Friday, the 13th –

A couple of weeks ago, the daughter (step, but honestly, nobody’s counting) of a dear friend of mine had a baby.  A brave little girl baby who came three months premature.  The daughter had this baby alone, in a bathroom—a total surprise since she’d managed to convince herself that no such thing would ever happen to her.  This is an intelligent, funny girl who is always taking life by the throat.  I guess it can be a curse to be bright and young at the same time.  We love her.  We love the entire blended family.  Her step mother, my friend,  is not a saint, thank heaven, but a woman of strength and great love.  She would deny the charge of patience, but since all nine of the children are still walking the earth, I think she’d be wrong.

The baby ended up plugged into the machines of life.  And the new mother (suddenly a little girl in the big, harsh desert of reality) and her long-time boyfriend decided that they would marry—as prosaic as that had seemed to them before—be a family, and raise this child with the love our girl had missed out with her own bio- mother.  It would work.  It would be okay.

But we buried that baby today.  It was a cold day out, but not too bad.  Not too much wind, and the sun shone, as it is wont to do in winter, maybe a little weakly out of a strained bluish sky.  May I tell you that the girl’s father, a man of great heart, a man I admire, had made a lovely little box.  Oak, I think.  Beautiful.

Some religious people (I have fought the urge there to use quotation marks, but how could I do that without damning myself?) believe in a vengeful God who designs trials and visits punishments on sinners.  It is a simple, if myopic, view of things.  I, myself, think he must spend a lot of time alone, staring into his fireplace, his heart wrung by the stubborn short-sightedness of his children.  Why, I wonder, would he go to all the trouble to punish us, when we do such a good job of it ourselves?

Everyone will get through this.  Hopefully, everyone will have learned something.  One of the girls in the family (not step, but again, no counting here) quietly explained to her mother, there under that pale sun, that she had broken up with her boyfriend that morning.  Not absolutely, but a stepping back.  A more casual relationship, pitched to the actual time of their lives.  “There is no reason,” she said, “to try to rush into growing up too fast . . . “