exciting former life for Esteban, filled with supposed immeasurable importance and stature. Their obsession with the stranger began to drive a wedge between the women and their husbands. “They secretly compared him to their own men, thinking that for all their lives theirs were incapable of doing what he could do in one night, and they ended up dismissing them deep in their hearts as the weakest, meanest, and most useless creatures on earth.” (Marquez; p. 331)

When we live with someone and our lifestyle becomes a day in and day out event, we tend to overlook our initial attraction to these life-long choices. The old adage, “the grass is always greener…” becomes commonplace with some. People tend to search for a break in monotony by creating unrealistic comparisons while drawing upon new and exciting prospects. I suppose it is human nature to invite excitement in life when boredom rears its ugly head. Perhaps we should attempt to spice up our lives at such a point by discovering productive ways to give validity to our original commitments. Re-visit the excitement of the past! Although we enjoy humor in the obviously overblown scenarios played out in our favorite shows and stories, we should seek satisfaction in learning from these characters rather than mimicking their destructive behavior in real life.