"I Just Might Be In There."

We had a wedding in our family over the past weekend.  Our older son married his long-time friend and fiancé.  We traveled to the Kansas City area on Thursday, and spent most of Thursday afternoon and Friday helping finish up the arrangements.

We were in the Shawnee area of the Kansas City metro area, and the wedding was just east of the little bedroom community of Basehor.  We had two churches involved in the planning and the event; the 151^st Street Church of Christ, which was our son’s background, and the Risen Savior Lutheran Church at Basehor, which was the bride’s background.

I don’t know how many cities I traveled in or through during my time there.  I lost count at eight.  There was Olathe, Shawnee, Overland Park, Basehor, Kansas City, and several others.  And as you may well know, it’s virtually impossible to know with any certainty, unless you just know, which city you are in at the moment.  They all run together in that area, and unlike Eastborough and Wichita, there is no defining physical thing that tells you where you are.  I’m not even sure which city our motel was in.  All I know is it is in the Kansas City area.

Do you ever feel like that in life?  You know where you are, but on the other hand, you aren’t really sure?  I’m reminded of the old Foghorn Leghorn cartoon of many years ago.  I’ve written about it in a prior blog.

This Looney Tunes cartoon from years ago tells the story of when Foghorn woos Miss Prissy the hen in order to have a nice place to call home and keep warm in the winter. The plot goes something like this. (Credit Wikipedia for the synopsis. I changed it some to reflect my recall of the story.)

Foghorn reads a newspaper story in the Barnyard News predicting a cold winter. To avoid freezing in his shack, he decides to woo Miss Prissy ("I need your love to keep me warm."), who lives in a warm, cozy cottage across the way. Miss Prissy is flattered by Foghorn's brief courtship, but tells him that, in order to prove his worthiness, he needs to show that he can be a good father to her nerdy son.

The little boy - Egghead Jr., is dressed in a stocking cap and oversized glasses – and would rather read about "Splitting the Fourth Dimension" than engage in typical little boy games. Foghorn, intelligent rooster that he is, catches on to this and sets out to win Miss Prissy’s heart by showing Egghead Jr. how to play various sports games.

They try baseball and flying paper airplanes first, to no avail. Then they play hide and seek. Foghorn hides in a feedbox. However, Egghead uses a slide rule (anyone younger than 40 won’t know what that is) and determines mathematically that Foghorn is buried in the ground. He uses a shovel to dig a hole, and pries Foghorn out of the hole with the shovel.

Foghorn is totally befuddled at this turn of events, knowing that he hid in the feedbox, not in a hole in the ground. He looks over at the feedbox, however, and decides to not look in it because, “I just might be in there.”

Sometimes, we catch ourselves coming and going, busy as all get-out, but never sure of where we really are.  I think we do that in part because we’ve been taught that busy-ness equals productivity, and busy-ness means you don’t have to think seriously about things that seem to get in the way of that productivity, like the eternal questions of “Who am I?  Why am I here?  Where am I going?”

Next time you catch yourself in a place where you aren’t really sure where you are, stop for a moment and let life catch up to you.  You have no business being like Foghorn Leghorn…who just might be some place where he doesn’t want to know.