March is the month when many of us in Iowa run out of patience. By this time every year, we figure we have suffered enough and we deserve a reward for making it through winter. We become irrational and intolerant. I loved the cozy wool scarf I got for Christmas. In December, I thought it was warm and adorable. I couldn’t wait for it to snow so I could wrap it around my neck and romp through a blizzard. Now, I can’t stand the sight of it—as if my scarf was somehow complicit in making winter last longer just to spite me. And where are all those crocuses and tulips, assuring us that spring is coming? Come on!
Today it’s raining. As cold as it is, I know I ought to be grateful that it’s coming down in liquid form. They say we need the rain, but sunshine and 75 degrees would be nice.
The Buddhists tell us there is no point in wishing for our ideal day or dwelling on some idyllic period in our past. Future and past are nothing but mental concepts and have no basis in reality.
Take the Chicago Cubs, for example. Cubs fans all think their team is going to win the World Series. Some day. It’s true, the Cubs won back-to-back in 1907 and 1908. But then they were called the Chicago White Stockings. Now does that sound like a team that needs to draw attention to itself? Even winning the World Series could only bring them greater humiliation. And when they finally saw the error of their ways, did they change their name to something powerful and dominant like The Grizzlies or The Kodiaks? No, they became The Cubs…baby bears. It’s sad, really.
I remember, as a young adult, waiting impatiently for my wisdom teeth to come in. And when they finally did, there was no room for them and they had to be pulled, leaving me none the wiser. Recently, Justin Blauwet of Sheldon, Iowa found a tooth that experts estimate had been patiently lying under the ground for 20,000 years. Justin who has always had a “huge interest” in dinosaurs, said, recognizing the 11.2-pound, 11 ½ inch long wooly mammoth molar was a “once-in-a-lifetime discovery.”
It turns out, Justin, who works for DGR Engineering, was present when they were digging a hole for a sewage lift station and noticed the massive tooth. Sure, it’s been 20,000 years or so since the giant elephant ancestor was walking on top of the ground, chewing on scrub brush and getting pestered by spear-carrying Neanderthals, but it’s a nice thought that the big molar that once lived pleasantly in the mammoth’s mouth will now not have tolerate a future, cohabiting with pipes filled with human sewage.
The tooth, discovered on property owned by Northwest Iowa Community College is to be donated to the Sheldon Prairie Museum, which like all museums, is a monument to patience and perseverance. And now, having survived during the Ice Age and endured many generations under the earth in the cold and dark, the old tooth can finally be at peace. Warm at last.