one man in his time plays many parts

In Shakespeare's vision All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;And one man in his time plays many parts,
meaning that he plays many parts in his own life story. But it is also true that one man, or woman, plays many parts in others' productions. Some wittingly and some unwittingly.

It is curious to me to think of the roles we play in one another's lives - often without realizing it. We all have our own life story, peopled with characters we both know and construe. There are the main actors, outside of oneself, of course, who play large parts, and then there are all the supporting roles and bit parts, often played by people who never auditioned to be in our lives at all. We all play some big roles in other people's life stories: mother, daughter, sister, friend, counselor, teacher, boss, etc. And then we all moonlight (sleepwalk??) in other dramas, either without knowing it or without realizing the importance of our role.

Let me illustrate. I remember a time when I really offended someone without knowing it. The funny thing was, before someone told me how I had slighted this person, I had no idea I was even capable of slighting her- that I was even a person of interest in her life. She was only a walk-on in my script. . . but I had been elevated to a much larger role in her drama. Funny how that can happen without our even knowing.

I think about some of the actors in my life story who may not know the parts they play. There is the woman who plays the part of the fashionista; the one whose style I always study because she always looks so good. There is the woman who performs a near perfect balancing act between her role as a mother and her creative pursuits. There is the well-read individual and the self-absorbed teenager. There is the runner who makes me feel guilty and the runner who is still my best friend. Probably most of these individuals would be surprised at how I have cast them. But these are the roles they play on my stage.

In one of my all-time favorite movies, About a Boy, the protagonist discovers, to his surprise and discomfort, that he is on center stage in someone else's life. He becomes angry when he is accused of not taking responsibility for his influence in another's life, not realizing that he was part of more people's lives than his own. The point of this very funny movie is that life IS an ensemble drama, like it or not. "No man is an island," a quote attributed to Jon Bon Jovi, provides the theme of the movie.

Sometime after Shakespeare wrote, Robert Burns wished, "O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us An foolish notion," but I'm not sure I'd really want that gift. It would be helpful sometimes to be able to identify our foibles and blemishes, but I think it would feel like too heavy a responsibility to bear. To worry about the quality of our work in dramas we have not asked to join, to realize we may loom large in the life stories of people we feel we hardly know or barely notice would wear us out. How can we play a part well when we've never seen the script? How can we get the stage business down when we are in so many dramas at the same time?

In I Thessalonians the apostle Paul prays that the Lord will "cause you to increase and abound in love for one another and for all men. . ." and I think that's the best direction. If we are always striving to do what is best for all men we may hope to execute any part we play honorably and with integrity. Our desire should be that our entrances and exits will carry with them the sweet aroma of Christ that will linger even after we have left the stage. That alone will make our performances truly memorable.

last resort

My husband thinks we should buy a fly swatter. We have been carefully raising five beautiful hot house flowers and the bees have begun to swarm about them. He came up with the flyswatter idea last week in church after glancing back at the balcony where our daughter HAD been sitting alone a minute before. . . .

Then there's the tall, blond surfer from the Outer Banks of NC who went on a mission trip with our tall, blond dancer and now calls her several times a week. There's the guy from work who slips notes in our eldest daughter's lunch bag. There's the guy raised-in-a-Christian-home who has been into Buddhism the last few years and all of a sudden is a regular attender at church since he's begun a correspondence with our strawberry blond. Or the young man who was too shy to play games at our son's 8 year old birthday party, but in the intervening nine years has summoned up enough courage to park his cute little red pick-up in our driveway and pick up our cute little daughter.

It's a whole new ballgame at our house, and, as my husband reminded me, we have the next fifteen years to enjoy it, since our youngest daughter is only five! (I even have mothers of five year old boys eyeing her!) We have put off this day for years, having strongly discouraged dating for our high school aged children. Now that our eldest has graduated it seems the dam has broken, and not just for her. All of a sudden boys have begun to hover around the edges of our lives; it seems every time we turn around we bump into one; they are always present in our peripheral vision, our phone (our girls do not have cellphones for a reason. . . ) rings even more often. It's like they were all out there waiting for some secret signal - maybe one of those tones that ears over 40 can't detect??

