A Full Day

It has been a good day but tiring, as usual. I got a meal ready for a friend who just had a baby. She is having some pretty serious post partum issues so families from our co-op pre-school are taking turns bringing them meals. Then we went to pre-school this afternoon where Finley and his classmates went to a "drive-in theatre". They had painted big boxes on Tuesday and today they sat in them in rows in front of a big screen and had pop-corn and little smores. How fun! It was hilarious to watch fourteen 4 year olds sit so still. Stillness isn't something I associate with that age.

Speaking of age... we leave tomorrow for Spokane where my grandmother's memorial service will be held on Saturday. We had just celebrated her 100th birthday in January with a wonderful party, a fun slide show of snapshots of her life, surrounded by her friends and family. I am so thankful we had that time. She passed away February 9, from complications from two surgeries. At 100 years old it was amazing she made it through either one; one for an appendectomy and after she fell and broke her hip in the hospital, another surgery for hip replacement. Now we will journey back over the mountains to celebrate her life again, albeit couched in our sorrow and grief in saying good-bye and recognizing the passing of time in our own lives.

Paul Bowles writes,

We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

How would I live my life if I didn't take more days for granted? Of course, most of us have asked ourselves that question but usually without any real threat to the promise of more days. I have had the luxury of a safe life, a protected life. I am relatively young and such questions are reserved for philosophizing with friends or the occasional memorial service. I turn 40 this year and I can tell you the funerals and memorial services of friends and acquaintances have become almost as numerous as the weddings and the baby births. I am sure there were always this many but now I pay more attention. I make more of an effort to attend them. I wonder who would attend mine if I were to die now?

Well, as Steven Wright says, "I intend to live forever. So far, so good."

I have been reading a lot lately, which seems surprising to me since I have no time for anything else. While I nurse Evelyn I keep books handy and I must say I have been a voracious reader. In the past 6 weeks I have read People of the Book, Eat, Pray, Love, When Elephants Dance, Memoirs of a Geisha and various issues of the Sun. I feel a wonderful guilty pleasure in consuming that much good reading material. However, there was a lot in those books about suffering and horrific things we humans do to each other. I don’t know if I needed to know about those things. My mind finds itself going back again and again to grisly scenes. It makes me afraid and anxious and I don’t like that. I will be more careful in what I choose to read in the future. I am just not cut out to read that stuff. The next book I have on the list to read, waiting on the table is Hot Zone: One man, One Year, 20 wars. Oops. I guess that won’t be the most uplifting read I’ve ever chosen either, but I feel a sense of obligation to inform myself of the world’s suffering. If not to send aid in some way, I read to at least put my own suffering in perspective and end my interminable self-pity.

Fortunately, I have these wonderful, sweet little people in my life to keep it all on the upside. They do not live like I do, constantly dragging the future or the past through all the beauty right in front of me.