Category Archives: Personal and family life

The perfect strawberry is a complicated business, and one in which I am not particularly adept. To understand this year’s crop requires a history.

Twenty years ago in Providence, an 80’ Norway spruce in our back yard made the transition from playground and shade provider to weed.  Conifers have been around this tired planet for 200 million years, a vital component of many ecosystems.  Their names are strong, evocative – even poetic:  Sitka Spruce, Pacific Silver Fir, Lodgepole Pine, Incense Cedar, Mountain Hemlock, Baldcypress, Redwood, and Tamarack.   Evergreen is a misnomer.  Each species has its own timetable, but they shed their needles every year like deciduous trees, some with a striking fall yellow.  Their narrow pointed leaves carpet the earth, but they only drop older needles with the current crop (or several year’s worth) remaining to hold ever-green all winter.

In the early nineties, this illustrious past made no difference to me: the needles and shade killed what little lawn I had in my tiny city lot; the sticky, golden drippings from the bark bonded to the finish of our cars; cones devastated our bare feet, and the 18” limbs hung like the Sword of Damocles over my garage, only five feet from its thirty six inch trunk.  We had no hope of a garden, and the pin oak I treasured twenty feet north of the spruce was beginning to deform to find sun of its own. The Norway spruce which had been planted by the previous owner of our home in the 1930’s was sixty years later a tall and heavy weed.

After we moved to Providence, my son designed and built a refuge with his new city friends.  Scavenging from the dumpsters in a six lot subdivision a quarter mile away, they cut and fit remnants of two by fours, two by sixes, half inch plywood and discarded loose nails into a tree house fifteen feet up in the Norway spruce.  My only contributions were a blue tarp to waterproof the roof and, after setting a rope in place, teaching Gabriel how to foot lock up the rope to his sanctuary.  I did go up to reassure his mother that although not OSHA compliant, it was habitable and secure.

The three wings, each long enough to accommodate a sleeping bag conjoined into a four foot square parlor under a three and a half foot ceiling.  Once they hoisted themselves up and pulled the rope up after them, parents slept secure that no marauders could easily access their fortress.  The boys ran an extension cord from Gabe’s window for a light, and when they each stretched out on their bags facing inward, the center afforded ample space for card playing, scarfing down Twinkies, Cokes and Doritos (fare foreign to his mother’s kitchen), tale telling and planning night excursions into the city.  We naively thought they were safe from the city; years later we learned the city wasn’t safe from them.

Unbeknownst to their parents, two in the morning expeditions wandered as far as the bus tunnel steeply descending the half mile from Brown University Hill to South Main Street near the courthouse three miles from our house.  The tunnel was a traffic free route for public transportation connecting the university communities of Rhode Island School of Design and Brown to downtown.  Pitch dark, except when a bus caromed through lights ablaze, the tunnel was an irresistible challenge for pre teen skateboarders.  Even in the nanny state days of ubiquitous helmets, boys will find ways of courting danger to grow into men.  They all survived – no fractures or paralysis.

The boys grew to manhood, and the young man helped his father dismantle the abandoned refuge and cut down its pedestal, now a weed.  With chainsaw, climbing saddle and ropes, we worked for two days first lowering the large limbs over the garage from the bottom up, and then popping the top twenty five feet into the small target circumscribed by the back fence, the pin oak, the garage and our house.  After all the limbs and top were safely cut up on the ground, three more ten foot logs were dropped one at a time from the remaining pole.  Last was the twenty five foot trunk, which we notched and felled onto the mark.

With the spruce gone, several years went by before we dug in a twelve by twenty foot raised planting bed in the sunny spot salvaged from the spruce’s shade.  Hundreds of pounds of organic compost built up top soil, and lime sweetened sixty years of acidic spruce needles.  First there were flowers, a lilac and a butterfly bush.  Later we reverted to our Maine habit of vegetable and herb garden.  In the tiny plot, we plant tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini and an occasional ill advised venture into peppers or pole beans.

Two years ago, we put in some strawberry plants, which quickly expired for horticultural reasons unfathomable to amateurs.  Last year I tried again, and they took.  The few miserable fruit that exposed themselves were quickly consumed by birds just as they matured.  Undeterred, this winter I protected them with boards as we stored our firewood in the garden.  Unsure what I would find this spring, I was pleased to find they had prospered under the tarps and four cords of oak and maple.

