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Category: transition

December 31, 2010

ticking toward the new

the sky has sprung a leak here in my corner of the globe this morn. thunder clouds are clapping, rumbling. lightning interrupts the percussive roar with its cymbal crash and sparks.

what had been winter white is now a dreary soggy shade of gray. the branches of the trees drip fat-walled tears. it’s a sad scene out there, like cheeks of little children (or their mamas) after a good long cry.

but perhaps it’s the world’s way of washing out the old, making way for new.

for new is, if you wish hard enough, what the night will bring. the page of the calendar turns, the 12 turns into 1. a new beginning. another chance. fresh start.

an incubator full of hopes and dreams, they’ll hatch if we are blessed, if we do our share. don’t sit back and wait for magic.

that’s not how new happens. that’s only how it is in fairy tales and science fiction.

we make new when we dig down deep, resolve to do it different. be gentle, not harsh. listen, not close the door. go out, not curl up inside.

as the whole globe gathers up the messiness of the year that’s left behind, we get–at least on paper–a chance to try again.

isn’t that the miracle behind the spiraling of time? we come around again to a place we’ve never been? we muster what it takes to climb again? to look more closely this time? to take solid steps? to sit and smell the pine, as we move higher on the mountain?

those are questions, all of them, because we’ve not yet mastered the art of climbing, the simple art of one foot in front of the other.

and so, the benevolence that is yet-another-chance is that we’ve built these constructs that lay before us the illusion, the hope, that this time ‘round we might come closer to getting it right.

that’s what fills our lungs in these hours toward the countdown. we tingle with the possibility that this stint, this shift, might be the one where we put aside the things that hold us back, and reach out and grab the ones that we’ve been promising to ourselves.

i know that i’ve a list. and promises i intend to keep.

i come to this rain-soaked morning on the last day of the year with a prayer card filled for those all around me. i look out into the new year and wonder what will come. i cannot take away the pains that might arrive but i can whisper incantations, beg for words and light and hope, to soften all the blows, to be the wind under wings that falter, start to free-fall from the sky.

here as we tick towards the new i count the ones who’ve suffered, are suffering. i count friends who’ve lost a soulmate, i count the brave soul across the street, the one who lies in hospice. i count the mother of a child who might not get well, and another who won’t (one mother, two children, too much to take, by any measure).

i count a dear dear friend far away who doesn’t cease to struggle.

i love them, each and every one. and their struggles weigh down my heart. i pray for hope in the new year. i pray for light.

i pray that once again we might try to get it right–as we carry on the climb to that holy mountaintop.

what do you hope and pray for as we tick toward the new year?

1 Comment
August 27, 2010

back at it

wasn’t it just a minute ago we were practicing putting our feet up, wiggling our bare-naked garden-stained toes?

weren’t we succumbing to the temptation to carry plates of food outside, light candles, watch the summer cloak of darkness fall, drape our shoulders, drape the twilight?

and, poof, in an instant didn’t it get swallowed, like a giant slurping down a clump of grapes?

here we are, back at it.

rising sharp at 6:01, no luxury of rolling back to sleep. there are boys to rouse, and oats to stir. there are slabs of bread to be slathered, meat slapped down, slithered into baggies. there are lunches to be lined across the counter, so many paper-bag soldiers awaiting their call to duty: fill the bellies of the hungry boys when the lunch bell rings at school.

school.

one more round.

already, we had scissors out, were clipping pages from a stack of magazines, sifting through the baby picture box, in search of pictures that would tell the story of who was the tousle-haired boy squirming in his chair, the boy not ready to be back in a desk, on the dark side of the windowpanes, looking out onto the field where balls aren’t bouncing anymore, because children are back in straight-back chairs and desks and rows and raising hands again and trying to net the daydreams that flutter in the space where numbers and letters once again are swirling, are in charge, are trying to compute, to fall in neat and tidy rows and columns, make sense after the long summer’s snooze.

here we are, back at it.

there are school supplies to fetch and forms to be signed, in triplicate. and checks torn out and paper-clipped to notes that scold: do not be late, or else you will be sent to unforgiving chair in corner, where you will wait out the remainder of the year.

oh, and carpools. back at that, too. remembering that it’s monday and not the day you drive, but if it’s tuesday you do drive, only not the late shift, it’s the early shift. and don’t forget the one boy who only comes every other tuesday. so don’t sit out in front at his curb, waiting for him to lope out to the car, where you will squeeze him in, because your car isn’t quite as big and roomy as all the others in the carpool. so you slip sunglasses on your too-young-to-be-in-the-front-seat child, and you hope the nice police officer passing by doesn’t glance over and think, how odd, that toddler in the front seat.