The fly swatter is probably not practical; the convent is not really an option since the girls were all raised as Protestants. We've decided our only option is to move to Malaysia.

looking for home

We always set our bedroom clock radio for 5 AM when the BBC news program comes on. I love the reporters' questions - they are so much blunter than the American reporters who often dance around an issue, trying to pretend they are impartial even when their questions drip with innuendo. The Brits just say what they are really thinking.

I never plan to actually get up before 6:30 so I catch about half that's said on the news and doze through the rest, often incorporating it into my waking dreams. Some mornings I have to ask my husband over my first cup of coffee, "Did such and such really happen in Iraq or was it just part of my dream?" Which of course gives him the opportunity to feed me all kinds of bizarre misinformation if he wants to.

Lately I have been waking up to anxious thoughts about all that I need to do in the next month, and then the next three months (they are two separate timetables in my mind.) As soon as I come out of sleep I feel the weight of all the unfinished tasks. This morning I actually found myself puzzling over the situation in the Middle East which dominated the fuzzy news reports floating around in my sleepy brain. It was such a relief to gradually realize that the situation in Lebanon, at least, was not my responsibility!

My relief was short-lived, however. While savoring the last few minutes in bed I heard a feature story that woke me up completely. It was about "trailing families" - a term that calls to mind either something lovely like wisteria or something pathetic like stragglers at the end of a race. In the news story it referred to families of diplomats who follow them overseas. The feature was about the challenges of living in a completely foreign place as an appendage to a gainfully employed individual.

The most frightening thing to me was the comment made by one wife, "When my husband gets up in the morning he goes to the office to work. No matter where we live he goes to the office to work. Just like he does in Washington. I, however, have to figure out where to get food, how to find the Western style market if there is one or the local market, how to cook, how to get around the city, how to take my children where they need to go. When we lived in Korea I got lost every day the first year we lived there."

All of a sudden I didn''t even want to get out of bed. I didn't want to leave my house. I wanted to stay right here, with the straggling, weedy perennial beds I could see out the bedroom window. I wanted to never leave the old apple tree I could glimpse on the north edge of our property. I wanted to wake every morning to the big maple out front and the sound of the brook and the sight of the sagging clothesline in the backyard. I didn't want to become part of a trailing family; I wanted to be firmly rooted in the rocky New England soil. I wanted to be from somewhere, not in transit; a patriot, not an expatriate.

Even though we never lived outside the US (unless you count Canada, which Americans never do), I have always struggled with the question , "Where are you from?" - meaning, where did you grow up, where are your roots. My husband has the same problem, but he can always preface his remarks with, "My father was in the military," which everyone immediately understands. Then he just lists the several bases where they lived - Omaha, North Carolina, Germany, Okinawa, and finally Dayton, Ohio. People understand a military family.

I, on the other hand, have no such familiar rubric into which to fit my family's nomadic history. I have condensed my saga to , "Well, I grew up on the East Coast." It's easier than saying, I was born in New Brunswick, Canada, but I only lived there for six months, so I'm not really Canadian. Then we lived two different places in New Hampshire, I went to elementary school in Massachusetss (two different school districts), then two different places in Pennsylvania and then high school in South Carolina. After that I became completely rootless through college and graduate school as my parents moved to Pennsylvania, (three different houses while I was in college), Michigan (two different communities), and finally Canada , (three different places), before settling in Nova Scotia. By that time I had been married for several years and established my own household. "So, " I always conclude when asked, "I'm not really from anywhere in particular. . . "

Maybe that nomadic upbringing is what caused the temporary lapse of judgment, which allowed me to say "yes" to moving to Southeast Asia as a trailing spouse for two years as I approach my 50th birthday, even though I have brought my own children up in only two different houses - both of which we have owned for ten years. They have not been just houses but homes which have given my children a strong sense of place and continuity, which I am about to disrupt, though I hope not destroy. I am scared by what we are about to do.

