Blog #4   Tuesdays with Morrie

            After running all of my races for the day, I had my ear buds in and was trying to fall asleep.  It was a winter track meet, during Christmas break last year (2011), and I all I wanted to do was pass out.  Next to me was Mike Puhl, reading some tiny paperback.  There was too much going on round me, so I gave up my efforts to sleep and asked Mike what book he was reading.  He told me it was called Tuesdays with Morrie and that he was reading it for Mr. Ingram’s Death and Dying course.  “What an odd name for a book?” I thought.  I looked the book up on-line later that night after I had gotten home.  The reviews said it was a very good book and had sold millions of copies.  All I thought was, “That’s what they say about all the boring classics.”  Satisfied, a nodded my head and forgot about it.

            This year, as it was my turn to be a senior and take Death and Dying, I had the opportunity of reading the very same book and there are few times in my life a have ever been more mistaken.  Tuesdays with Morrie is a very simple book, that depicts the last fourteen weeks of a very wise man’s life.  This man, Morrie (duh), is anything enver short of knowledge.  It seems that he has some idea or virtue to fit everyone.  When I was reading this book, it felt like all my problems and worries were gone and I was at peace with everything around me, simply listening to the wonderful words of Morrie Schwartz.  

            There was one thing I did not understand at first though.  How come Mitch Albom, the author and narrator of the book, almost never said a word during the fourteen interviews?  The way he wrote his book, it seems like he never had anything to say back to Morrie.  Finally, after I had finished the book, I realized why.  There are some people that I have met that I could listen to all day.  Some people just have that gift that they can hold your attention and make even the simplest of topics seem interesting.  The conversations you hold with these people seem life altering and mesmerizing at the time, and then afterwards you realize you were just talking about food or grades or football.  This must have been the case with Morrie.  It isn’t that Mitch didn’t have anything to say, but he wanted his book to be filled, mostly, with the final words of Morrie.  He didn’t want what he had to say get in the way of the beautiful advice offered by his old friend.