for you’ve no time to be pulled over by the nice officer, no time to explain, to make him understand how, yes, yes, the child’s five pounds shy of the legal limit for front-seat riding. but really, how else will you get him where he needs to be? what, mr. officer, you think i can do all this driving on my own, without a carpool to assist? just to have the child snuggled safe in the seat behind me? oh, mr. officer, you do not understand: we are back at it here.

and we will do whatever need be done to make it from alarm clock at dawn till light’s out back at midnight.

we are surviving, mr. officer, and that’s all we can hope for. summer’s over, sir, at least as far as principals and teachers are concerned, and so it’s back at it for the grownups and the kiddies still under the thumb of the schoolhouse ways-and-means committee.

oh, we might sneak in a little morning’s coffee under the boughs of the pine tree where the wind chimes sing their end-of-summer song. might muddy all our toes squishing through the garden where the sprinklers try to make up for the lack of so much rain.

we might lick one more ice cream cone out where the fireflies do their blinking.

but we know the sorry truth here: we’re back at it once again, and summer’s break is a long, long way away.

have you been hit yet by the end-of-summer blues? have you been hit between the eyeballs by the non-stop pace that comes with the brink of each september?

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August 13, 2010

one thing: be safe

and so, like that, hair still wet from the shower, white t-shirt tight enough to catch each plane and shadow of the rower’s top-half topography, the babe i once rocked in my arms, the boy who never much took to tricycles, the now-man with newly-minted license in his tight-squeeze pocket, he did something i’d never seen before: he swiped the keys to the old blue wagon off the ring where they’ve dangled since the day we moved into this old house, and he ran for the door, for the driver’s seat, for the road and whatever lay beyond.

mid-stride, and without ceremony, he glanced back to check the clock, nervously (only because he was late not because he had an ounce of apprehension about the road ahead), as i tried to slow the exit, calling out, wait, where exactly are you going? and when will you be home?

as he tossed back words, perfectly sensible replies, and made one final lope through the door and down the steps, disappearing behind the crab apple that nearly blocks the path, i called out: “be safe.”

and the words hung there.

each crisp syllable so wholly capturing what i wished and prayed for with all my being.

be safe.

what more is there?

what deeper prayer does a mother’s heart hold?

above all, be safe.

come home whole. come home without a gash. never mind the fender or the tail lights. just be safe, my sweet beloved child.

and so for the next few hours, i went about my business. few noticed, i’m certain, that i was turning blue around the mouth. i held my breath. only half expanding lungs, i do believe, as i watched the clock hand glide towards ten.

till at last i heard the rumble, saw the headlights illuminating garbage cans as they pointed down the alley, came round the final bend into where we sometimes park the car, two bright eyeballs, blinking “we’re home” to me, as they clicked off, and the 6-foot-3 first-time-alone-ever driver slid from the old wagon as if he’d been out unencumbered a million times before and this was nothing, nothing really to have interrupted anyone’s lung-work for the eve.

i find myself employing those two words–be safe–often in these past few weeks.

both my boys, it seems, are pushing out the boundaries, laying new tracks, expanding their orbits beyond me. out of reach. into that terrain where we hold on only through the silky thread of prayer, the whispered murmurings of petition to the great protectors all around, or up on clouds, wherever is the place from where they keep their watch.

the little one now bounds up the stairs to his piggy bank, grabs a crumpled dollar bill, and tells me he is walking to the little not-so-far-away grocery where all the kids buy chips and candy. or to the comic book store. or, just the other day, over train tracks, across the big street, the one with five lanes of traffic, to get to the store where baseballs called to his friend, and my little one didn’t think to say, um, no, i can’t come with you without checking first at home.

and as he sweetly told the story–confessed, really–i could only gulp and think of safe again, that word that captures unbroken wholeness, the white light of safety shield that we hope and pray and beg surrounds our children, no matter what they throw against it: diving boards or busy streets or trucks with 18 wheels and drivers half-dozing at the steering wheel.

not one to rely on hope alone, and having grown up with rosary beads dangling from my bed post, at the bottom of my white straw pocketbook (the one with starched-cotton cornflowers and poppies on the lid, the one i carried each sunday into church), and, yes, amid the pens and pencils and assorted detritus in the pit of my high school backpack besides, i wasted little time before enlisting st. christopher to my back-up squad.