I know that our real core as a family is not a place, but our relationships. I know that in a very real sense we carry our home with us; that we may be even more closely knit in a bungalow in Petaling Jaya than we are in our comfy old Colonial, but I also know that culture and place are important to human beings - that we all want to have a place that feels like ours, people we fit with, customs that are predictable. I know that physical locations can in some mysterious way house memories, or at least unlock them. I know that in middle age I still long for that place to come home to; that I envy intensely my friends who have either always lived in the same area, or come "back home" after many years away. I have never felt like I really knew where Home was.

So now I hold my children's memories in my hands. I don't want them to grow up feeling rootless; I want them to know where they are from. I'd like them to feel they have a place to go home to. At the same time I know they will grow immeasurably from this experience and will probably be better, wiser adults because of it. I also know that 90% of employees who take overseas assignments do not come back to the same company when they return home, and I wonder if we will ever live here again, even though we are only renting our house, not selling it.

I know, too, that the real home I long for is probably a heavenly one, that I only mistake it for an earthly home because I don't know any better. One day all of our dreams of Home will come true.

the tortoise and the hare

"Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation. " George Washington

I have a friend who is a runner; I would consider her a "serious" runner. The fact of our almost 10 year friendship still amazes me, because I am the kind of person runners look down their tanned noses at.

I am more than a little soft in the middle; I feel like an Olympic athlete when I finish my daily 3 mile walk, (and she pats me on the back for it), but she runs twice that far on a slow day. She has an enormous wardrobe of race T-shirts; I have a lot of nightgowns. She frets over injuries which sideline her for a week or two (she has to use her rowing machine those days), I fret over not enough time to read. But she apparently likes me anyway, even if she can't respect me!

Last week at our children's swim lessons, (during which she faithfully goads me to swim across the pond with her), she confided that the one good thing she could think of about turning the big five-o is that she would be in a new age class and her times would automatically look better. She told me how fortunate I am that I don't have her "performance issues" to deal with, the unspoken script being "because you have never performed in the first place." Another day she told me my upper arms would "not look so bad" if I got a little sun.

So, what is it I love about this friendship, this friend? I mean, with friends like this. . . Well, this woman has stuck with me through thick and thin (an unfortunate metaphor considering the two of us). Several years ago I went through a very difficult time in my family and when other people scattered like cockroaches when the light is turned on, (alright, another unfortunate metaphor, though curiously apt), she hung around, endured the glare; she let me know she could not be scared away that easily. She exhibits the same tenacity in friendship as she does on the road. Neither rain, nor sleet nor gloom of night keep her from pounding the pavement every morning. Neither gossip nor innunendo nor the embarrassment of associating with someone whose family name hit the evening news more than once could kept her from sitting beside me when everyone else was clustered at the other end of the bleachers.

So, I can easily excuse her if the words "flabby" or "slow" occasionally slip into our conversations. I don't really mind hearing about blisters and toenail issues that might cause some people to blanch. I can handle her grousing about how baggy this or that particular brand of tiny size 10 jeans are. She has earned the privilege as far as I'm concerned. She is entitled to the appellation, "friend."

summer love

I have a long history of falling in love with authors. I remember playing the Authors children’s card game and hoping against hope that I would end up with the set of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Robert Louis Stevenson (whom my children irreverently refer to as Bob Louie Steve). The golden hair and moustache of the first and the soulful eyes of the latter thrilled my heart at the time, as their books did in later years.

I remember finishing the Chronicles of Narnia with a sigh when I was a bit older, closing my eyes and saying, “I want to marry the man who wrote this.” I did not know at the time that Lewis was 1) already dead, and 2) scholarly, stodgy and balding. I’m not sure which of those would have presented the greater obstacle to my 11 year old mind. I suspect the latter.

