Alex Mulcahy

My daughter lay in bed, her dark green cast propped on a stack of pillows. “This sucks,” she said. As a rule I discourage the use of the word “sucks,” an artifact of how I was raised. But after reviewing the facts — injured on the last play of the last game of the season, four days before a summer vacation that’s suddenly without swimming or circus camp — I had to admit she was right. “Yes,” I said, “this sucks.” In addition to the pain, she had to process the grief of the loss of summer plans.

Some people turn to the ocean for philosophical reflection. The vastness, the rhythm of crashing waves — it gets the mind pondering. But for me, farms teach the same lesson on a more human scale. On a farm, a particular crop may only be around for a few weeks or months. You have a limited window to enjoy what the world offers. Gather ye blueberries while ye may.

Donald Rumsfeld famously, or maybe infamously, once said, “[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” Rumsfeld was truly the Yogi Berra of statesmen, capable of saying something so convoluted it starts to make sense.