i ordered up a medallion, a dangly disc, of dear saintly chris, the one who carried baby jesus (i do believe) on his shoulders across a raging river, and who, along with st. babs, my namesake, got unceremoniously dumped from the heavenly chorus back in the revolutionary 1960s when the catholic church decided their miracles weren’t quite of the saintly stature, so they were stripped of rank, left to be mere lieutenants of goodness in the hierarchy’s eyes. which, of course, is all it took for me to promptly and fiercely promote them ever higher, in my book now patron saints of all of us who have ever suffered the indignities of being shoved to the back of the pack.

yo, chris, for you we have assignment.

and thus, in a white envelope left waiting on my keyboard (thanks be to my own personal patron saint of procuring–my holy blessed mama), there is the half-inch metal oval of mid-stream chris that will forever dangle from my brand-new driver’s key ring.

be safe, it will whisper, will send off vapors, will infuse the air my firstborn breathes when he is far, far beyond my clutch.

be safe, the holy mantra of the mamas, as we stand back and let our babies reach and stretch and take to the highways. st. chris, right there in that front pocket, where we can’t ever fit.

the photo up above is reality journalism, taken the very moment my firstborn cruised to the end of the alley, clicked on the blinker, headed north into the rest of his driving life. it was mere hours after the driving czars deemed him worthy of a certifiable driver’s license. and i was left, with quivering fingers on the camera clicker, having captured the stunning truth: my boy was driving now. i heard the snap of the scissors as yet another cord was cut.
whose safety have you prayed for of late? and what long nights’ vigil have you kept, waiting for the headlights at last to come to park?

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July 23, 2010

starting the goodbye

that old cat, a country cat, has been a feisty cat since the day he sprang forth from the icehouse beer cardboard six-pack in which he’d mewed the whole way home.

he was a kitten then, a wee striped thing, and he’d come to fill a gaping hole in our little family.

you see, we’d had our hearts broken time and time again back in the baby-hoping years, wishing and praying for a someone to carry home someday for our little one, who’d turned from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, and still was all alone, without a someone to share a room, to fight over books in the back seat, to venture off into our tiny back yard and spend the afternoon making like it was the amazon jungle, or the dark side of the moon. or, heck, looking down the road (and that’s what mamas do), there was no one yet whose hand he’d hold on the someday when i die.

fact was, there’s only so much breaking a heart can do, and then it’s time to wipe away the tears, make peace with what you’ve got rather than long for what you’ve not, and, well, when talking to a friend, a friend with many cats, and more on the way, you nod and murmur, “hmm, maybe…..”

and then you rejoice at the news that your kitten has been born. you wait six weeks, and when the father of your four-year-old is out of the country, for heaven’s sake, you drive out to the farm to meet the furry little fellow.

and, oh, you feel your heart go thwallop. and you see your little boy melt down onto the floor to meet what will pass for, um, a brother.

and you tuck the little ball of stripes into the nearest carry-all you can find, in this case the cardboard six-pack left from someone’s weekend beers.

and home you drive.

and out you let those stripes.

and he hightails it straight for your toes.

so many toes he charges for, he nibbles, he pierces with his razor kitten teeth, you hear these actual words come from the mouth of the father of your child, once he’s back from faraway country: “either he goes, or i go,” you hear him say. (and deep inside you snicker because you know forever more you’ve got one fine yarn to tell.)

and of course neither the ferocious toe-smitten kitten nor your mate heads for any door.

and you grow to love said cat. you catch your little one curled up with him, stroking him, making houses for him, trying to coax him into his kindergarten backpack.

you screech when said kitten leaps from tree limbs onto rooftops and when, uh oh, he can’t get down. and you hold your breath as the one who issued he-goes-or-i-go declaration hauls out the ladder and climbs precariously to the little rascal’s rescue. again and again and again.

and you walk through city alleys, crying, calling his name, every time he goes and gets lost for days on end, stuck in tight spots and dark cellars where, egad, drugs are sold. (you discover the latter after you’ve tiptoed through the labyrinthine basement blackness with the helpful chap who gangbangs on the side.)

oh, lord, that cat puts you through the wringer. and you love him more with every cock-eyed hair-raising chapter.
and then, some 13 years pass, and the cat you never could contain, the cat that roams all night, and leaves body parts on your doorstep, he slows down one summer. loses weight. is hardly his feisty self.

