Gratitude is in the details
by Stephanie Piper
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, wrote Keats. He may just have been talking about walking in the dark, but he was a poet, and so anything he said is open to interpretation. I think he was talking about paying attention.
It's hard to imagine a poet missing the moment. Still, even Keats might have wandered sometimes into that web of worldly cares that blinds us to beauty and sends us spiraling out of now and into yesterday or tomorrow or last week or next month.
These are time zones in which I spend too many waking hours. I waste now as if the supply were endless. And then the phone rings, and I am jolted back to implacable truth.
It's the significant other of a girlhood friend, calling from California to tell me that Sandy died Thursday night. I saw Sandy in April at a class reunion. We hadn't met in 30 years. I didn't know she was ill.
Neither, then, did she. We spent the weekend staying up late and laughing ourselves breathless over remembered silliness, old boyfriends, teased hair, innocence. Three decades fell away.
Then Sandy went back to L.A. and got very sick, very fast. She didn't write or call. Perhaps she didn't want to spoil the memory of that spring idyll.
We covered a lot of ground in our brief reunion. She told me about teaching first grade in Watts, about living in Australia, about the miles she had traveled since we wore the same plaid uniforms and worried about dates for the Gotham Ball. We exchanged hugs at the airport and promised to stay in touch. I'm so glad I got to see you again, we said almost in chorus.
And we both believed there would be other times, other gatherings of our far-flung class, grayer and creakier, but present. All present.
We believed it the way we believe there will be many, many more mornings like this one, the sky that pale winter pink, the voices of waking birds soft in the half-bare trees. We believed it the way we believe that there are an unlimited number of nights like tonight, the house warm with the smell of cooking, George Winston on the CD player, ivy in a brass pot on the table. We believed it as we trust that we will always hear the sounds of our children in the front hall, home for Thanksgiving, home for Christmas, leaving but coming back to us again and again and again.
In Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a young woman who has died in childbirth is given the chance to return to earthly life for one day. Choose an unimportant day, a wise older character counsels her. Choose the least important day of your life. It will be important enough.
An artist friend once made me a gift, a wireless clock and calendar combo. It's a small piece of wood painted in soothing colors. On one side is carved the time: now. The other side shows the date: today. I have placed it on top of my computer to remind myself that it's all I really need to know about where I am in the universe.
Today we will join hands around the table and offer big, sweeping thank yous for big, sweeping gifts: freedom, and prosperity, and family.
My personal grace will be brief. Thank you for the flowers at my feet, mostly unseen, usually trampled. May I find them now.
November 23, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 47
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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