Spring arrived; I weeded and raked in yet another few hundred pounds of dried manure and planted this year’s crop of vegetables.  The four strawberry plants looked so promising I planned to buy some bird netting to defend the harvest from predators, but waited until the weekend, which as it turned out, was three days too late.

Memo:  buy bird netting early next year.

Last week, while watering the garden at five AM as is my habit, I glimpsed half buried red under one of the strawberry plants.  With faint hope and mounting joy, I gently uncovered just ripened perfection.  I briefly considered saving it for Rita, but she was asleep after all.  I washed off the soil, admired God’s wondrous variety for a few moments and bit into sweet delight after a bitter winter.

“It is better to limp along the way than stride along off the way.  For a man who limps along the way, even if he only makes slow progress, comes to the end of the way, but one who is off the way, the more quickly he runs, the further away he is from his goal.”  Thomas Aquinas

“Human reason has this peculiar fate that … it is burdened by questions which… it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is not able to answer.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

When I went out one morning this week to bring in some wood for the woodstove, the thermometer registered 3 degrees, which is about as cold as it gets in Rhode Island without wind chill. Now in the Sandy River Valley in the West Central Maine where we once lived, 3 degrees before dawn might qualify as a bit of a January thaw.  Routinely in the dead of winter there, we would wake to 20 below.  I remember a week when we didn’t break into positive numbers at the warmest period in the afternoon, and every night was 15 or 20 below.  Hauling in wood from the shed would numb my face in the thirty feet I carried it.  I grew a beard most winters to protect my skin, since I was often outdoors.

Albert Camus once wrote, “in the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”  Camus’s metaphor seems to bear more than merely surviving a cold winter; perhaps he writes also of the winter none of us will escape in the end.  As I near my 67^th birthday, the depths of winter echo with chords of my mortality.   As I near my 67^th birthday, I am reminded that one certain inevitability is closer now than ever before, and it is necessary to be reconciled with that truth.  And yet, an “invincible summer” is within us, an unquenchable, “desperate desire” that the final deep cold will not descend undiminished, that we will see those we love again, that the inescapable lowering into frozen ground is not the end.

“The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass.  Beware lest he devour you.  We go (to) the Father of souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” St. Cyril of Jerusalem

In December, our dear friend in Maine, Bill Yates, succumbed to bile duct cancer after being diagnosed in August. A strong, unexpected cold wind overwhelmed him.  Always very fit, in July, he was competing in 5K races, still going strong at 71.  He never made 72.  Bill was a former Navy doctor, board certified in obstetrics and gynecology.  In 1975, he opened the first OB/GYN practice in Franklin County, Maine.  Later in his career, he updated his training and refocused on helping infertile couples, but eschewed in vitro procedures, which he deemed risky, expensive and with grave moral issues.  He retired in 2003 after nearly thirty years and over 2,500 babies delivered.

In 1969 while serving as a Navy lieutenant, he married Navy nurse Margaret Bandlow in Virginia two years after graduating from medical school.  Bill and Meg were married forty three years at his passing.  Among their six girls and two boys are a physician (Elena, one of the twins), two Sisters of Life in NY, Leah (Sister Mary Louise Concepta) and Rachel (the other twin, now Sister Mariae Agnus Dei), an engineer and a certified rafting guide on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.  Like Bill and Meg, their children travel to places all over the world to explore, hike and run, bicycle hard, and love the hills and rills of Maine.

 Bill grew up in Elyria, Ohio and maintained a Mid Western natural friendliness and dry sense of humor.  His intelligence and insatiable curiosity made him an engaging conversationalist. His kindness made a conversation with him a distinct pleasure: full of new ideas, but devoid of painful pitfalls.  His father owned a general contracting company, so he grew up around construction and summer jobs.  Bill inherited a deep pleasure in building things – a new house, a new office suite for his practice; he would occasionally uproot what was and build something fresh because he wanted to.  Once when his partners wanted to stay in the last office he built, Bill got new partners. “Undeterred” comes to mind whenever I think of him.  Since construction has been the source of my career, we had many talks about contracting and contractors.  My firm hope is that we will have some more when time is no longer finite.

 “Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay

If you are a regular reader, you may remember the story about our choice in 1980 to undo our decision following nearly a decade not to have more children after Amy and Gabriel.  The great blessing of Angela and Meg (and now Pete, Gianna, Ellie, new baby in the womb and Marty) were the direct happy result of that decision.  Bill Yates was Rita’s OB/GYN physician in Maine whose encouragement and connections to his Navy doctor friend in Portland enabled me to have a vasectomy reversed.  Our lives were affected so profoundly that I cannot reflect on them without emotion.  For this and for Bill and Meg Yates, I am forever grateful.