you fear he’s slurped too many murky waters from the birdbath, darn it. or perhaps he swallowed one too many critters from the tall-grass jungle.

and the boy who once carried him home, who stroked him, and cooed to him the whole long way, the boy who loved to tell the story of his name, how he came to be turkey baby choo-choo hi cat bye cat, the boy whose legs are now so long they spill beyond the borders of the bed (though the cat finds room to curl there, each and every morning), he is the first one to crumble when you point out the cat’s all bony just beneath his fur.

when you point out how he barely leaves the hollowed-out spot beneath the old roses in the garden, where he now spends hours napping. or is it that he’s feeling rather ill, and just can’t muster what it takes to up and stumble toward the house?

all at once, you all realize how time has passed and this chapter might be coming toward a close. how this cat that carried you from all alone and four to seventeen and very much a real-live brother has shared some fine adventures, stories to be told forevermore. and how, along the way, you’ve come to count on that rare breed of loyalty a boy and cat can surely share.

and you realize that even if it’s not the very end, the goodbyes begin in measured spoonfuls.

and so for a whole hour one summer morning, you sit on bricks, beside the spot where he’s gone limp, you stroke your blessed furry cat, you honor him with gratitude that’s deep, will last forever. you whisper words to him, tell him he was mighty in his glory days, showed what cats are made of, hauling home whole herds of chipmunk parts, and mice tails too, fierce hunter.

you consider the gentle side of that ol’ cat, how he climbed upon you in the morn, pushed his paws into your chest, as if kneading breadloaves, one paw after another, sure sign of cat love.

you think back on all the times when that cat, he leapt to your rescue. how when you were sick or sad, he always had a knack for climbing in your lap, for licking you with that scratchy sand-paper tongue of his. uncanny, how the cats smell hurt rising from the ones they love.

and with a cat–or any creature, after all, maybe even with a caterpillar if you name it, feed it, let it out for so-called walks (though more likely bends-and-stretches)–love’s a two-way street.

and, oh, what with college round the bend, and all this slo-mo cat decline, it seems we’ve come to the part of the story where the grace-filled parting starts unspooling.

where we gather up all the hours and the days of our entwined lives, where we sift through the parts that make us laugh out loud, and the ones where we held our breath and begged the heavens for his safe return.

love is like that towards the end. if you’re blessed to see it coming. if you’re given long slow mornings where you have a chance to look into each other’s eyes and hearts, say thank you for the bond that will not break, the bond that got us through a dark place, the pawing at the door so many times, when in on cat feet crept the next best thing to a little brother, one who never fought for books, but did play along in the amazon jungle.

that old cat is moving slow now. and we are mustering the start of our holy blessed vespers, the sacred rites of thank you and thank you before the last goodbye.

not always do we get the chance to tell the stories one more time, to whisper thank you and good bye. i know too well how suddenly sometimes death can come, and we’re left gasping. without goodbye. i know too that cat or dog or bird love is real. and its loss leaves a gaping wound. hopefully that old cat has a few romps left. he’s the cat my boys grew up with, he’s the cat who’s made us laugh and cry. and one thing’s certain, there’ll be more of both. have you been blessed to whisper long goodbyes? or were you too cut short?

7 Comments
July 9, 2010

sewing for college

the question came late, of course, as i was tiptoeing off to bed, the house–except for one last bedroom–finally dark, lit by the few scant rays of moon that crept around the clouds.

“mom,” he said, coming to the door wearing white oxford and shorts, “some of these buttons are coming loose. can you get these?”

truth be told, it was 1 in the morning when this loose-button truth erupted. “not now!” i shot back, or maybe all i did was mutter, the details now are fuzzy. i’d been up late making a movie–oh goodness, doesn’t that sound all hollywood; fear not, it’s not something i do too often, in fact have never done before, but geez, it sure sounds fine in that there sentence. anyway, i was dragging my movie-making self to bed. the manchild was packing for his quick trip to college. (oh lord, that too was a test sentence: to see how it feels to write that he was packing for college.)

it is all, really, something of a test these days, this dabbing of big toe in college water, this slow unspooling process of a whole family absorbing the knowledge, through and through, that what we’ve been these past eight years–the whole of his little brother’s life–a family of four who wake up and go to sleep under the same roof, who know each others’ quirks and oddities, who leave red peppers off a certain plate, or stock up on slow-churn ice cream, who have memorized each other’s coughs and sputters and sloppy habits, we will soon be only three. there will be a bed that’s never tousled. there will be a bathroom sink that’s polished, unspattered, no vanity of goops and creams for me to rearrange most mornings. there will be no clothes flung on backs of chair, on floor, a dropped-and-heaped trajectory of just where he has disrobed.

