Birthday wishes times fifty and more....

Today is a very special day in the life of two people that I love, one from my family by adoption, and one from my family by choice.

I have been spectacularly fortunate in my extended family. I have cousins who are like sisters to me, I have aunts and uncles who I know I could turn to if I ever needed to, and each one has some special quality or characteristic all their own which makes them uniquely lovable.

My Aunt Shirley, my aunt because my Uncle Fritz had the good sense to marry her while he had the chance some time back, (I don't want to make anyone feel old, but the number 60 comes to mind,) is the best kind of aunt. She makes the world's best Special K bars, she has the most infectious laugh, she is the best hostess ever, she still worries about me getting sunburned at the cabin and reminds me to put on sunblock [too bad she wasn't here for the last Royals-Twins game I attended,] and she still loved me, even when I was an obnoxious teenager and everyone wanted to strangle me for being so mean to my mother. What more can you ask for in an aunt?

Although I got her a birthday card, it is, unfortunately, currently sitting somewhere other than in her mailbox. [I don't think we need to go into that any further. Blush.] So, to my Aunt Shirley, happy birthday to you, and many, many more. Consider yourself hugged!

The other special person who is celebrating a big birthday today is my long time friend and college roommate, Beth.

Beth and Sarah on May 23, 1982, when we graduated from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

We are not talking routine, run of the mill friendships here. This is a friend of the heart who knows all my secrets, so unfortunately for my readers, who are breathlessly anticipating my usual expose of humorous anecdotes, I will not be dishing any dirt here today. We have swept all that under the rug a long time ago.

Although, if I were going to dish up some funny stories, I could theoretically reveal we might have considered doing a little more sweeping and vacuuming while we were in college. Of course, we would have had to work around the less than cleanly dishes. Which might have been under the closets hanging on the wall. Not that I mean anything by that. Just throwing out some hypotheticals, here.

Beth and I have gone through a lot together, and I recently remarked that we seem to find ourselves going back in time. It's like we just graduated from college again - single, broke and trying to figure out what to do with our lives. I think I can safely speak for both of us when I say we are now ready to pass go and collect our $200.

The choosing of a college roommate is an inexact science, and you never really know how it will work out until you try it out. Living together in a dorm room reveals the cracks and fissures in the landscape of your relationship. There is no guarantee that living with someone just like you will be a success. And that doesn't mean opposites can't be best friends and work it out.

When I think about Beth and me, I am reminded of a Donny and Marie song from longer ago than I want to remember. [For those youthful brats who pretend they don't know Donny and Marie, that would be Donny Osmond, teen idol, and Marie Osmond, who used to be a country singer before she became the poster child for post-partum depression and whatever other causes she is currently representing.]

Beth was a lot country, I was a little bit rock and roll. Beth was an athlete, I considered moving from my bed to the sofa to be a major workout. Beth was a morning bird, I was a night owl. (The only way we were awake at the same time was if she lapped me getting up in the morning before I got to bed.) She was a blond Norwegian, I was not. She took school seriously, I took boys (and hooking rugs, for one memorable finals period) seriously. I was a creative writer with no self-discipline, she was a serious student that put me continuously to shame. We had nothing in common, if you looked at the surface.

Yet, despite our differences in nature and personality, our three year stint of rooming together worked out so well that she is still one of my closest friends, godmother to my children, [some more recently than others,] and keeper of my deepest secrets I wouldn't dare to tell anyone else. I know there were a number of people back then who wondered how we could possibly live together so successfully, since we were so different. The answer was pretty easy. Compromise, honesty, and shared values was the secret to our success. A secret we both evidently forgot when choosing our life partners, I would add, since we both ended up with the wrong people, which is how we ended up single once again.

The two special people who share this natal day remind me of how truly gifted I am in my life. As this day has approached, I have contemplated at some length how truly bereft I would be without all the people I love, and who love me back.

You are never alone when you have people who love you. The gift of love, freely given, is the only thing in life that is truly irreplaceable. Cherish those you love, nurture those relationships, and when you have the chance, let them know how much you care about them and about the relationship.

Aunt Shirley and Beth, you each have a place in my heart that cannot be filled by the love of anyone else. Wishing each of you the happiest of days, and in Beth's case, I wish that 50 times over! Happy birthday, happy year, and I want you each to know that I am looking forward to many more happy birthdays to come.