Meg is a lifelong Catholic, and although Bill was raised in a mainline Protestant denomination, he kept the promises he made to her at their wedding and attended Mass with the children and her.  At one point in his forties, he became more curious about her faith.  Rita and I were on vacation for a couple of weeks on Webb Lake, near where they lived.  We happened to be carrying in my Bible our note cards for something called a “Life in the Spirit” seminar, which we had taught as a husband/wife team for quite a few years.  Usually conducted with once a week sessions for seven weeks, we spent several nights covering the material and praying with Bill and Meg.

In the autumn, they came down with the whole crew to visit us and attended a Fall Festival with a Catholic community to which we belonged at the time.  That we absorbed with nary a speed bump the ten Yates in our small house — sleeping bags and air mattresses everywhere — was a testament to the loving, controlled chaos of their family.  While here at a picnic, Bill had an absorbing conversation with our friend, Father John Dreher, himself a convert from Protestantism and a Mid Westerner, who came east to study at Brown decades before.  The next year Bill took formal instruction in the Church and joined Meg as a professed Catholic, a commitment that carried through the rest of his life.

The following summer, when we saw them again, they brought me a magnificent 12 speed bicycle.  At the annual Wilton Blueberry Festival that they helped run, Bill bought a limited run $10 raffle ticket in my name for the bike as a thank you for the previous summer.  The ticket was pulled, and I enjoyed many years of long rides around Webb Lake in Maine and to and from a state park in Rhode Island on many early mornings back in Rhode Island.   Bill’s bike.

I spotted the bike hanging upside down in our garage when I was pulling out my wood splitting maul a month or so ago; the bike has been there for five years without a ride. Pitchers and catchers will arrive in the major league training camps next month.  Ash Wednesday is less than three weeks ahead, which inevitably leads to Easter, and is my personal first sign of the annual greening.  I’m going to take Bill’s gift to a first class bicycle shop for a full tune up and some new tires.  Hope comes once again during a cold snap, as it always does. Spring beckons.

“The leaves are falling, falling as from way off,

as though far gardens withered in the skies;

they are falling with denying gestures.

And in the nights the heavy earth is falling

from all the stars down into loneliness.

We are all falling.  This hand falls.

And look at others: it is in them all.

And yet there is One who holds this falling

endlessly gently in His hands.”

“Autumn”, Ranier Maria Rilke

Quotes in this post were shamelessly purloined (but attributed to their original authors), as was the title of a previous post from Dr. Regis Martin’s superb small book on Christian hope, “Still Point – Loss, Longing and Our Search for God”, which I could not recommend to you more highly, irrespective of your inclinations in this regard.  The desire for hope is imbued in our being.

“I’m Irish, so I’m used to odd stews. I can take it.  Just throw a lot of carrots and onions in there and I’ll call it dinner.”  Liam Neeson

Many would say the topic is oxymoronic, but the roots of all things Irish are hardscrabble.  My father was half Irish, and never knowing his father, who died when he was an infant;  he was raised by his Ma, Margaret Veronica Lannon, a former vaudeville singer who married her stage manager, John Parquette, and helped by her Irish sisters Stacia and Essy — immigrants all in a three decker full of family in Lynn, Massachusetts.  My mother was the youngest of six to Irish parents, her mother, Molly Manley, was full time at home, and her father, Jim Laracy, was a tin knocker.  She was born in the apartment over D.A. Baker’s sheet metal shop where my grandfather lived (and worked) before they bought the house on Maple Street in Walpole.

Our family of six children in Walpole, of which I was the oldest, was deeply imbued with an Irish culture, albeit with a French name.  My mother, Betty (or Girly to her sisters), going strong at 91, still possesses her characteristic sense of humor and intelligence.  The main danger she presents currently is to gondola displays at the local Target when someone foolishly allows her to drive a battery powered ‘accessible’ sit down shopping cart.  All her kids grew up straight and true.  Somehow.  All of us are blessed with the strong work ethic of both our parents.  Ma has long claimed that her six children would never go hungry as long as she had a good can opener.  She was pretty good at potatoes, though, and beef stew, even if Dinty Moore canned stew was not foreign to us in a pinch.