I have recently fallen in love again. Today’s author is also somewhat scholarly, balding (if you can believe the picture on his website, though the picture on the first dust jacket I saw looked completely different!) But the reader that I am today is much more forgiving of a few more pounds and a little less hair, and “scholarly” sounds rather attractive. The only real problem I can see is that (I only know this, also, from the dust jacket), he is married and has two children. (I am also married and quite a bit more committed in the way of children.) And while he is the man who speaks my innermost thoughts and lays bare the angst I wake with in the middle of the night, I am, alas, only one of millions of book club groupies. He probably wouldn’t give my dust jacket a second glance, if I even had one.

Seriously, though, while I’m not about to run off to Louisiana tomorrow, I was so moved by the first book I read by this guy that I immediately went to Amazon and bought five more of his works. I have not been disappointed yet. The first book I read was actually written in the first person by a female narrator who is close to forty as the book begins and she is perfect, she KNOWS things I would not have believed a man could know. And, it takes place in the deep South and all the terms of endearment are ones I remember from my brief but happy years spent below the Mason-Dixon line!

The other two books I have read so far focus more on the husbands’ characters, but they are all about marriage and what happens between two people who spend long years together in the same enterprise – parenthood. They illustrate the huge amount of unknowing that exists in even the most intimate relationships, but also the unbreakable ties between people who have shared a life and created new lives together. They remind the reader that the physical tangle of bodies and bedclothes is really just a metaphor for the tangle of hearts and histories that follows.

The books have caused me to reflect on the troubled but unbreakable bonds I’ve seen between some of my married friends; the ways in which children have seemed to bless some relationships and doom others; the chasm which exists between me, who have never lost a child, and friends who have walked through that dark valley; the ways that my own children have forged a stronger bond between my husband and I than either vows or feelings could. They have caused me to cherish each day with my children who are growing up and away from me as surely as tomorrow follows today.

So, although I am spending long, summer days with my new favorite guy, relishing his every word picture and description, ducking into his books every chance I get, what he keeps whispering in my ear is to look at my marriage and my children with fresh eyes, to hold them close, to remember that what matters at the end of life is how faithfully we have loved the people God has given us to love.

life on the cosmic stage

My son recently read a book of Urban Legends - many of which I remembered with a fond mixture of horror and fascination from my own adolescence. (My personal favorite is the caller on the upstairs phone.) Many of them have to do with close calls - the narrowly averted meeting with the serial killer, the ax murderer we nearly invited home.

We all love stories about close calls - the person who did not get on the Titanic, or who missed her flight on September 11. Most of us probably have a story or two from our own lives about a near disaster, a barely averted calamity which leave us thanking God, or our lucky stars, depending upon our understanding of the universe, and perhaps dealing with the curiously named "survivor guilt."

I wonder often how many close calls we have every day and never realize? Once in a great while God gives us a glimpse of how He has protected us, how His angels have lifted us up so we did not dash our feet upon the stones, but most often we don't know about the near misses in our lives, the deadly pestilence that did not come nigh our tents.

We do often discuss how "it could have been much worse;"
"Thank God this happened right after we left home and not in the middle of our trip."
"Just think if this had happened in the middle of the night."
"I can't believe he had the exact part we needed!"
"If I had not chosen to take this particular route today . . . "
These are all variations on the theme of the bullet we dodged and we find them fascinating and comforting.

We may wonder too, about potential calamities. Does it have eternal significance whether I take Rt 120 or 12A to get to Lebanon today? Is there, perhaps, a drunk driver or a log truck with failing brakes on one or the other? Or, on a different scale, is my daughter more likely to get AIDS working in a third world orphanage than she is to be in a fatal car crash on her way to college in Boston? (If you know Boston drivers you know how the odds stand.) I can go on this way ad nauseum, but eventually I have to conclude with Kip Dynamite, " Like anyone could even know that."

