Marian and I Will Be Looking, and Hoping

   As I was reading through Matthew 11 this morning, the thought of self promotion hit me. Jesus was the exact opposite of this term. He went about the landscape doing what His Father led Him to do. It pleased some, angered some and just plain bewildered some others.

   Already we are bombarded with stuff about the political scene in this country. Already we are in the midst of the 2016 campaign for President when the 2014 mid term elections have just concluded. Candidates are raising huge amounts of money to run and get their name and message out.

   As these two separate thoughts ran through my mind, I thought of a song, but I need to set the stage.

   One Fall, in an early year of our marriage, Mayre and I went to New York and got tickets the the Broadway musical, The Music Man. Since that time it has been our favorite, and we have the 33 1/3 LP record and the DVD of the movie to prove it.

   In the show, the prim librarian, Marian, falls for the fast talking music salesman, Harold Hill. In one scene she sings about what she would like to see in a man who could become her husband. Part of the lyric from this song contains these lines:

All I want is a plain man.
All I want is a modest man.
A quiet man, a gentle man
A straightforward and honest man
To sit with me in a cottage somewhere in the state of Iowa...
And I would like him to be more interested in me
Than he's in himself and more interested in us than in me...
And if occasionally he'd ponder
What makes Shakespeare and Beethoven great.
Him I could love 'til I die.


   My mind played the contrast between the song lyrics and the political gyrations today, both ideas centered in Iowa, then and now.

   At this point in the story, the words of the song that Marian sings contains the opposite description of Harold Hill, the slick salesman, but by the end when they both can only see each other, the words seem to be gaining steam toward reality.

   Contrast these descriptive words with the current slate of possible Presidential candidates, raising money to put themselves out in front of the voters of Iowa.

   Is it too simple to pine for?

      a plain man (woman)
      a modest man
      a quiet and gentle man
      a straightforward and honest man
      more interested in us than in me (himself, herself)
      willing to ponder deeper things

   How about just a man or woman that I could be enthusiastic about supporting? How about voting for and not just against?

   It is a long time until November of 2016. Maybe such a man or woman could surface, but until then, self promotion seems to be the name of the game.

   And Marian the librarian would still be looking...