“I have always found the Irish to be a bit odd.  They refuse to be English.” Winston Churchill

My wife, love of my life and frequent muse, Rita, suggested this blog topic, so I’ll begin with a story that includes her.  When we were newlyweds, we didn’t have a lot of money.  Rita was a registered nurse working full time, while I finished out my last three semesters of college.  We lived in a third story walk up ‘shotgun’ apartment on a tight budget, painfully young and rhapsodically happy.  Rita, of Italian and Portuguese descent, is a creative cook acquainted with all manner of spices alien to me at the time.  Salt and pepper were the only spices I knew from my mother’s table, and pepper was suspect.

I tried to inflict my childhood Saturday night tradition of hot dogs and beans on Rita, which held for awhile.  A month or two into our marriage, we sat down on Saturday night – canned Boston baked beans and hot dogs grilled in the frying pan – two each.  Halfway into this ambrosia, Rita, who is genetically incapable of telling a lie or a joke with a straight face, started snickering.  When I asked her what was funny, my question stimulated full blown laughter.

It seems, since our food budget allowed nothing for waste, that when she was gathering the goods for supper, there was a new package of hot dogs and two left over hot dogs that were a bit, shall we say, sticky, but not yet quite green.  My young beloved artfully and meticulously kept the old segregated from the new in the frying pan throughout the cooking.  I, of course, was given the old ones.  But she couldn’t hold the deception together and giggled her way to full disclosure.  Her justification for this crushing of young love was that I, being Irish, couldn’t tell the difference, and she being of more refined culinary sensibilities, could.

“It’s not that the Irish are cynical. It’s rather they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.”  Brendan Behan

Our friend and former coworker with Rita at Rhode Island Right to Life, Peg Lavallee, told Rita this recent story of her brother, Charlie Galligan, a retired cop (what else?).  The Lavallees and the Galligans were going to a fund raising event for an Irish cause at McBride’s Pub on Wayland Street in Providence.  McBride’s features normal pub fare along with Galway Shepherd’s Pie, Fish and Chips, Bangers and Mashed, an occasional boiled dinner and “Famine Stew” along with the “Perfect Pint” of Guinness.  The pub is located in the old carriage house of the Monahan Funeral Home and part of the Monahan complex, a century old site of Irish wakes in the city, which is still open for business across the shared parking lot.  It is convenient to go to a wake, tell a few maudlin jokes and hoist a few to honor the recently deceased at the pub.  Every night at ten the bartender calls for a pause as a “Last Call” where all raise their glass in memory of someone who has “gone to the Promised Land.”

As Peg and her husband, Arty, were coming from their cars with Charlie and his wife, a van pulled up with a long wooden box which carried a replica of a full size statue of a small family, part of the Irish Famine Memorial in downtown Providence. It was to be displayed in the restaurant.  Two older gentlemen in their late sixties were unloading the crate.  Charlie offered them a hand, but his help was politely declined.

As the determined Irishmen slid the box out of the back of the van, disaster struck, the statue smashed through the front of the crate and flew out to a loud thud on the parking lot.  Charlie in typical Irish wry humor, without missing a beat, said to them, “Hope you guys aren’t the undertakers.”  Then he started back towards the parking lot pretending to look around, and asked them, “Do you need this head?”

“I’m Irish.  I think about death all the time.”  Jack Nicholson

A grandchild story will round out the topic for this week.  Gianna is my daughter Angela’s four year old.  Her dad is Polish and Irish, and Gia has dragged a few of the dry Irish wit genes through.  She does, however, manage to maintain more sophisticated taste buds.  Recently I was bringing her to Walpole one Saturday to treat my mother to lunch.  On the way, we discussed the menu.  I asked her what she would like for lunch, and she said tostados.  I told her it was unlikely Nana could be talked into a Mexican restaurant (IHOP as it turned out was the selection).  Since squirrels and a large oak tree in my backyard are a frequent topic of conversation, I suggested she might enjoy an acorn sandwich.  She remained somewhat skeptical.

I assured her that with strawberry jam and ketchup, acorn sandwiches were tasty, and that if people were really hungry, they could eat acorns just like squirrels.  She assured me that she wasn’t that hungry.  We changed subjects.

