"Human nature will not flourish...if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth." (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
When Brett was five years old, his godmothers took him to the Barnum and Bailey Circus (which he would later join for a few intense months) in New Orleans. They returned home, his aunts disappointed that he spent more time focusing on the children around him, with the amazing sparkle-guns from the concession stand, than on the three-ring acts with their own sparkle and glitter and clowns and show-manship. As they described what he had missed, he continually corrected them. The clown car wasn't red, it was yellow; there were 8 lions, not 6; etc. They were amazed, as were his teachers in years to come, that despite his seeming inattention, his attention to what was going on around him was remarkable.
I thought of those stories as we sat in Lefty's Restaurant on Sunday with Brett and Stephanie. In the middle of our conversation, Brett picked up the sugar jar on the table, fiddled with the lid to see if it worked, added his opinion to the topic at hand, then without saying a word, rose and carried the sugar jar to the elderly man at the table next to us. It was only then that we realized what he had seen, processed and acted on: the gentleman was looking in vain for the waitress for assistance with the jar on his table that wasn't working.
It's those little moments that we miss out on when our children do not live, work and play near us, but choose 'unaccustomed earth' for their own life experience. Those moments remind us that there is a continuity in life, that childhood episodes are simply tantalizing previews to an adult life that we cannot judge or gage in such a narrow view-finder as a report card, or an A.D.D. diagnosis, or a detention notice, or a teacher's opinion, or an expulsion, or the lost details of a three-ring circus. Bette Midler said, in reviewing her own life: "If only I'd known that one day my differentness would be an asset, my early life would have been much easier." It is more likely our difficulties, however, that shape our character and our future kindness.
We spent a relaxed five days with 'the kids,' who mostly slept and read, decompressing from the energy of the Big Apple. Even the over-night stay on the wild West Coast of the island was in keeping with the overall mood of their trip: cloudy, misty, shrouded in the intimacy of a cool fog that closed the veil on our passage from the East. The whole of the coast appeared as an inviting sea-side room with grey ceilings, cedar-treed walls and rugs in coves of gentle surf. Brett and I shared a quiet walk on the beach, while Michael read and Stephanie slept. It was the perfect time to just be mother and child, playing on a beach, encountering puppies and dodging waves and talking about life and politics and other things that sound relevant and important, but mostly I was simply a mother marveling at this grown child.
But time itself, as Ben Hecht so aptly said, "is a circus, always packing up and moving away." Usually we say our goodbyes at the top of the Malahat Mountain pass, after lunch at the Inn. But this time we went with them the extra hour to Sydney, where the ferry would take them on to Lopez Island and Stephanie's family, before they make their way back to their life in New York.
This trip seemed like more of a passage for our son into his new life than his wedding did last year. Major life events, whether they are weddings, deaths, births, graduations, or other milestones, all seem to come with an aura of suspended reality around them. We live through the ceremonies, through the rituals, through the shock, through the transitions, but there needs to be a passage of time for a sense of normalcy to arise out of the new circumstances. We adjust to life without a loved one, we adjust to living with a spouse, a partner or a baby, we adjust to a new job or home. The newness wears off and the daily-ness brings routine to the new way of being. I listened to Brett introduce Stephanie to neighbors as his wife; I heard him tell me that his life now includes the "Stephanie-filter" through which all of his decisions must pass. He has taken to this new role as a husband, and on this trip, our relationship deepened once again as we became mother/father-and-married son. Stephanie's glow is working its own magic in our lives.
The day after they left, I sat alone on the water, watching and hearing the world shift as the tide followed some mysterious direction in its holy Divine purpose. The awareness of where I am astounds me in its beauty. A seal glides just below the sun-specked calm waters, only her head revealing her secret passage. Dragonflies lightly touch each other mid-air, their clear wings holding the stain-glass colors of this morning Cathedral. It is the kind of morning, even with my wistful thoughts of our now empty home, that tells me there is no name that can be given to the Creator of these wonders. The sense of awe includes an awareness at the utter transcendence unfolding all around us.
Michael and I continue to realize and name our blessing at being here. As we sat on the waterfront reading, we could hear the eaglet stretch and flap her enormous wings in preparation for her instinctive first launch. Why is this thrilling, if not a reminder of how we, too, greet each day with the possibilities of flight beyond our own confining limits and thoughts? I remember suddenly the small plaque that I kept in our bedroom for 23 years before passing it along to my niece after she had her son: "There are only two things we give our children. One is roots, and the other wings."
"If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, You are there." (Ps 139). In this sacred space, these early morning reflections take flight revealing, if just for the moment, the Divine Circus of joy and wonder.
YAY GOD
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