Optimism for the Big Strange Family

So, I subscribed today to a magazine new to me. It's not like a need one more thing to read in my life, but the subtitle -- and the recommendation of a friend -- hooked me: Ode magazine -- for Intelligent Optimists. That has a nice ring to it. Though I like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent, I have drifted dangerously close, of late, to pessimism. I could use the corrective. After all, it's September and the days are cooling and the leaves are coloring -- those alone are cause for optimism. Besides, my day is typically the only thing that gets bitten when I growl.

Appropriate reinforcement, then, that my new grocery bag arrived today in the mail today from Brian Andreas, the quirky folk artist in northeastern Iowa. Depicting a handful of very colorful, very odd looking "people," the caption reads, "I don't think of it as working for world peace, she said. I think of it as just trying to get along in a really big strange family."

Now that is intelligent optimism in the daily grind of reconciliation. I can't wait for the magazine to get here.