Archive for the ‘Who knows?’ Category
Vive la différence!
Recovering from Silence
I watch the women in my life — and who could resist? Each a marvel, her own constellation of strengths and mysteries. What strikes me most is their uncanny attunement: they know when something is right, and when it is not. Perhaps this is why their lives, more often than ours, run longer — they listen to themselves.
These days I find that same listening rising in me. My history, long buried in hidden folds, presses forward and names itself. The fiftieth anniversary of my marriage to Beth, my late wife, has brought me into strange country. Difference is not only what I admire in others; it is what I now confront in myself.
For years I kept my inner dialogue under lock. Sadness and joy alike I carried in silence. When I remarried, I spoke Beth’s name, but I hid my grief. I feared it would wound my wife to know sorrow still haunted me, so I consigned memory to the shadows. Silence gave sorrow room, but never joy.
Now the landscape shifts. What was once rolling and familiar has grown sharp and perilous. The gentle curves of remembrance have narrowed into hairpin turns; the easy hills have broken into sudden ridges, blind crests, and heart-stopping overlooks. Change no longer waits at a distance; it walks beside me.
I have wept more in the last month than in decades past. But the tears are welcome, because in speaking aloud — in sharing what I once held back — grief no longer stands alone. Joy has stepped out of hiding to take its place beside sorrow. And together they travel with me, companions at last.
Women are sometimes faulted for their sensitivity, their willingness to notice change within. But I am learning this is not theirs alone. It is human. And that discovery — that I too can listen, can open, can live — is the real difference.
Vive la différence!
Light Falls Across the Years
Light falls across the years; a ribbon that ties together mornings separated by decades.
Here in my kitchen on a quiet Sunday, the coffee not yet poured, I have left the lights off. From the east, the sun filters through late-summer oak leaves and finds its way inside. The beam slants low and sure, almost carrying texture in the air, as though light itself could be brushed with the hand.
And in an instant, I am a child again. I see the narrow blinds of my boyhood window, the sunlight carving bright stripes across the floor, shadow and brilliance arranged like notes of a song I did not yet know how to sing.
What surprises me now is not the memory itself, but its persistence. Across the long arc of living, my gaze has remained tuned to these small alterations of light and dark, to the way illumination lays itself down like a blessing on ordinary spaces. It is as if such moments have bracketed my days—beginning in wonder, and now, in later years, circling back to wonder again.
Living on Borrowed Time
When I would visit Crate Elliot, he would inevitably declare, “I’m livin’ on borrowed time, Preacher.”
Are not we all?
Until he entered my circle of friends, I thought borrowed time meant waiting for the reckoning. Watching him tend his garden and honor his wife with its produce, I learned a different lesson: borrowed time is a lens.
It reveals how the small enriches life — the nick on a cup, the cadence of an old friend’s greeting, the way sunlight lingers on a porch rail — until each ordinary thing becomes revelation.
Yes, there is a mild terror in knowing our days are bound. But there is also a clearer joy in choosing, every morning, what to keep. If grace appears anywhere, it is in the hands we extend when we know the hours are not infinite.
That is how I try to live now: making small deposits of tenderness, balancing a ledger with laughter and apology, learning to call the ordinary holy.
Life stretched long and thin pales beside a life meaningfully measured by small mercies extended in love, however short it may be. Living on borrowed time, I’ve come to see, is like living on the edge of infinity.
Chores Not Done
The air, thickened and over-warm, cautions against exertion. A brief and once beguiling call to fix up, repair, restore is but a whimper. In a sparse corner of my imagination I hear that whimper and recoil. It’s too damp and the soon-to-fall rain dissuades me from sawing wood or clearing debris. I retreat to the table where a seat awaits. The air inside, comparatively cooler, is seductive. I shall not work says my first yawn. Indeed not, says the second. I’m done, says my nodding head.
Apple – In One Fell Swoop…
The New York Times, quoted by Apple’s site, reports that Amtrack spokesman, Matt Hardison, said that the carrier has adopted Apple’s iOS devices to make improvements for Amtrak and customers in, “one fell swoop”. (Amtrack Story )
That’s what I LOVE about cliches. The ubiquitous meaning of the thing fades and all that is left is a sweet sounding shibboleth. Those of us who remain the faithful adherents of language filled with meaning are assaulted by the remarkable capacity of others in our species to use a phrase only because it “sounds right” but have no sense of whether it is really appropriate.
I suppose we could get our dandruff up over this or let our craft flounder but in the end it’s all really quite funny. Take the quote and replace the cliche with a substitute bearing the meaning of the abused phrase:
Imagine this, “Amtrak’s Matt Hardison says, ‘We’ve made a number of important improvements all in one cruel, predatory, devastating attack upon our customers and Amtrak that they never saw coming.'”
Shakespeare put the phrase, “one fell swoop” into the mouth of a grieving Scot. If we replace his tight script with our own, the burden of too many worlds might lead to an early end for McDuff. A McDuff whose remorse upon learning that his family and household have been ruthlessly slaughtered is so powerfully portrayed by the image of a predatory bird diving with breath taking descent, on his hapless prey. Ah, McBeth a ruthless predator, has descended upon the house of McDuff!
So, fair Apple, from thy tall tree hast thou descended upon commuters to work mayhem and destruction? Only on their wallets would Apple prey!
For those who missed my humor I can scarcely resist owning it. My dandruff may be “up” but the word is dander. Dander, I say, as in a frothy fermented roiling mass. In an argument some ill tempered people become so worked up the spit flies as if they were foaming; His dander is up.
As to water craft, they founder, not flop about like Sole (flounder). So far as I know all founder remain seaworthy even after they flop about. In the latter case a ship may strike a reef and be dashed in such a way that the vessel breaks apart; It founders.
On a whim... 