Point of View: Standing Corrected

Hughie King corrected me the other day, as he should have, after I’d retrofitted John Howard Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home” with more modern lyrics.

Thing was, said our village historian, Payne’s grandfather never lived in Home, Sweet Home, as Wikipedia (it will be my downfall yet) had reported, and that while it was a fact John Howard had visited East Hampton as a child — he wrote of having been afraid of the geese around Goose (now Town) Pond — no one knows exactly where he stayed.

Anyway, wherever it was, there was no place like it.

I admit it, I do at times (only at times?) play fast and loose with the facts — annoying impediments, I find, on the path toward Greater Truths. I may stand corrected, but not for long — an apt motto, I’ll warrant, for a journalist.

In this regard I’m reminded of the coat of arms my father had emblazoned on the whitewashed front wall of his castle in (or rather, near) Spain: “Aquila Muscas Non Captat.” Which he translated as, “The Eagle Does Not Stoop to Catch Flies.”

Maybe that was why I never made it to the Major Leagues.

Let’s see what Wikipedia says about it. . . . It says “aquila muscas non captat” means not to sweat the small things. Good advice, I’d say. In fact, our favorite family psychologist has that pinned to the door of his office. “Don’t sweat the small things . . . they’re all small things.”

I mean, given that there are an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the universe, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars (and does that figure include the 647 galaxies discovered the other day?), how can we presume that we and our problems are not small things?

Does it follow, then, that every problem, every failing we humans have is amenable to solution — or if not to solution, at least to amelioration?

This earth, I think, could indeed become home, sweet home should our arrogance be allayed and our collective minds put to it.

Do I stand corrected? By any sitting in judgment? Good, then, I’m off for a walk.