The Tree House 

As many of you may all ready know, this year Cecil County Dragway is planning to do a lot of remodeling.  With that is the tearing down of a house that is in the corner of the propriety, along with the tree house that is there.  You may be aware that the tree house has been there since the 1960s.  It seems a shame to see it go, even if most of us have never had a chance to get into it.

Hearing that news, I thought of the Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi” with the verse that says “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. They pave paradise and put up a parking lot.”  I always thought how great it would have been to live in that house and own the tree house. Just think of all the great cars that have run past it. Anybody who was anybody used to run at Cecil County in the 60s and 70s.  The track was known as the “Traction Capitol of the World.”  In the early days everyone used to say the times were so good because the track was at sea level (the track is really 300ft above sea level).  Englishtown is lower at 86ft above sea level, but for whatever the reason there were always better elapsed times at Cecil County.

You could have rolled out of bed, climbed up the tree on the weekends, and had a free show. Not only that, but the view was better than the paying customer’s view. I heard it said that the house should be torn down but the tree house left in place. That would be nice, but unrealistic.  If it’s left there, someone is going to try and climb up in it, fall, get hurt, and of course want to sue the track. You may or may not miss it but once it’s gone it’s gone.

That’s just the way life is.  When something is gone and you think back on it…if it’s something really important…there may be a bit of regret.  What can be done about it then?  Well that is how many collections get started.  We collect things from our past that didn’t seem so important at the time.  We tossed them (or maybe our mom of wife did it for us).  So now the only option is to buy them back; and at a far greater price I might say.  (Ask me how I know all this!)

There are other things, non-material things, that can’t be replaced for any amount of money.  This can take us from regret to grief.  In the Bible it says “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” (Ephesians 5:16)  In one of her songs, Cher once asked if she could “Turn Back Time.”  We know we can’t turn it back; we can redeem time when we invest what we have learned in someone younger who will take that learning and continue on for us.  In other words, by being a mentor and sharing what we have taken a lifetime to learn.  Also from this verse we learn that we need to make the most of the time we have with others while they are with us; avoiding regrets later on.

So my encouragement for you is to live each day for the Lord, make the most of every opportunity, and your regrets will be few.

Dan Laterza