Later we discussed her uncertainty that we might not find Nana’s house given the limited access highway (Route 95) we were on.  I explained the concept of exits and not to be concerned as I knew which one to take.  After we mulled that around for a few more miles, she spotted a sign coming up and proclaimed it said, “EXIT”, which it did.  She asked if that was where we were going, and I told her there was another one farther ahead.

Being a grandfather, I then told her she was the smartest four year old girl in the world.  Gianna graced me with her half smile and replied without a pause, “Smart enough not to eat acorns, Papa.”

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” William Butler Yeats

Last weekend on Saturday we attended the wedding of Allison and Henry; we’ve known Allison since she became our youngest daughter Meg’s friend in the second grade.  Twenty odd years later, both Meg and Allison are professionals with letters after their names and married.  Both have now been in each other’s wedding parties; Allie was a bridesmaid in Meg’s wedding in August.  Allie’s wedding was in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul near downtown Providence, the main building completed in 1889 on the site of a former, smaller church, built on “Christian Hill” in 1832.  The structure is magnificent and is a sign of the majesty of God, constructed by the faith of its builders and thousands of worshippers who have assembled there for over a century.

For Allie and Henry’s wedding, the ceiling height pipe organ filled the space with classic music, including Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D as the beautiful bride processed into the church and later Shubert’s Ave Maria.  During the wedding Mass, the priest told a story of the late actress Helen Hayes, a lifelong Catholic and one of only eleven people to ever win an Emmy, an Oscar, a Tony and a Grammy.  She was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, by President Reagan.  Her first stage role was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when she was five, and her last was as Agatha Christie’s character Miss Marple when she was eighty five.

When Helen was first married to her husband, playwright Charles MacArthur, they had little money.  On their first anniversary he gave her a paper bag full of peanuts and told her he wished it could be a velvet bag full of emeralds.  After nearly thirty years in a loving marriage, Charles was diagnosed with terminal cancer; Helen was fifty six.  On their final anniversary together, he gave her a velvet bag full of emeralds.  Her response was to tell him she wished it was a bag of peanuts, and they could do it all over again.  As he finished the story, Rita and I reached over to grasp hands as both of us were filled with gratitude for our forty five years together.

After the homily, the priest joined the young couple before the altar and guided them through the marriage vows.  He left the microphone off, and in such a large church, only those witnesses right near the bride and groom could hear them.  It wasn’t necessary to hear. As they exchanged rings, everyone present could see and knew their love and sincere intent to “have and to hold” for the rest of their lives.  To me, it was entirely appropriate that their vows and love were for them alone – simple, in complete focus one to one, heart to heart, mind to mind, soul to soul.

“The spirit’s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.”  George Santayana

Last Sunday, in lieu of our regular parish, we went to Mass at St. Patrick’s on Smith Hill in Providence, an inner city, poor, bilingual church – poor in money and accoutrement, rich in Spirit and Love.  The church building had long ago been declared structurally unsound and demolished, but the parishioners converted their school auditorium into a church and persisted with both school and church.  St. Pats hosts a soup kitchen on Mondays and has for over thirty years.  The school evolved three years ago into St. Patrick’s Academy, a small high school staffed by both professionals and dedicated volunteer mentors. Next year will see its first graduating seniors.  The contrast to the soaring cathedral could not have been more striking.  The music was guitars and a piano, not a large pipe organ; the pews were filled with all manner of folk, color and age – teenagers, children, the elderly, families, the halt and the lame. The sound of children, silent or rare in many churches, was beautiful.

We were a bit disappointed that her pastor, Father James, wasn’t presiding over the Mass, and an older priest was there in his stead.  Father James’ homilies are always to the heart, his humility genuine and immediately apparent to all who are fortunate enough to pass his way.  Since he is fluent in Spanish, he must have been the celebrant last weekend at the Masses in that tongue.  He has done such things as live anonymously on the street as a homeless person to more fully understand the poorest of the poor in our city.  Father James is a gifted listener and counselor.

“I am not a genius, I am just curious. I ask many questions, and when the answer is simple then God is answering.” Albert Einstein

Our disappointment was short lived as we heard the lovely Irish lilt, saw the impish warm smile, intelligence and wisdom of this priest we had never met.  Reminiscent of the many Irish priests of my youth, he was simultaneously loving, witty and direct.  His homily about the gospel reading reminded us that complaining about “not getting anything out of Mass attendance” quite misses the point. “Since when did we become the center of the universe?” he asked.  Worship is not another entertainment we think should have to compete in a world of feel-good distractions, to be judged and participated in based on the liveliness or ‘relevance’ of the music or the emotions and passion of the preaching.  We come for the Eucharist and the Word, to give thanks, to gather together as Christians have gathered for two millennia.  Being a “good person doing our best with good works” is an inadequate response in and of itself to the transcendent Gift which bridged the gap between the eternal and the ephemeral, the mortal and that which never dies – the soul and the Creator.