Reasoning.....

I have heard that everything in life happens for a reason. Good. Glad to hear the universe is not as random as it usually seems. The real question, though, is when, exactly, do we get to know what that reason is?

I look at my own, rather average, pretty normal life, and I wonder, what, exactly, was the reason for the tires on every vehicle I own (that would be three,) to go bad at the same time? In a rational universe, that seems ridiculous, since the tires that were on the vehicles were not all originally purchased at the same time.

I wonder what higher purpose was served by my broken foot on the Fourth of July? Did it save me from some dreadful fate, a la "Sliding Doors," because I wasn't able to drive somewhere for a couple of weeks while it healed?

What could be the higher meaning for the flu vaccine running out immediately prior to our arrival, thus causing us to run around town looking for an alternative provider? [The reason being my daughter was required to have it for her class the following day, which she didn't know until that week, because she was out sick the week before, when the rest of the class found out, and no one told her. See? Totally random.]

The things that plague me are mostly small things, I realize. Nothing too serious or earth shattering, just the stuff that keeps you up nights wondering.

But there are bigger questions, too. What betterment of the universe could possibly have been served by The Great Depression, our current recession, the Holocaust, rampant unemployment, or any of the other major issues of this, or any, day, that seems to plague us in this world.

To me, the world appears very random and haphazard. My favorite poem, which I have posted here previously, is about God as the master weaver, and he sees the fabric being woven from the upper side, where the pattern is clear, and the outcome neat and orderly.

We, on the other hand, see the weaving from the underside, where everything is a mess, there are strings hanging everywhere, the pattern is not evident, and all is in disarray. I don't know about you, but if life could array itself, even briefly, it would really help me out while I'm going through the struggle.

I don't mean to imply, for the relatives and friends who are suddenly feeling panic clutching their hearts, that I am deeply depressed again. I am not, so breathe! I am just contemplating the random nature of the world, and wondering if, in telling people there is a reason for everything, we are not doing them, and us, a real disservice.

Perhaps, instead of seeing reason in everything, we should just accept that some things have no reason, no purpose, no ultimate meaning. Perhaps, sometimes, life just happens. Sometimes it happens good. Sometimes, it happens bad. But all in all, mostly it just happens.

I have always been fascinated with the concept of people who have missed this tragedy or that happening by seconds because of some random thing that occurred. Someone with a flat tire missed one of the flights from 9/11, and they are here today because of it. While they no doubt cursed their bad luck at the time, I am sure that ultimately it appeared to be a blessing.

What we don't hear is that because that person had a flat tire and missed that flight, there was probably another person on standby that perished that day because of the flat tire. Is there a higher purpose for that person to have died, seemingly out of turn? I think, perhaps, it was just a matter of random luck, happenstance gone wrong.

There is such a thing as karma, I think, because bad living always does catch up with you, sooner or later. But I'm not sure that it is truly a tit for tat type of thing. I think that if you live your life badly, sooner or later, you will run into the wrong person, abuse the system one too many times, or do something so egregious that you ultimately end up getting caught. While it may make the people on the other side of the equation feel better, I'm not sure that it is a balancing of the universe so much as having pressed their luck one too many times.

We frequently hear about prayer being answered, usually because people are thankful for the positive outcome of a situation that only God could have saved. But the truth is, more people have prayed for the same outcome for their loved one that never happened, so why one and not the other?

Prayer is everywhere, despite the naysayers who howl that prayer is being removed from our world by the atheists and the ACLU. Truly, we are a very prayerful nation, and everyone from the president to the smallest children can be seen praying, or talking about praying, any, and every, day of the week.

Where are most of the preschools located? In churches. We find polling places, where people go to vote, in churches across the nation. We hear the president in the middle of a catastrophe talking about praying for the victims. We see sports teams talking about praying for the outcome.

Prayer and Christian values are seen and heard almost everywhere we look in this nation, from the courthouses to the schools to the workplace. We get married in churches. We have funerals in churches. We discuss almost every important concept in the context of our religious values, from abortion to economics to the weather. Who has not heard a weather forecaster talking about praying for rain?

