Ain't No Use Putting Up Your Umbrella 'Til it Rains (Alice Rice)

By Kerry Blair

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system. ~William James

I may, in fact, be queen of that planet William James was talking about. Over the course of my life I have worried about virtually any-and-everything there is to fret over. I vividly remember being four years old and lying in bed night after night begging God to keep coyotes from jumping in the window to eat me up. No, I’d never known anybody who’d been bitten by a coyote, let alone eaten by one. I’d never even seen a coyote in my whole life, but I worried myself sick just the same.

By the time I was a teenager I’d mostly stopped worrying about coyotes – but only because I was now obsessed with zits, nuclear war, making a B in geometry, dwindling global resources, prom, children starving in Africa, not getting a college scholarship, plane crashes, hurricanes, volcanoes, sick kittens, contracting malaria . . . you know, this list could go on indefinitely. If it headlined the news, was discussed in the lunchroom, or mentioned anywhere in passing, I worried about it.

When I was in my early twenties, Quincy almost sent me over the edge. Every week Jack Klugman (et al) offered something new – and horrific! – over which to despair. Anthrax. Mad Cow Disease. Plague. My hands shook as I turned off the TV every Wednesday night, and I went to bed certain everybody I knew would soon die horribly of the malady du jour. (Seriously, these episodes made being eaten alive by coyotes look attractive.) After a particularly graphic episode about botulism I swore off canned foods for eight months. (Okay, that’s a lie. It’s been twenty-five years and it’s still hard for me to open a can of chili, let alone eat it.)

Now that I’m growing older, I’m thinking more and more about abdicating my crown to the Planet of the Worriers and immigrating to Earth. My Nana lived here, and she was the sanest, healthiest, happiest person I have ever known. Of course, she kept all her worries in a box.

No, really, she did! She had a wooden recipe box with this quote from Hugh Blair (no relation) on the cover: Worry not about the possible troubles of the future; for if they come, you are but anticipating and adding to their weight; and if they do not come, your worry is useless; and in either case it is weak and in vain, and a distrust of God’s providence.

I was an adult before I understood how worry is “a distrust of God’s providence,” but I understood the concept of a worry box early on. My grandmother had been widowed three times – the first in the midst of the Great Depression where she was literally penniless with two little boys to feed and clothe. She learned then that she could not cope and worry at the same time, so she wrote down all her worries, put them in a wooden box, put the box away where she couldn’t see it, and then spent twenty-three worry-free hours of every day coping as best she could. In the twenty-fourth hour she opened the worry box, cried, worried . . . and prayed. When she shut the box, she said, she could always sleep because she knew that while the worries themselves may not have passed, the time to obsess over them had. She simply left them in God’s hands and went to bed. Somehow, He always managed, even when she couldn’t.

Here on earth there are still earthquakes and airplane crashes and hunger and sick kittens and botulism and – you know what? – I even see a coyote or two every week on the back roads around Chino Valley! Those are pretty much the least of my worries, though. I now have two elderly, ailing mothers, a daughter with an ovarian cancer scare, and a son in Iraq. Since I must worry, I do it faithfully at 3 o’clock every afternoon – except on weekends or Wednesdays when I have Cub Scouts, or Mondays when I'm ususally driving somebody to a doctor’s appointment, or Fridays when I'm cleaning the bird feeders or . . . well . . . sometimes I just forget. Turns out that the God of my grandmothers has never failed me, either. As my faith increases, my worry decreases and so there are days that I honestly have to work at that worry thing.

Which reminds me of one more of my favorite quotes about worry. A sportscaster once asked long-time Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda if he was worried about a rain delay going into the World Series. Lasorda replied, “The only way I'd worry about the weather is if it snows on our side of the field and not theirs.”

Hmm. Maybe that wasn't a good choice for a quote. I'm pretty worried about the DBacks maybe not winning the West, come to think of it. I'd better go put that in my worry box right now or I'll obsess about it all day! (And you thought I didn't have priorities . . . )