The music was occasionally ragged, the voices in harmony, but untrained, some of them in their teen years, some of them in their sixties.  Nothing was diminished by the imperfections; the spirit was authentic.  Everyone sang.

“Being with someone, listening without a clock and without anticipation of results, teaches us about love. The success of love is in the loving — it is not in the result of loving. ”
A Simple Path – Mother Teresa

Meg was radiant; tough guy Marty’s eyes brimmed with emotion as I walked toward him with her on my arm. The Atlantic created the backdrop behind him while a gentle on shore breeze eased the heat from the mid August late afternoon sun.  The emotions were true, lovely, dear and necessary.  The wedding was charming not because of the setting or the beauty of the bride, the handsomeness of the groom, but because of the promise.  It was a very good beginning, but, still, just a good start.

And I don’t mean a start to the great party afterwards upstairs at the Newport Atlantic Beach Club, although, it, too, more than lived up to expectations.  Everyone danced, the food was superior; conversation flowed easily with much laughing, many toasts and more than a few tears from time to time.

Meg and Marty vowed their lives one to the other from this time forward.  Meg said this, “I love who I am when I’m with you and strive to make you as happy as you make me.  I look forward to seeing you every day and never grow tired of our time spent together.  I find myself comfortable and at peace with growing old together…. I love you with all of my heart and before everyone who is most dear to us today, I promise to commit myself to you completely (even during hockey season).  I know that happiness in a marriage may come and go – but whatever hardships we face throughout the years, I have full confidence that we’ll face them together, make decisions to love even when it’s hard, and we will both be able to look back and find the happiness we feel today.”  I don’t have a copy of Marty’s vows, but they were similarly heartfelt and completely sincere.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the father of the bride is a traditionalist and finds no fault in “to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer until death do us part” in a church, but promises of the heart are promises of the heart, and God is in the promises – they are compelling and for the rest of their lives.  Meg, Marty and the friends and family who gathered to affirm their promise all know this to be true.

You will reciprocally promise love, loyalty and matrimonial honesty. We only want for you this day that these words constitute the principle of your entire life and that with the help of divine grace you will observe these solemn vows that today, before God, you formulate.  Pope John Paul II

The value of a promise is in its keeping:  in making decisions to love day after day, year after year, even and especially when we don’t feel ‘loving’ and are tired, discouraged, broke or sad.  You have good precedents.  Dore and Gloria (Marty’s folks) have loved and kept their promises for over 35 years; Rita and I have as well for 45.  This is my prayer for Meg and Marty:  keep your promise, trust in one another, cling to your first love when times are hard (and they will be), and you will be all right in the end.

As for man, his days are like grass;

he flowers like the flower of the field;

the wind blows, and he is gone..Psalm103

A few years ago a movie with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson called “The Bucket List” was so popular it added the phrase to common usage.  I think most of us have a “bucket list”.  Mine has nothing to do with climbing mountains, jumping out of airplanes or visiting Florence (although Florence sounds wonderful).  Those have more to do with ego, self image and reputation than legacy.  For me, living a purposeful life and keeping my promises with the beautiful bride of my youth, Rita, is far more important.  She was also a stunning bride, who has grown in character, virtue, wisdom and inner beauty through faithfulness born of suffering the vicissitudes and challenges of life through the years.  I love her more now than then, although at the time, I didn’t think that possible.   Would that my children share this blessing.

Of paramount value in my bucket list is seeing my children off to a good start, especially in their choice of a spouse of good character from a loving, laughing, stable family.  My Meg did that last week.  I know that through age and infirmity, I will be less and less able to help them as time goes by, and eventually be gone from this stage.  My children’s spouse and family will see them through.