What can anyone know? Much of what we know about "how things work" is revealed in the book of Job. I am amazed when I consider that it is perhaps the earliest book of the Scriptures written - because what God showed us when He lifted the curtain on the heavenly backstage is huge - events are not random, even though they may not follow our notions of cause and effect. There are purposes we know nothing of; we only have some of the pieces of the puzzle; we are actually on display here on earth and it matters greatly how we live our lives.

In the book of Job God lets us see that events here on earth may well be part of a much larger story; that the calamities or blessings which come into our lives are entirely under the control of God, and He may choose to use our lives here on earth as proving grounds or even real life lessons for other conscious beings. He shows us that the calamities that we meet or avoid may not have anything to do with the goodness or rightness of our choices, but rather with His unknowable purposes. He teaches us that our responsibility is chiefly to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, trusting that He will lift us up in His time.

So what does this have to do with close calls and fortuitous choices? How does it help us make sense of events which may seem both random and weirdly preordained? It reminds us that love and fidelity to God are our first duty, combined with unswerving trust in His ways. It cautions us that we see only part of the picture, so it may not make sense to us. It comforts us with the knowledge that we do not need to agonize over what might have been if only we had made different choices or booked different flights. It reassures us that in a paradoxical way our responses to life matter greatly - they are on cosmic display, even though our obedience or disobedience may not gain its reward this side of the grave.

"Why" is a question God seldom answers, except in an ultimate sense. We will probably never know why one bridge washed out and another held. We will probably never understand why one child died in the car crash while another survived. We may never know which celestial beings are watching us as we wrestle with heartache and loss, and decide whether to rail against God or trust Him. We may never even understand how He receives any glory from our responses. But the book of Job assures us that He does.

Arthur Ashe, the tennis great who died of AIDS contracted through a blood transfusion made peace with the seemingly capricious nature of God's will when it is viewed through a purely earthly lens. Ashe, was a kind, noble humanitarian; certainly not a man who deserved to have his life cut short. R eflecting on his diagnosis he wrote, "If I were to say 'God, why me?' about the bad things, then I should have said 'God, why me?' about the good things that happened in my life." Both are past finding out under the sun.

the best mirror

"The best mirror is an old friend." --George Herbert

The best and the kindest! Last month I had the joy of spending a brief 36 hours with two old friends and their four beautiful children. We had been very close during those magic years when babies are being born, first houses are bought, life is full of birthday cakes and playgrounds, anxious calls to the pediatrician, sleepless nights with crying infants, sticky toddlers and first words. We vacationed together, prayed together, renovated old houses together, and pretty much lived in each others' pockets for several years. Last month we laughed over old memories, caught up on news, told outrageous stories and remembered why we were such famous friends.

I have come to believe that the closest thing to time travel that has ever been discovered is a reunion with old friends. While Ron and Rhonda probably looked like any mid-forties couple to the man on the street, to me they looked exactly like they did 17 years ago the summer we first met. Although almost every circumstance of our lives had changed, nothing had changed about our friendship.

Our children renewed their friendships differently; they have changed much more than their parents. Kids who used to have Legos and Barbies in common found they had very different interests as adolescents. They found enough shared interests to have a good time, but one of the unanticipated pleasures of our visit for me was watching my older children get to know my friends as adults, not as the "grown-ups" they used to be. I loved the feeling of introducing some of my favorite people to each other. It was great to hear my 18 year old pronounce Ron, "one of the funniest people I have ever met."

I find aging a puzzling and disconcerting process. External things about me keep changing, and the prognosis for my condition, humanity, is not good. But there is a core - I guess it's what theologians call the soul - that stays the same. I feel a separateness from my "outside man", in the words of the dear old King James. My inner man is renewed daily, and I am at some untouchable center the same person who gave that high school commencement speech, who taught that first freshman speech class with fear and trepidation, who gave birth to that first baby one afternoon almost 19 years ago.

