We had a light freeze on Monday night, after the thunderstorm on Sunday night that brought lots of lightning and very little rain. We had high winds a couple of days and then a thoroughly pleasant Wednesday: temperatures in the solid sixties and a very slight breeze on a sunny day. A colleague and I stood out on the front lawn of our small office building, conversing and enjoying the chance to do so on such a fine day.

Yesterday, we had thunderstorms again, with a little bit of rain, maybe as much as a quarter of an inch at our place. Today, our forecast calls for mostly sunny with a slight wind and temperature back up into the sixties again. Tomorrow’s prediction brings us up to right at ninety degrees!

Then, we’ll slide back off that a little on Sunday and by Monday be back to seasonal conditions. All of this brings me back to my wretched little sense of humor with statistics and the myth of average.

Our “average” temperature for the week might be right in the mid-sixties but only two days out of the week had that temperature. To take a week of extremes like this and try to describe it by the average is so misleading as to be worse than useless. It reduces the week to the same as one when every day’s temperature was in the mid-sixties. But, of course, it’s easier to say “mid-sixties” than to say “we had a couple of days that felt like February, a couple of stormy March days, one that came straight out of July and a couple more that were, oh, sort of like spring in Kansas.”

Maybe the truth is that all of this up and down, sideways and back and forth is what spring in Kansas is like. Talking about “average temperature” might not be the best way to convey that. Too often, we reduce our lives to those same sorts of generalizations and fail to share the aspects that make true fellowship and connection possible. Someone asks how we are and we reply “fine” with nothing ventured and nothing gained. Only when we share joys and heartaches with one another are we able to move acquaintances into the realm of friendship and friendships into the realm of genuine fellowship.

It reminds me of the Cal Coolidge-like fellow whose week went something like this: On Monday, his mother passed away and a nephew graduated from college. On Tuesday, he had a cow struck by lightning. On Wednesday, two calves were born. On Thursday, a grandson was born. On Friday, his brother got paralyzed in a car crash on the way to the funeral and his son in Boston got a big promotion. On Saturday, he moved the cows over to another pasture and planted a garden. On Sunday, he was asked, “What kind of week did you have?”

He reflected for a moment and said, “Oh, about average, I guess.”

H. Arnett

4/8/11