As Perfect As Could Be

From Victor Hansons' blog, a month ago:

Wisdom and Idiocy in Farming

I can recall, comparing great things to small, the same changing wisdom in farming: pick grapes early for a safe drying period for raisins; or pick late to ensure a sweet ripening grape for a better raisin. If September was dry and hot, then the late guys who saved their heavy sweet raisins were geniuses; but if it rained, the early pickers who at least salvaged their crops when no one else could were considered brilliant.

But some September mornings it would cloud up and threaten; then the neighbors almost hourly would praise the early pickers as visionaries. But by afternoon when the clouds blew away and the sun appeared, the same critics would blast those who had their grapes prematurely on the ground as idiots who panicked and would have “wheaties” not raisins due to their sour grapes on the tray.

I wrote about the daily changing wisdom in Fields Without Dreams, and how fickle human nature is, rather than looking at things in a tragic sense that there are no great choices, but often just bad and worse, and that wisdom is predicated mostly on the perception of success. In 1982 I picked early and thereby avoided a horrendous tropical storm that ruined the industry, saving thereby 200 tons of raisins that sold for over $1400 a ton; in 1983 I picked early again, the clouds blew away, and in weeks of perfect weather I produced lousy, sour, and light raisins, selling scarcely 140 tons for $400 and lost far more than I had made the year before. I was neither a genius the year before, nor a fool the next, but rather did the best I could in both years, recognizing that we are still subject to fate, despite our vaunted technology and knowledge. I am not advising helplessness, simply some recognition that the verdict is out on Iraq, and what looks bad today, might look far better very soon—and that erstwhile supporters turned vehement critics might well reinvent themselves a third time.

The field of choices from which we much chose, everyday, in order to live our lives are rarely ever crucial or great. They're generally found in the mundane and pointless. We make them big, but they are not of themselves. Only after the fact do they become the stuff of stories or legends we tell others, or others tell still others.