A Long-running Past Into the Future

It was a brief gathering — a few hours that whirred by in a rattle of baby clangs and the chatter of adults. But it happened. We weren't all there — we lamented the relational gaps — but enough of us were present to call it good: four generations, convened in one place for food and visiting and the blessed grace of looking into each other's eyes while convened in the same room, around the same table. For once it wasn't an occasion. No one had died, there were no candles to blow out or graduations to proclaim; there was no holiday to celebrate. We all simply found ourselves proximate and seized the opportunity. 

We don't take such moments for granted; they happen seldom enough given our disparate zip codes — that, and no one can guess how many more chances we will get. Life is unpredictable that way — ultimately ephemeral, and no matter what our ultimate ages inevitably shorter than we'd wish. We see what we get to see, do what we get to do in the days of our pulsing, according to our choosing. And the choosing is key, I reflect to myself, given that we can neither see nor do it all. 

Whatever lies ahead, today we chose to be together, if only for that handful of hours — parents, child, grandchildren, partner and Great-grandchild. We remembered, we caught up, we laughed, we shared a meal, we inhabited the moment — physically this time, rather than telephonically — with our lives and ourselves. And while I'm grateful for the technology that blurs and bends the miles on a more frequent basis, there is something holy and blessed about bodies in one place, sitting close enough enough to feel the warmth of each other's skin and smell the varied colognes. 

The baby helps. Without voicing the reality of it, his crawling and reaching, fascinating and cooing reminds us of the birthings that prefigured this very gathering — of a husband and wife who became parents of babies who grew to become parents whose babies now give birth. Families as gestation and birth writ large and wide. 

While the rest of us were both buoyed by and freighted with memory, baby Truett has only a future into which he reflexively leans and beckons us. Willingly and sluggishly — nostalgically — we follow along. And somehow both the leaning backward and the leaning forward are satisfying; centering even. 

And so it was that we eventually went our separate ways — changed a bit despite the brevity of the moment. Swelled, perhaps, by the largeness — and the largess — of these precious days. 

However many of them we get.