SEPTEMBER 20TH

This Sunday the world will continue its wobbly spin. Trump will thump his chest while bloviating. The least and dumbest among us will appear on morning talk shows.

At the same time butterflies will flutter by and the neighborhood hummingbird will brunch with his considerable beak into our gourmet feeder celebrating our 29^th anniversary. Not just another day for Peggy and me.

In 1986 we made it official after 2 ½ years together. We got it right this time. Only a few people in attendance that day are still with us. It happens that way the second time around. How to describe bliss? I suppose it’s bad form to publicly proclaim one’s good fortune. I might sound like Donald Trump. But the fact is I won the human lottery.

At 94 Peggy is still in her extended prime. We don’t travel any more but her imagination carries her to far regions off the map. If she takes daily flights of fancy I ground her and in the process she lifts me enough to claim a distant perch.

As a surrogate mother to at least a half dozen young(er) friends, besides our combined families, she is a model and inspiration of how one might be in this world pulling on inner resources. She is a harbor for my voyage both in and out.

Peggy enthuses and her ardor is an affirmation of being alive. It charges the air around her. Her ground, her gaze becomes a fertile garden of possibilities with hybrid consanguinities. In a recent poem she connects secular saints (transformational artists) with lame religion and the faithful watching a sixteen inning baseball game.

Peggy was orphaned at eight. As a consequence she had the benefit of two mothers. One offered unconditional love and nurtured her imagination. Her aunt who took over gave her the tools to make her way in the world. How she made her way to me and I to her is the stuff of a French film where a man and a woman drift inexorably toward one another, almost meet, then almost don’t, then do. It’s called life. It is our movie.