Today I realized that sometimes life is lived in upbeat
emoticons--
I am one of those people blessed with two parents and two siblings whom I very much love and who very much love me. I hesitate to even write the preceding sentence, because I know not everyone has my good fortune, and to talk of good things somehow seems
to some deep superstitious part of me like a way to invite bad things to happen. I remember as a child being told never to mention a new family car purchase, because nothing is less desirable than appearing to have material good fortune. This is good thinking, a modesty of which I wholeheartedly approve, but if I cannot revel in happiness in my journal, where can I?
My brother and I sat with my dad this morning on our parents' front steps talking about my dad's civil war swords and his grandchildren (my brother and my sister each have children), and it just felt so down to earth and so *right*. Then my wife, my mother and I sat in our dining room doing that very southern kind of visitin', in which one discusses the histories of folks from my folks' little home town, in a fairly non-gossippy, life's rich pageant kind of way.
Then we hit the road for the 4 1/2 hour trip back to our suburb of Allen in Texas. The fields were yellow with black eyed susan flowers throughout our drive. We made very good time, through light traffic, and now we're comfortably home. I arrived exhausted but happy.
I arrived home to the most satisfying mail day of my entire life.
I am so excited at this good fortune.
in a package on Friday. I got a blank notebook from the woman in Tennesse with whom I'm doing a poem exchange for nervousness.org. After reading so many horror stories of exchanges that didn't work out,
I'm so glad this one is....but I still have verse to write and a rather odd looking notebook to decorate.
I still have one nervousness.org exchange corruplast to mail out, and it will feel good to be caught up.
I got not one but two amazing pieces of artwork that
completely delight me.
If this were a Twilight Zone episode, the exit paragraph Rod Serling would intone would be:
Gurdon Ark, a shy, unassuming, very plain, ordinary man, a sometimes boring commercial lawyer, a poor poet. When he awoke this morning he imagined he would have a nice day, but just another in a series of nice days. Sometimes, though, life isn't just nice...it's amazing. Amazing, that is....in the LJ Twilight Zone.