Now

The goodness of life is limitless. Easy to remember in the good times. Tougher to believe when life is challenging. This morning, I rose and read emails…one from a friend who loves to keep her Manhattan neighborhood free of homemade posters about lost kittens, guitar lessons and poetry readings, one from a friend who was having second thoughts about his two-decade dislike and distrust of the small SE Kansas community where he lives, another from a friend whose father died quietly yesterday after a long, slow decline. Then I read the news.,..of gatherings of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Mecca, Cairo, and other cities, of impending commemorations of 9/11, of the now-in-evidence construction of the 9/11 Memorial and other aspects of Ground Zero.

I can’t help but think about where I was that day, how I learned of the bombings, how with my neighbors gathered at the Muffin Shop we witnessed the collapse of both towers, how I rode my bicycle into the restricted area below 14^th street for a birthday party two evenings later. The memories are vivid, as they are with other American tragedies—the assassinations of the Dr. King and the Kennedy brothers, the explosion of the Challenger. They are American tragedies. They are ours. And they are no more or less important than those that strike other parts of our ever-shrinking globe. Reverence for life is in all beliefs.

Last night after dinner, Seal came into the kitchen where I was cleaning up. He stood quietly by me for a few moments, then raised his hand and insistently said “Fannie,” which is code for “Come with me.” So I took his hand and he took me to the living room to play. First, we colored…me inside the lines, him wherever he wanted. Then we made a paper airplane, which amused us for about 10 minutes. Next, we put all eight couch pillows on the floor and did gymnastics, which could have kept us screaming with joy all night. Except that one of us got tired.

Life is so good and so simple. We have it. And then we don’t. Between the beginning and the end, we have endless choices about what we do with the one life that is ours.