Two Bags

We danced on the occasion of my 65th birthday, It was a surprise party. The picture in the bag is from this party.

Gave two of my wife’s little bags to two little girls yesterday. Knickknack bags with pink felt flowers and the like. One had a drawstring. One had a zipper. The bags not the girls. I put a tiny picture of my wife and me inside each bag. I think their mother might explain why. The girls never knew my wife, and they only know me as Mr. John, the old man suddenly attached to their family who seems to show up all the time.

There’s no telling how long the bags will last with them or what they’ll think of them in the years to come. But that’s okay. They’re just little ripples of my wife’s life landing on the distant shores of some child’s life, and that feels good. And maybe one day at a family get together in the distant future, when the two little girls have little girls of their own, they’ll talk about the time Mr. John showed up, and their parents and grandparents will tell them who he was, and who his wife was, and that will be good too. And those ripples will keep on rolling.

Our family had a Mrs. Pruett who came to live with my great-grand mother by the house by the house where I now live. She’s even in some of our old home movies. A lot of her story is sort of lost in the past, but she’s part of our story now so that’s been saved, and the ripple of her life is still moving through the universe. And I’m always touched by the kindness of my great-grandmother who let a stranger come live at her place, as if that was just the most common and ordinary thing to do in the world.