ah, but like all of us these days, i am getting ahead of the story. i am peeking round the corner, trying hard as i can some days to imagine, just how quiet it will sound when he doesn’t bound in the door, fling his messenger bag, kick off his shoes, drop the headphones, dash up the stairs.

all he’d asked was if i could thread a needle, knot the thread, pull it through the oxford cloth, get those buttons cinched, taut where they belong.

and so, next morn, before the clock struck six, i sewed for college, sewed for the boy who was boarding the plane with his papa, flying off for that rare chance to sit down with a dean of admissions, say who he is, have someone listen.

i of course have visions of the dean picking up the phone, calling me, saying, where did you get this kid? he is magnificent, isn’t he?

but then, i’m his mama. i’ve been his ace no. 1 believer since the day i took his chubby just-born thighs into my hungry long-waiting arms, marveled over the whole of him, breathed promise into him and over him and through him, through and through.

i sewed those buttons taut, all right. whispered secret vespers with the tug of every thread. prayed for those buttons to hold it all together, straight through the interview–and far beyond.

it’s the least a mama can do. she can do so little by that point. her work, so much of it, has come before, in all those hours in the kitchen, the talking place so often in our house. her work’s been done in the worries and the hopes and the love notes tucked under pillows, in lunch boxes, sleeping bags and suitcases. her work’s been done in the driving and the shopping, and the riding, once, in the ambulance, and the checking of the mailbox for the letters from summer camp that rarely came. it’s unmeasurable really, the work that’s been done since that long-ago moment when the doctor called, said “blood work’s back; you’re pregnant, dearie.”

but at least, on the dawn of the day when he flew off to college, the sewing gave me purpose. gave me a string of stitches to pull through cloth, to knot, to carry to his room, to lay on his suitcase.

not too many nights before, as i was tucking the little one in bed, he looked up at me, a somber face suddenly washing over his sunburned cheeks. “can i ask you something i’ve wanted to ask for a long time?” he started, not waiting for my “of course.”

“is willie really going to go away next year? i don’t want him to go away ever!”

and then the tears came. to both of us. down our cheeks and soaking into sheets, a sloppy mess of gaping-open sadness, we were.

i thought of that as i sewed those buttons tight. i thought how much the sounds and rhythms of this house will change. i thought of the empty aching heart of his little brother, his brother who has only known life with a big brother always in the wings.

there’s a lot of shifting, looking round the bend, that’s going on here.

and all i could do was sew those buttons tight. and pray they lasted through the college interview.

we’ve got a year to stitch together all the rest. or get tangled in so many floppy threads.

i have a sense this will be but one in an occasional series of captured moments as we all try to wrap our heads around the change that’s coming, how the world as we know it will not be. we’ve all weathered–and worried about–such ebbs and flows in life. we’ve sent a kid to camp, to college. we’ve lost a spouse, a mother, a father, a child. we are here a table of folks who pay attention to the stirrings and the comings and the goings. we’re allowed to say here how much it hurts, when it hurts. mostly we’re allowed to sift through the messiness of the human heart. that’s why there is a chair at the table for each and every one of you. because here we understand that the most glorious side of being human is the one that’s tied to the heart, and to ignore it, to shove it under the table, well that’s to miss out on a whole book of beauty.
have you tightened buttons for a leave-taker? how have you readied. steadied yourself for a major shift in your life’s river? or were you taken wholly by surprise?

7 Comments
January 1, 2007

exuberance and a little knot

this is the detritus of the new year. or of the exuberant ushering in, i should say. it is piled beside my sleeping 5-year-old. he ushered in wildly.

not me. i took it in with a deep breath, a voracious prayer and something of a knot in my belly.

maybe it’s what happens when you are on the eve of your mid-century mark. maybe it’s what happens when you, sadly, come to know the ebbs and the flows of this life. there will be joy. there will be sorrow. it happens.

my 5-year-old, bless him, doesn’t have a clue. he was so thrilled to be up with the big people, he would have yelped for whatever the reason. so there he stood, one of a chorus line, all in their shiny paper hats, clenching noise makers with both fists, standing inches away from the couch, a couple feet from the screen where the shiny ball was glittering, blinking, seducing. for a kindergartner learning to count, this backwards tumble from 10 down to 1 was sheer joy: he could do it, he could be part of the roar. so he shook, and he leapt, and he counted.