Nothing underscores that continuity like a reunion with old friends. Yes, that forty five year old across the table is the same guy I prayed with so many times years ago!! Yes, that is my dear old friend with whom I engaged in so many friendly competitions, and if we each had a baby today we'd be fiercely comparing which one weighed more, who smiled first, who slept through the night first, who got more compliments from strangers at the grocery store!!! What a joy to find that, indeed some things never change!

James Boswell wrote that, "A companion loves some agreeable qualities which a man may possess, but a friend loves the man himself." I know that to be true, and I also find that nothing reveals "the man himself" like the mirror of an old friend.

handy-man

My husband is upstairs trying to catch a bat. Once or twice a year one gets into our living quarters from the eaves or the attic and causes quite a stir. His attempts at trapping the unhappy animal have turned into a spectator sport tonight. S just arrived down reporting that the bat has flown into Anna's room and Kevin can't catch it until the light is turned on. He has to go into the room to get to the light and he "is going in with a sheet over his head and he is screaming. Did you hear that screaming?" I did, in fact, hear some screaming, but it sounded distinctly young and female.

I suspect my husband is enjoying the drama a bit too much! But I can't blame him! If you end up with the unpleasant job of catching the bat (or the rat or the mice or the raccoons in the garage) you might as well enjoy it! Last week he rescued a baby robin from the dog's mouth and made it a make-shift nest in a box in the fork of a maple tree. For days we watched the parents fly in several times a day to feed the baby. My husband checked it every morning and it seemed hearty and energetic, but yesterday a weasel (or a house cat. . . ) found the box and the tiny bird met its Maker, despite Kevin's heroic resuce from the poodle.

My husband and sons not only have to act as animal control officers for our own house, but they service the neighborhood. We live across the street from a fierce feminist, a full professor at an Ivy League school who is just returned from an international round-table at Oxford on the Rights of Women. But she still calls my husband when a rat drowns in her toilet or a bat appears upstairs in her ancient house! We never rag her about it, but we do always smile. Some things you still need a man for.

not so raw confesssions

This morning a banner ad popped up for a site called, "Raw Confessions". The ad encouraged people to "confess anonymously to billions." Hmm, I wondered, what is the appeal of that invitation?? I did click on the address, and ended up with the options of "Confess" or "Browse Confessions." Thinking this was probably a site I should add to my filter's "Not Allowed" list, I chose "Browse Confessions."

What a shock! Dana anonymously confessed she had finally cracked and yelled at a cyclist on an "no-cycling" footpath! Shelly confessed that her mother could not get good medical care and she was sick and tired of it; ("Sorry" commented that she could not believe Shelly's account and Shelly retorted she was sorry that "Sorry" was "not a caring person." ) Well, if I had hoped for a 2006 version of the old "True Confessions" magazines I used to ogle at the checkout counter in the '70's, I was sorely disappointed.

Then I pondered what Raw Confessions I might make, of the same "bare-all" variety I had read. I might confess I had left an open Tupperware with cantaloupe in it on my kitchen counter when I went to bed last night and it was covered with tiny flies this morning when I woke up! Or that I have on more than one occasion pretended to be a bona fide customer in order to use a "Customers Only" restroom. (Please don't tell anyone.) I have never stooped so low as to take home a roll of toilet paper from a public bathroom when I knew I was about to run out at home and was running too late to stop at the store, but the thought has crossed my mind. I don't know if that would count on Raw Confessions.

On a more risky, personal level, I might confess that I have (not very often, of course) lied to someone about making a phone call I had promised to make when I just have not gotten around to it. I have more than once lied about my weight on some form that requests that somehow pertinent information. I have even lied to myself about my weight!!

I have told an ostensibly needy person that I didn't have any change, when I knew if I looked I could find plenty. Once I drove through the "correct change only" lane of a toll booth when I did not have the right amount. I didn't wait for the "Thank You" light but just kept going. I never looked back. I have told my children the chocolate was all gone when I was really just waiting for them to go to bed so I could have it with a cup of coffee and five minutes peace.

