Sunshine's view of Grandpa

 

 

2014, Grandpa with Benjamin (2 yrs. old)  He loves reading to his grandkids.

“Grandma, I don’t know how to say this.”

 

Sunshine, just go ahead and say it.

“I mean, I love Grandpa, but…

Why did you marry him?”

                                    

                                      I glanced over at

                                            My husband

December 1972, our wedding day

nearly asleep in the rocker. 

His face was flushed

from the heat,

and his graying hair 

looked almost silver.

 

Sunshine looked at him, long

and hard.  “He has a big tummy.”

Why, yes, Grandpa is fat.

“Oh, Grandma!  Mommy said 

we can’t say that

he is fat!”

 

 

 

It’s okay, he already knows it.

It came to me that Sunshine had never known us

 as we were, when we fell in love.

                 So I told her how young we were, how his hair

Just out of college.  So young.

was black and curly, and he was thin then.

I told her how my hair was so long that

it came nearly to my waist.

I told her how we met and then

 we…got married.

Oh, the day of hot-pants!

Sunshine looked back and forth at us.

Long and hard.  

 She gave up. 

“Okay, Grandma. If you say so."

 

T is for...

Time.  We all moan about not having enough of time.  I used to tell my children that they had too much time on their hands if they were getting into fights.  My husband always has big plans for projects he will do over the weekend, but on Sunday night, we look at each other and ask, “Where did the time go?”

That is the big question of the day:  Where did the time go?

It is not as though it slipped behind the bookcase, or joined the lost remote in the sofa cushions.  It certainly isn’t hiding with the iPod, which my husband has AGAIN misplaced!  Time seems to run away from us, like a small child who has just discovered he can outrun his parents.

Time is a fire in which we all burn.

In “Star Trek: Generations” with Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard (sighJ), he is confronted by Dr. Tolian Soran, played by Malcolm McDowell, who says, “Time is the fire in which we all burn.”  Picard has just learned that his brother and nephew have perished in a fire, and this statement hits him rather brutally. 

Is Dr. Soran correct?  Is this the view that most people accept? 

I don’t believe, or can’t believe that it is. 

Time is the ticking of some form of clock, to be sure, but it is also an accumulation of life experiences, memories, events, and closely held loved ones.  Time is a steady revolution of the earth around the sun, a myriad of glorious sunrises and sunsets, the rushing of the foamy tides.  Time is holding the hand of my husband on our wedding day, and still holding his hand when we are old. 

Jean Luc Picard, at the end of the movie when all action is said and done, concludes that time is much like an old friend who moves along slowly with us through our life time.  I really like that conclusion.  “Do not go gentle into that good night!  Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!”  as proposed by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas is certainly an option.  But, as for me, knowing that the closing of my eyes as a mortal being, and the opening of them to behold God for all eternity, I prefer that measurement of time.