I feel . . .
Disoriented.
Tonight my daughter, Margaret, flew home from college, the first time she's been home in a year. Now she's off with Erik, my son, and Erik's best friend from elementary school, junior high school and high school.
Tomorrow morning Erik will return to Groton, CT where he'll join the commissioning crew of the USS JIMMY CARTER SSN-23. And in that simple act I remember another day, December 1972, a foggy day with low overcast in Pascagoula, MS where I rode through the front gate in a gray Navy bus and looked up to see the PARCHE SSN-683 looming overhead, hull splotched with chalk marks, rust, barely visible through the three-story scaffolding surrounding her. And I fell in love, for then and forever, with a chunk of HY-80 and stainless steel and inconel.
And tomorrow I step onto an airplane and fly to Washington D.C. where on the weekend I will hear my son Tom explore his passion and his talent for vocal music as Choralis sings its Christmas concert.
So much LIFE swirling around: past and present and future and I have trouble holding my place in it.
I remember sitting down with Tom at the dining room table with a set of 3 x 5 cards each of which held something important to him. We sorted the cards: making the high school elite Madrigal Choir came out on top. I was surprised.
I remember Margaret in first grade working and working at hanging from the monkey bars at school. So proud of her calluses.
I have this DVD I want to make. I have this garden I want to design that combines the sensibility of a Zen garden with the desert plants of the Sonoran desert. I have these petroglyphs I want to see and these mountains I want to hike. A house in Arizona I want to make my own and share with my family.
It swirls around like snow, like fog, like life.
What joy.
9:58:40 PM 
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