and i stood off to the side. drinking in his exuberance. delighting in his delight. but not being able to swallow the dim-watted dread that had lodged in my throat.

then in the night, when the clock read 4 something, we awoke to our room bathed in the blinking red light of something amiss. oh, no, happy new year, i thought. or my husband, he said those words. it’s all rather foggy. but we groped, both of us, toward the window, and there, at the curb, was the ambulance. the dear old lady next door goes off in an ambulance sometimes once a month, sometimes more. but never before in the dark before dawn.

so on this night of brand new beginnings, we had gone to sleep to the pop-pop of pyrotechnics down the block, woke up to the red bath of light of an ambulance idling in the night.

kind of hard to shake off the trembly sense of what the new year will bring.

i pray to God we all have the strength to take it, whatever comes. i pray mightily, deeply, exuberantly.

3 Comments
December 29, 2006

before the page turns

before the last page flips over and away, it seems fitting to say, in no particular order…

this was the year my bones got less wobbly thanks to a dancer named donna; my broken-necked boy got rescued, he did, thanks to guardian angels and samaritans, too.

a little girl with a brain tumor reminded me how simple it is, when she nestled next to her mama and proclaimed this lasting truth: “i can read, i can whistle, i have a loose tooth; my life is complete.”

another sweet girl with a brain tumor didn’t make it, but she got up out of her wheelchair and walked across the finish line, she did.

a quartet of builders pounded their hearts into my farmhouse kitchen, and everywhere i look, everything i touch, i see them, i feel them; one blessed builder didn’t live to see the end of this year and for him i will forever ache, and forever be thankful.
a wise editor named ross urged me to tell the whole truth in a tale that finally brought my skeleton out of the closet; an even wiser woman named linda gave me the courage, the backbone, to do so.

a wizened man from ecuador told my sweet will how he walked to this country, would let nothing keep him away; another from mexico told of crossing the desert for three days with nothing but orange peels and hard candy.

a plaza filled with passionate people would not let the world deny nor forget the suffering in darfur, and my boys, thank God, were there to soak in the passion, to add their voice to the outcry.

a college kid with pierced ear and huge heart fell in love with my rambunctious child, offering hope that someone out in the world might see the golden light in his aura.

a golden-haired girl, with a platinum heart, loved that same little kid, and filled his wednesdays with light, every week through the summer.

standing in the emergency room with one trembling 5-year-old, my dear friend and neighbor ran to our rescue, interrupting her birthday to let him leap to her arms and out of the terrifying horrible place.

month after month, our friends at the soup kitchen bathed us in gratitude, humbled us deeply with the simple act of telling us our supper was something.

two soccer coaches, our first taste of the game, cared not about winning; were gentle and sweet as two coaches could possibly, imaginably be.

friends jane, jan and judy, old hands each, took me by the hand, by the elbow, the shoulder, and got me through the great rite of my firstborn’s bar mitzvah.

my blessed magnificent rock of a friend, one from way back in the newsroom, flew here to stand in my kitchen, to be by my side, and teach my sweet will the fine art of ghetto fried rice.

a sweet woman named molly left a shabbat basket on my stoop, melting me thoroughly with her random act of deep kindness.

a man named dorel, who can no longer make words, delighted me endlessly with the gleam in his eye as we went over and over simple sounds, ah, buh and k, kat.

when the going got rough, i stood back and watched a man named pete be the consummate father, showering love on a kid he wouldn’t let get dumped.

on the other end of the line, when i needed him most, my old ER doc friend said the words i most needed to hear, and stayed on the line ’til all was clear.

a farmer named henry, week after week, quietly, wordlessly grew for the world the purest produce that i’ve ever tasted; his sister, the word smith, puts his stories in print, and reminds every one of us of the infinite wisdom buried deep in the earth.

in a million other ways, the friends who i love bathed me in goodness and light, made me laugh, dried my tears, held my hand, held me up. from the ones who brought donuts before dawn to our hospital bedside, to the ones who pushed me off the great blogger ledge, i ask and i beg God to bless them with grace and with all that is good.

it’s been one stunning year, and we’re here at the end. God bless you. God keep you. take a deep breath, take a dive once again…..

if perhaps you have someone who stood out in your year, for their kindness, their goodness, their most amazing grace, tack their tale here. no need to name names, we’ll all get the gist….

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