Golden moments

I wondered today, walking slowly along the road, how it was that so many simple things give me such exquisite joy. I saw a gray cat curled up on a window ledge in the morning sun, and stood looking at her with such a sense of fitness, such an understanding of comfort as I cannot describe. Why should a cat in a window please me? Why should I care to stand and watch her there luxuriating in the sun? Why should I recall the experience for several day afterward with a warm sense of remembered delight?

David Grayson writing in “Under My Elm”

It was one of those golden moments I can look back on fondly now with gratitude, bittersweet though it may have been.

At the large pet supply store, I walked in the door and stopped almost immediately by what caught my attention to my right. At a pet adoption table, a small boy about 7 was clutching to his chest with sheer joy a sizable, tan-colored puppy, perhaps six months old and a labrador mix, something like that. I stood transfixed by that brief scene of pure, unadulterated bliss, not wanting it to end. But a bittersweet experience, too, in the knowledge that it was something I never have or will enjoy witnessing as a parent, not being one myself. Life is filled with many of these types of “golden” and bittersweet moments, mainly because I tend to notice more keenly that which I don’t or can’t have or experience in a more personal sense. It’s difficult to explain.

Not so with another golden moment I cherish during the time I was caregiving. It was the middle of the night when my mother called and had to use the bathroom (actually the portable potty next to her bed). I had a monitor and I could hear her from upstairs unless I was very soundly asleep, which fortunately was rare considering the caregiving responsibilities I had back then. I came into the room, turned on the lamp, helped her, comforted and gave her a hug. I turned off the lamp and passed back through the den and stopped at the sofa where our sweet old tabbby cat, Ginger, was sleeping, now awake, and she, too, got a hug and then commenced her deep purring.

It is during brief moments like those in the deep and quiet shelter of night, when all the outside world is asleep and the anxieties of life fade briefly, that caregiving seemed very doable. Would that life could always be that way — peaceful and secure. During those fleeting and treasured moments it is, and I am thankful for that.