Life: My Oyster
It’s an interesting age to live in. Or to finish up living in, to face life honestly. We read history and think, “that’s the way it was then, but now finally it’s like this.” But it isn’t, not at all. The first time I remember becoming actively conscious of my own just-passing-throughness was an afternoon the end of July 1984, the week we arrived in Apalachicola. I had just read the list of priests before me at Trinity Episcopal Church, spotted some I had been at Camp Weed with thirty five years earlier, and was wandering around the church property thinking now finally it’s me at last, right where as a child I wanted to be. For some reason, in that wandering, awareness dawned that it wasn’t now finally me at last, that it wasn’t final at all, and not me at last, just my name being added and that a generation hence Tom Weller would be just one more name on a longer list with others after me.
Just so, that was three decades ago and that generation came and is gone and there are two or three names after me on the list. The little children who showed up in church a couple days later, my first Sunday, eventually became my acolytes, then my lectors, served the chalice when they turned sixteen if they wanted to, finished school, grew up, married, mostly moved away, and have children and careers of their own. Their grandparents are long dead, I know because I buried them. Now, their parents are retired or finishing up too. It’s an interesting sense.
Barak Obama isn’t now finally president, nor is John Boehner now finally Speaker, they are just two more names on lists of folks who have dealt with the Constitution the founding fathers gave us and the Supreme Court has interpreted. I feel sad for them, especially for the antagonism in which they are making their way. It’s an interesting age to live in. Frankly, the tense antagonism is better by far than any alternative of one party rule. We have two parties, but in reality we need three, right, center, and left. Not Dixiecrat Redux though, God forbid.
From summer 1984 to summer 1998 the years were ups and downs, if mostly ups, but nevertheless. If I can happily return to Apalachicola and Trinity Church more than a generation after that summer afternoon, perhaps thirty years from now John and Barry will laugh over a beer that everyone took them so seriously.
One of my first acquisitions that first week in Apalachicola was a gallon of oysters, which I opened and put in the refrigerator in the rectory kitchen. Over the next few days I fished them out of the bucket and ate them one by one. About half became my favorite breakfast: six to nine oysters on a slice of whole wheat bread. Slip into the toaster oven, broil, take out, butter the top, sprinkle of salt. That’s as good as life gets. And it's fine.
Might as well be, it's the way it is.
Might as well be, it's the way it is.
TW+