High on my list, also, is the hope that my four children will continue to be true and there for each other as well.  This is from Meg’s older (slightly) sister, Angela, her matron of honor last week, “Throughout the years we’ve had different friends and different tastes, but we share the same family, heritage and the same blood.  We’ve been there for each other through first days of school, first kisses, first everything.  I will never ever forget the loving support and encouragement you gave me the day I gave birth to Gianna.  I’m not sure I would have made it through that day without you.   Life may separate us by many miles, but in the words of Jo March in Little Women, (how many times have we seen that movie, maybe 25?!): “I could never love anyone as I love my sisters.””  Link to full text of toast

I say to God, “Do not take me away

before my days are complete,

you whose days last from age to age..”  Psalm 102

And so, dear children, this old dad’s heart is full and at peace this Sunday.  Be of good heart yourselves and thank you all so much.

The psalms seem to me to be like a mirror, in which the person using them can see himself, and the stirrings of his own heart; he can recite them against the background of his own emotions. St. Athanasius

Sarah was stillborn on Tuesday.  Her heart simply stopped. That certain finality almost causes our own hearts to cease beating like her tiny one: inexplicable, irreversible heartbreak for her parents, Liz and Ray, and her grandparents, my good friend Jim and his beloved wife, Margaret, parents of Liz.  Sarah will never sit in their laps to be sung to sleep or read “Cat in the Hat” or draw with crayons on the kitchen table.  There will be no first steps, no elementary school flute concerts, no graduations, and no walk down the aisle or Sarah’s children.  Her life cut short before she drew breath.  When she emerged twenty three hours after her heartbeat was last detected, her silent, little body was perfect in every way with her father’s eyes; her mother’s nose and mouth and auburn hair.  Her parents and grandparents hugged her, kissed her, held her for a long time and wept over her.

The nurses, midwives and doctors at the Birthing Center of Georgetown University Hospital did whatever could be done, were extraordinarily supportive and grieved with the family for what they could not explain.  Melanie and Sarah, two of the nurses, brought an outfit they picked out for Sarah. She will be laid to rest in a Catholic cemetery in an area reserved for babies.  On May 12^th, there will be a memorial Mass at St. Ann Catholic Church in Washington, DC presided over by Monsignor Mosley, Ray and Liz’s pastor.  A second Mass is being planned in Jim and Margaret’s parish in Roswell, Georgia presided over by Father Peter Rau.  These good priests and Father Henry, who married Ray and Liz, help console the family and lovingly minister to their deep faith.

With that faith, there is this:

 Pre born babies have already experienced much. Sarah surely recognized familiar voices and responded to them, especially her mother’s and father’s.  She felt the loving strokes of her mother’s hands through the safe enclosure of her womb.  Sarah reacted and bounced when Liz laughed.  She heard and responded to music. She knew joy. She knew love. She never knew cold or hunger or fear or loneliness, and now never will.  Sarah knew there was wonder and mystery outside her secure, warm world.  She now knows far greater wonder, wisdom and mystery than her family has yet to experience.  Her joy and love are now eternal.

Margaret wrote to her friends and family, “She is now in heaven, a Holy Innocent, powerfully interceding for her family.  We look forward to seeing her again one day, but in the meantime she will remain in our hearts and minds.  It is comforting to know that she is where we all long to be, and that she will never suffer the hardships of this earthly world.”

John Donne wrote, “He that asks me what Heaven is, means not to hear me, but to silence; he knows I cannot tell him: when I meet him there, I shall be able to tell him, and then he will be able to tell me.”  Unity with the Creator is far beyond our limited faculties to comprehend or attempt to explain, yet our faith draws us there to “our own far off country”.

Saint Augustine tells us in “City of God” that “There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love, we shall love and we shall praise.  Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end.” C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory likens us, who still engage in this vale of tears, to a schoolboy striving through hard study to learn the sublime, “Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this… Poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded boat.”

Sarah now knows, truly knows,  what we long for: entirely, effortlessly, within her soul.  The hope of us left behind is that at some joyful, future celebration we will see her perfect and complete.  All guilt, recriminations, self doubt, second guessing will only impede our journey and cause us harm, and in the end slough off.

A close friend once confided to me that his personal belief is that a loving God takes each soul home at the most opportune moment for each person, the moment best suited for our own salvation.  For some that means a long, tough climb.  All of us will come to that moment, of that there is no doubt.  “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” Psalm 90.   Even eighty years is a blink of man’s history, and not even that when measured against eternity.  Our time will come.

The name “Sarah” derives from the Hebrew, meaning “Princess”.  This young Sarah is already royalty.  The time of her homecoming was early on, but her outcome is certain.

Sarah, pray for us.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.  Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God.  Matthew 5: 4,8