Priorities

Every time we meet for lunch he sits with his back against the wall facing the crowd. He must’ve been ambushed when he was a younger man. I’m late and he’s early. He carries an internal clock like the crock from Peter Pan.

It’s Monday and I’m breaking bread with the blue-eyed Cherokee.

There’s no telling where the conversation will wander off to. One week we’re Don Quixote and Sancho Panza slaying windmills and dreaming impossible dreams. The next, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. The next, two old cats stuck in the 60’s. He’s already ordered my diet Coke and I sit down where it’s sweating. He asks how I’m doing and I tell him things are going pretty well, but that I’m having some trouble juggling things. Keeping them in the right order.

Ever read your own writings, Doc?” he asks me. “You wrote something about priorities a while back.”

“What did I say?”

“Not enough,” he says. “You didn’t go far enough.”

“Life is a box,” he says, “with all different size holes in the top and a peg that fits every hole. The trick is getting the right peg in the right hole. The trouble starts when you try to put small pegs in the big holes.” (I’m trying to listen but one thought keeps going through my mind: “I didn’t go far enough?!”)

“So what do you do,” he asks, “when your little box gets a hard shaking and all the pegs fall out?”

“I put them all back in.”

“No,” he says. “You find the biggest peg and put it in the biggest hole. That’s the first thing you do. Then, find the next biggest peg and put it in the next biggest hole.”

“That’s it?” I ask

“That’s it,” he says.

“What’s the biggest peg,” I ask.

“That’s what you left out,” he tells me.

“God?”

“The biggest peg in the biggest hole,” he says. “Whatever that is for you. That’s where you start.”