The Drive to Make a Difference

This has been a wild week. My parents, who are 74, landed in the emergency room after a freak accident. Mom has a broken hip, and is still in the hospital, awaiting a transfer to a rehabilitation facility. Dad has returned home, which presents its own problems. In the days since the accident, I’ve been facing questions about their future health and safety, and, of course, mortality. While going through their closets, looking for clothes to take to them for their stay in the hospital, I had an epiphany, a sort of déjà vu-in-reverse experience. I was struck with the realization that I would be going through that closet again one day, when they have left the house for the last time.

Those thoughts echoed with an entry in the book I’m reading, New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, edited by Teresa Carpenter. The book is a collection of diary entries from New Yorkers famous, infamous, and unknown, and from visitors who recorded their observations while passing through the Big Apple. It’s organized by calendar date, so today, May 27^th, has entries from 1844, 1925, and 1972, for example. I’m enjoying the book on the whole, though its organizational approach presents some interesting challenges. Reading it cover to cover, as I am, one sees little vignettes played out over days, when a diarist is included for several days in a row. For example, Gouverneur Morris records his response to the killing of Alexander Hamilton in a series of diary entries from July, 1804. These entries are interspersed with others made during the same week of July, ranging from 1776 to 1885, which, of course, have nothing to do with the duel between Burr and Hamilton. Much of the time, however, there is no narrative thread connecting one day to the next, as the diary entries included jump from century to century. At times, this lack of a narrative thread is mildly irritating, but it’s a natural consequence of the clever organization structure.

The entry that jumped out at me this week is from George Templeton Strong, a well-to-do lawyer whose contributions included in the book range from 1835 to 1875. His diary entry from July 7, 1851, struck a chord with my thoughts on mortality, morality, and the way that we all want to live a life of consequence. In that entry, he commented, with a mixture of revulsion and pity, upon gangs of young girls that could be found in parts of the city, and the terrible lives that they were forced to live in order to provide for themselves.

His final sentence, quoted below, is a beautiful appeal to himself to remember his urge to live a life of significance.

“But if Heaven will permit and enable me, I’ll do something before I die—to have helped one dirty vagabond child out of such a pestilential stink would be a thing one would not regret when one came to march out of this world…and would be rather more of an achievement than the writing [of] another Iliad.”