There was a time when it all seemed so right. Don't we hold dearly to some shred of those hopes, even now? It is the season.
Jim, with the drum, gone at 27. John, with the camera, gone at 33. Even still they wait with me, through another season of anticipation and watching and the seemingly eternal passion of yearning. Those days on Muncie's South Ebright and Ft Wayne's Rose Lane, Colson Drive, or the cold drafty year in the old farmhouse in Cumberland and the "new" house on Lawnhaven visit again, Christmas ghosts, like snow around the foggy lamp post.
With so many of others we've learned to invite losses and disappointments to our hearth. It's a good thing, to remember, to reflect, better even, sometimes, with tears. I think it all gets framed up somehow in a hall of time. We deck the halls, with joys of the past. We sip melancholy, we wade into time, and smile at old dreams.
We get to an age when those missing from our table, or those who are slowly departing somehow fill us with feeling, a muted trumpet, crying. The young fill us with cheer and kindle our aging imaginations.
Those who celebrate this as a holy season lean into the circular, recurring nature of it all. More than catharsis, it is like the birth we celebrate. This season is a cosmic in-breaking, a moment poignant, which scatters. Past, present, future fuse, and then go again to their own places in the unconditional, the unending, that beyond the names we give it.
We wait, all of us, for a spark, that moment when everything truly is right. Out of it, we come away, again, with another shred of hope, held dearly. It gets us by.