I have noticed, however, that it is usually the victor who is seen talking about how their prayers were answered. Curiously, we rarely hear from the losing side, talking about how their prayers were not answered. I always wondered, did one side pray harder? Were the prayers more virtuous? Did they have more people, like some sort of other-worldly reality show, where the pray-ers vote for the winner with their prayers?

We pray for jobs for those we love. People find jobs every day, of course, but we also hear, all too often these days, about people who searched diligently for months to no avail. Are they not praying hard enough? Do they not have enough people praying for their success? Do they need to find another team, perhaps? One with a more direct line to God's consciousness?

We pray for a cure for cancer, hoping for a miracle for the people who are important to us, or those on our church prayer chain. So why does one person receive a miracle, while another one does not? I have no answers.

I have truly felt the power of prayer, and I believe strongly in it. I know that prayers are sometimes answered, and other times they are simply not. And at other times yet, they are answered in ways that are revealed only months or even years down the line.

I know of a family that prayed for custody of the children in a divorce to go one way, while it went exactly the opposite. Yet, in the end, the children ended up exactly where they belonged, for a complex set of reasons that don't matter here. Was that a long delayed answer to prayer, or was it simply that things worked themselves out as best they could, under the circumstances? I don't know.

I know that the right thing ultimately happened, although it took a very winding path to get there. But I will never know if it was God's hand that drove it, or simply that things worked themselves out in the end, because people are who they are, and don't really change, over the long term.

The truth is that you will never know what might have happened had you taken the road less traveled, the other fork in each decision-making situation that you faced. While you can speculate on what might have been a better choice, (i.e. if I had married B instead of A, I wouldn't have gotten divorced,) you will never really know what would have happened, because you don't know all the ramifications of having made that other choice.

I look at my own life, and speculate occasionally on what might have been. I don't find it to be a particularly helpful exercise, nor a particularly appealing one. But every now and then, I play the "What If" game as well as anyone else, and although I don't have the answers, I try, at the very least, to use the speculation to learn and make better choices the next time I am faced with a similar situation.

My own life of sliding doors, those instances where I made a decision, and things haven't worked out, or perhaps even when they have, is not that exciting, overall. I have made many mistakes in my life, like most people, but few of them were truly life changing. I have been able to recover, more or less, from pretty much everything that has ever gone wrong in my life, and even now, have hope that the greatest disaster to befall me, divorce and financial ruin, will ultimately work itself out. [Although if anyone has a spare million or so sitting around that they want to get rid of, I could use a hand. Just sayin'!]

And so it is with most people, if you look at their lives as a whole, and not in small part.

That is the interesting thing about life, something which my 82 year old mother holds at the heart of her optimism. No matter what has gone wrong for me, [and she knows everything that has ever gone wrong, and has patiently heard about it in minute detail, whether she wanted to or not, which I think probably assures her saintly passage straight to the right hand of God when she leaves this earthly life behind,] she has held fast to the phrase, it will all work out in the end. It's her mantra, and generally, it turns out she is right.

Perhaps that is really what is meant when we say, everything happens for a reason. Perhaps there is no intentional meaning at all. Perhaps, as human beings, we have been created to be resilient, so that whatever comes our way, we will shift gears, fire up our brains, and turn it into something that will work for us. Maybe the reason is simply that we will self-direct to make whatever happens work for us, in the end.

I think that might be the most hopeful part of the human spirit, this never ending ability to change directions and to accept and move forward, whatever happens. People who have terminal cancer continue to hope, against all odds, that they will beat it, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, they do. In the depths of despair, we search for anything positive upon which to hang our hats, and feel good about having done so.

There is a Minnesota phrase, [perhaps other people say it, too, but I have never heard it uttered from anyone who was not from Minnesota,] "Well, at least it's something." It is a to-the-point analysis that while everything is not perfectly ordered, there is at least one thing that is going okay.

It is almost breathtakingly poignant in its simplicity, and it's truthfulness. I have yet to find a life situation in which I could not utter those words; well, at least it's something.

I guess, if there is a reason for everything that happens in life, at least that's something. I'm not sure what, and if you figure it out, let me know. Until then, I, for one, will continue to watch out for the strings in my eyes, and the potholes in my path, and look for that silver lining. Maybe I can sell it and get some money to pay my bills. Now that really would be something!