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Fulfillment

Fulfillment

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Advent is the season of waiting, of ancient chants and plainsong. It is the season of patience and hope and muted gladness, a glimpse of distant mountains, the lure of the promised land.

Advent is, therefore, a good time for new beginnings, for celebrations of all kinds, planned and unplanned.

I write today on one of the latter. Unless you count the two years in a dusty African village, the nine months awaiting a visa, the long years before that.

It is, for my family, a day of fulfillment and rejoicing. To which we all say “Amen.”

Active Shooter

Active Shooter

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On the day of the latest mass shooting in the United States, I took part in an active shooter exercise at my workplace. We learned how to run — low to the ground in a zigzag pattern. We learned how to hide — turn off the lights, close and lock your door, barricade it if possible. And we learned how to fight — go for the hand that is holding the gun, do whatever you can to slow or disrupt the killer.

I sat politely, even took notes. Colleagues joked and laughed about crawling under their desks, George Costanza-style. “I learned a lot from watching Seinfeld,” said our presenter. 

I don’t know if employees at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino had taken active shooter training. But could a 30-minute presentation have helped them  counter the assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns? And more to the point … is this how we want to live?

(M2 Browning machine gun, courtesy Wikipedia)

A Door Ajar

A Door Ajar

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It’s a mild day so I write with the French doors slightly ajar. A small breeze wafts in across the deck. The deck where we hung out yesterday eating crab dip before the big feast.

Afterward there was a game of bocce ball — and some energetic raking preceded it. (Hard to play bocce ball with leaf piles everywhere.)

It was a different kind of Thanksgiving. New people to share it with. A tinge of sadness, too. A dish or two we’ve never tried before. All befitting a change, a shift.

I liken the shift to the door ajar. A door through which one sort of life has ended and another sort of life has begun.

Full Circle

Full Circle

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Our neighbors are expecting their first grandchild, due any day now. These folks have lived next door since we moved into the house 26 years ago. I remember their daughters as little kids and they remember my daughters as babies.

It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that we would stay in the house more than a quarter century (maybe two years?!), but stay put we have, and the staying and the putting have brought a great full-circle quality to life that almost makes up for the years lost to traffic jams and Metro delays.

So on this red-letter day for my family — one daughter celebrating a birthday and another learning that a long wait will soon be over  — I pause to savor the richness of it all — and to give thanks.


(Two rush hours, two red-letter days, much gratitude.)

7,800 Miles

7,800 Miles

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It is 7, 214 miles from Washington, D.C., to Kigali, Rwanda, where Tom has gone on a business trip. In less than an hour it will be 7,800 miles — just a few hundred more — from Nasa’s New Horizons probe to Pluto.

Earth meets space, the Kuiper Belt, that which lies beyond our solar system in what surely deserves to be called terra incognita (except that it isn’t terra!).

Early pictures show an orange globe with a crown of methane and nitrogen ice and craters the size of the Grand Canyon. By tonight we will have more photographs of this celestial body, photographs that may help scientists decide whether to call it a planet or a dwarf planet.

What we have right now is a tantalizing glimpse, a collectively held breath — and of course, the wonder. 

Fourth of July Parade

Fourth of July Parade

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Yesterday I went to the National Independence Day Parade with my dear friend Kay, who is visiting from France. It was mostly a chance to hang out with her, but it was also an opportunity to soak up the holiday spirit and marvel at the expansiveness of the American dream.

There were high school marching bands from Ohio, Nebraska and Alabama. There were cloggers and Irish steppers and Chinese-American dancers. There were the Sikhs of America holding down a Smokey the Bear balloon.

There was, in short, all manner of celebration and diversity.  Not exactly a small hometown ensemble — but not sophisticated and glitzy, either. More of a medley than I thought possible in these days of politicized newscasts and gerrymandered districts. And that in itself, I think, is worth a parade.

Casual Thursday

Casual Thursday

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Like most of the rest of the working world (those of us who are working today) I’m wearing jeans and sandals. Also seen in the office today: flip-flops, shorts and a little gray terrier. The pace is slow, the day is short and the mindset is … what is the mindset? I’ve already forgotten.

I’m tempted to hang up a “Gone Fishin'” sign, but I don’t want to check out completely.

Instead, I’m sitting here in office chair, hands on the keyboard, work piled on the desk, summoning up the energy to dive into it.

And I will dive in … any minute now.

Outside In

Outside In

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I missed National Trails Day (June 6) but am not too late for Great Outdoors Month (all of June). The idea behind  these celebrations is to get people outside. No problem for a walker in the suburbs. I’m outside as often as possible.

But Great Outdoors Month is a good time to ponder the great divide between outside and in, between natural light and its artificial cousin, between the elements and our shelter from them.

Thinking back to Benin,  open doors, the colorful cloths hung where screens would be. There the line between outside and in is far more blurred than it is here. There people sleep on their little verandas in the hot season. They cook outside, eat outside and often wash their clothes outside, too. They do not need a Great Outdoors Month. 

Not to romanticize this, though. The Beninese are in a constant battle to keep their houses clean and dust-free, not an easy proposition with unpaved roads and meager sidewalks. They live with a degree of discomfort most of us cannot imagine.

Still, in so many ways, including this one, they remind me of simple truths we seem to have forgotten. One of them is this: That before we became creatures of climate-controlled comfort, we lived in tune with the wind and the rain and the sun. We belonged to our world in a way we don’t anymore. And it’s good to remember that.

“Long Live the King”

“Long Live the King”

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A quick trip to Kentucky last weekend plopped me down squarely in horse country on the big day. I watched American Pharoah clinch the Triple Crown only an hour away from the racetrack where he won the Derby.

There was a certain inevitability about the win, not just the odds and the sportscasters’ predictions but the three-year-old leading the entire race, his second-only-to-Secretariat pace, his supple gallop, his champion’s heart.

Only a few minutes before the race, the televised coverage took what I considered an unusual but  heartening turn. It showed a printing press whirring out a newspaper and speculated on what tomorrow’s headline would be.

Was I imagining this? A print newspaper? A headline? Not a click, a tweet or a post?

So yesterday, before I left Lexington, I picked up the newspaper. The Lexington Herald Leader‘s headline, which I regret I did not photograph, was “Long Live the King.” The Washington Post‘s, which I regret I could not photograph better, was “American History.”

American History in more ways than one.

Mother’s Day Hike

Mother’s Day Hike

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You can do a brunch or a picnic. You can do church and a corsage or dinner and a movie. When asked how I’d like to spend Mother’s Day, I said, let’s take a hike.

We went back to Great Falls again, the park I visited Friday to see vintage aircraft but left that day without walking even 10 minutes on one of its inviting trails.

Yesterday the road to the park was closed when we first drove by. Completely full. But after trying a crazy trail head parking lot we could barely get out of once we got into it, we drove back by the park and found it was admitting visitors again.

We strolled above the chute and the falls and Mather Gorge. Then we looped down to Sandy Point where we picked up the Matildaville Trail that took us back to the parking lot. It was a perfect Sunday amble with rocks to scramble, straightaways to savor and views to inhale.

And when it was over, we had a piece of the sinfully rich chocolate strawberry cake that Claire made.