These kind of confessions are easy to make and they do have a certain appeal for the confessors, I think, though they are pretty disappointing for the salacious among us (not me) who want to read something really juicy. Confession is good for the soul, if it is genuine and not half-hearted. But we can twist even the lovely grace of confession by dissimulation and minimizing. I read a hilarious spoof at the fake Christian news site, LarkNews, about a man who had to find a different fellowship group since he was obviously too sinful for his current group. He had confessed to a problem with lust and pornography and found no one else in the all-male group could relate to him at all. He was the only one with a problem.

Haven't we all been there? Maybe we never actually make the confession, we only imagine making it, and we just know that no one else we know struggles with the particular sins we do and that we would be shunned and shamed if we admitted them. So we all make sure our Raw Confessions are pretty tame; we sound disclosing, but we are really hiding. We all spend our lives showing our best selves to one another, tossing the pile of dirty laundry behind the shower curtain when company comes, lighting the scented candles to cover the odor of the catbox- which- hasn't- been- emptied- for- days, sucking in our stomachs when we walk past the mirror, preferring to undress in candlelight rather than flourescence (this is a really good idea, incidentally.)

You get the point. And no, I am not about to make any really raw confessions here. But I need to make sure I make tham before the Almighty; that I don't make the easy ones but figure He'd be too shocked if He knew what I was really like. And I need to practice making some relatively raw confessions to my friends as well, for their sakes as well as mine. Not because misery loves company but because we all need to know we are not alone and we can be forgiven. We need to allow our friends to minister the absolution, "Your sins are forgiven" to us, and to free them to make their own raw confessions.

I still may go back to that site and tell the anonymous billions about that time when I thought no one was looking and I . . . .

Happy Birthday

Today is my husband's birthday. As I poured him his second cup of coffee from the pot he made while I was still in bed (he always gets up before me), I thought, as I do so often, about the grace upon grace God has poured out on me. I handed him the mug as he sat on the front porch of our 210 year old clapboard house - the kind I always wanted to live in. He was sitting on the porch reading his Bible; several cats loitered nearby. I can't help but remember walking through a neighborhood of old homes during our courting days, choosing which ones we'd like to own and singing, "Our house is a very, very very fine house. With two cats in the yard. Life used to be so hard. Now everything is easy cause of you." And here we are, 22 years later, in a very, very, very fine house. And a very, very, very fine life.

Is everything easy? Not by a long shot. Is my marriage everything I thought marriage would be? Not hardly! But it is still very, very, very fine. And this morning I am very, very grateful.

one man's trash

I spent the last week visiting my elderly parents in the tiny North Atlantic fishing village where they live. By a stroke of fortune, the week we were there the tide happened to be low around 7 or 8 AM, so that I was able every morning to walk the full length of three white sand crescent beaches at the end of their dead end road. Although the seabirds were numerous and raucous, I was often the only person on the beach, free to reminisce, ponder and dream in perfect solitude.

I did a lot of reminiscing. I grew up spending my summers at the beach in New Hampshire where the water is nearly as cold and the sealife the same. I remember so well the pungent almost sufurous smell of the salt marshes - the thrill we felt after hours in the oven of our station wagon and the smell of the burning tar pots that marked the constant road construction north of Boston, when we could finally lean out the windows and smell the beach. I remember days walking the beach with my brother, hunting for treasure, making up stories about pirates and shipwrecks, trying out harmonies and learning to blend our voices over the lapping and breaking of the waves.

I did not come to know this particular Maritime beach with it's numbing cold water until the summer I was twelve, and did not frequent it regularly until I was married. When my children were young we spent weeks every summer here hunting for shells and the hundreds of sand dollars that the tides washed in, building sand castles next to the icy water and watching the waves lap them up as the tide encroached. We walked the beaches for hours, giving a wide berth to marooned jelly fish, watching seabirds dive for fish, chasing sand pipers across the dunes and leaving endless footprints in the wet sand. None of those footprints remain, of course, anywhere but in my memory.

