Golden moments

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf,

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day

Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost 

There are times in life where we find ourselves caught up, inthe most perfect sense, in the very flow of life and being.  And,  more often than not, it’s  quite an ordinary event, scene or occurrence that allows for this.

I am a great believer in those special moments in life where everything comes together so perfedtly it’s impossible not to see what’s happening.

In the airport last week waiting for my sister, niece and nephew to come down the gate where I was waiting to take them to the family home in Charleston after a flight from distant Seattle, I beheld a most memorable scene.  Walking into waiting arms was an obviously ecstatic grandmother whose two young grandchildren, brother and sister, I am guessing, and their mother were there to greet her.  I gazed rather awestruck as the grandmother hugged and kissed her grandchildren with such obvious happiness and sheer delight that I felt privileged to witness their homecoming.   The children were just as happy to see their grandmother.  I wanted to hold onto that scene in my memory for as long as I could, and here it is a week later and it’s still quite vivid.  Paradoxically, I was happy, but also sad as I was reminded at the same time that I’d never have grandchildren to hug like that.  But, just a few moments later, my sister, niece and nephew, a recent college graduate and a sophomore in college, appeared in the near distance coming down that same gateway from the plane toward me.  I was so glad to see them, and we all hugged each other briefly, but not as effusively, of course, as that group that had arrived earlier.   I don’t know if I have the capacity for the kind of emotion expressed by the grandmother.  It’s a very special and unique.  But who’s to say? That morning I just felt very connected to the whole human family and all of life by way of two emotional reunions right outside the rope barriers of Gate A-2.

A couple of days later I had my own private wave of well-being, so rarely experienced these days when I often experience a generalized sense of anxiety.  Lying in bed relaxing, off from work, I looked over at Ginger, our 15-year-old tabby cat, eating and then grooming herself on the rug.  Rays of golden light entered the second story bedroom where I was lying, and filled the room with a glowing warmth that is rare only because I am seldom able to relax long enough to notice it.    A purring cat, sunlight filtering in, bookshelves full of books waiting to be read — I felt at that moment a brief sense of peace.  It didn’t last long but I was transfixed by those brief, golden moments when one is aware of the special gifts of life.