SF Bay Area Sunset*
The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Stevie Wonder made me cry. I was zipping along I-580 when “Isn’t She Lovely?” came through my earbuds and my eyes brimmed with tears. I surprised myself.
There has been a lot written about 2020’s altered Thanksgiving due to COVID. Certainly five of us spaced at one long table brought back memories of the years when 20 to 25 family members took up two or more tables, spilling into adjacent rooms. We had a small group for Thanksgiving this year, but we amused ourselves with very old memories of the tension between my mother and her mom over the making-of-the-gravy. It was a dependable drama every year and we all had a good laugh–so my tears were not about the pandemic’s effect on our Thanksgiving.
It didn’t take long to realize that, thanks to Stevie Wonder’s great song, I was reliving the happy arrival of a baby girl in our family last summer and the anticipated birth of another grandchild in May. Again, I thought of my mother. In her final days, she talked about all the family events she would not live to see, which didn’t bother her one bit. I thought about my own life and all the time I spend worrying about what might lie ahead. And then I had an epiphany: This is it, Kiddo. Enjoy it now, every day, while you can, and stop fretting about what might or might not happen. Or, as James Taylor wrote in a song: “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.”
Sweet post. James Taylor is so wise, and it’s a song I didn’t know.