I found myself thinking about mortality and death far more than I wanted to this week. I wanted to think joyful, carefree thoughts on the silvery windswept beach, but I could not escape the fact that the visit I had come to make might be the last time I would see my father alive, that I was already ten years older than my mother was the first time I remember walking this beach. The reminders were everywhere from my father's stooped, unsteady walk to my mother's deeply furrowed cheeks. While I still had a daughter with me who giggled at the way the sand slipped away under her heels when a wave washed out, I had another who was discussing her plans for an upcoming semester in India.

I combed the sand, as one must, for things washed up and abandoned by the tide. What I was most drawn to was the occasional piece of seaglass, clear or green or brown which glowed on the wet sand, unlike the dull, chalky white of the bony sand dollars or shells. I carefully picked up each one I saw and tucked it away in a pocket. I loved the feel of the thick, dull edges under my thumb; edges which at one time would have cut and drawn blood, but were now smooth and safe.

I wondered as I passed over the shells, searching for one more piece of glass, why I was drawn to the man-made, the unnatural items on the beach. Wasn't the natural creation the real wonder and beauty of the beach? What could I find appealing in fragments of broken beer bottles - the detritus left by careless fishermen? Why should I pass over the shells and choose the glass?

The transformation of the broken shards was the real fascination. Pieces which were sharp, dangerous, not to be touched lest they make you bleed had, by the pounding of the surf and the rocking of the waves, the pressure of the deep, the very weight of the water become friendly, safe to the touch, dulled, but also tamed. They still gleamed in the sun, though the patina was definitely softer and they had lost the clarity and sparkle of new glass. But now they could be picked up by even a child, stowed in a pocket, fingered and caressed.

Once discarded as useless, thrown away, cracked and broken, they had become like gems lying on the beach. Not useful anymore, they became beautiful instead, no longer common, they became rare. Not sharp, but soothing; not threatening but somehow comforting. I filled a pocket each day with them and carefully laid them out on a sunny windowsill where they could catch the light and grow warm to the touch.

I love the thought of the change wrought in the remains of old bottles; the inevitability of the softening, the time it must have taken - who knows how many weeks, months or years the pieces endured the action of the ocean before they were gently washed ashore on the beach? Who knows how far they travelled; whether they were tossed from a fishing boat in this very bay or traveled hundreds of miles before landing here. There seems to be no intent on the part of the ocean to file and buff the fierce corners and edges, but given enough time it will always succeed.

Is there a metaphor for life here? My mind, of course, runs that way - to think that time and tide, pressure and pounding, weight and waves can beautify the commonplace, soften the harsh, smooth the rough edges of us all. And they can, but I know that old, broken fragments of humanity are not as predictable as sea glass. We can choose to let time and experience soften and gentle us, or we can fight to stay the same. We can become like seaglass - older, wiser, softer, kinder, less brilliant but more luminous; but the transformation is not inevitable.

As I watch my father and several elderly friends move toward the ends of their earthly journeys I am impressed by the vastly different ways they have weathered the storms of their lives. Some are like old glass, polished and buffed to a lovely glow, their sharp corners mellowed and smoothed by time and trial. Others remain sharp and cutting still, full of hurt and anger, ready to wound any who come too close. They have not allowed the time and tides of their lives to do their softening work.

I suspect we have much more choice about our future shapes than the broken debris tossed into the ocean. We can respond to the waves that toss us in any number of ways. I'd like to end up soft to the touch, comforting, definitely weather-beaten, but not worse for the wear. When the glint and sparkle of my younger days is gone, I'd like to gain the winsome glow of the seaglass , the small treasure that catches your eye as you walk the beach. God grant me that grace.