Life is Messy

I had a birthday yesterday. It wasn’t a milestone although the older I get, the more I believe that every birthday is a mile stone.

Our former daughter in law had a tradition of asking the rapidly aging person at dinner, “What wisdom have you learned, now that you are a year older?”

No one asked that yesterday, but I still thought about it. Here’s my wisdom after my close to six and a half decades:

If you do it right, life is messy.

I had a student once, Missy, an accomplished harp player who married the son of a super star of music, who told me that you can’t know what’s good unless you have some bad, and conversely, you can’t know what’s bad unless you have good in your life.

I had never thought about life that way, but it makes a lot of sense.

We have great joy in our life because we experienced - and still experience on occasion - great sadness. When our son Daniel died, we thought it was the end of our world, and on occasion we wished devoutly that our world would indeed end. It didn’t, obviously. Instead, we were given chosen family: two grandsons at first, David and Jonathan. Then came Alexa and Greyson and more recently the beauteous Ella. Derek and Shannon chose me their dad and the grandson’s dad put us in the same category as did another former student whose father is a giant jerk. Then the lovely Rochelle named me her cousin. For all of these wonderful people I am extremely grateful.

We survived a messy time, and on occasion our lives continue to be messy. We have made a couple of moves, a house that is six plus years later worth far less than we put into it. We have had broken ankles and dogs that chew things and poop all over the yard. Both major and minor messiness, but all messy just the same.

We have been through friends’ and relatives’ divorces - and remarriages. We have seen our kids’ significant others come and go. We loved all of them because our kids loved them, and we mourned their loss.

Yesterday was messy, but in a different way. My prerogative on my birthday is to do what I please. So we had lunch for some friends - only six because our table seats only eight and I no longer split people up. My cousin Rochelle and a great jazz singer we know through her, Joan Collaso, came for lunch yesterday. They joined our Furry Godmother - the couple who take care of our dogs when we need them to - and the two lovely ladies I regularly walk a mile in the pool with at the health club, Gwen and Joann. It was a no-presents party, but I got some funny birthday cards. The theme of the cards seemed to be wearing thongs, usually backwards, and we laughed and had a great time.

What was messy was that we cooked. Ann made dessert - Christmas pudding with hard sauce, my request - and I did the rest. I made pumpkin soup with kilbasa, and fresh bread. It was pretty simple, but after I baked I also vacuumed because we have two dogs. Apropos of nothing, I love the word vacuum because it has a double U, but not a W.

And in a further digression, since we no longer have a cleaning lady, I’m the downstairs cleaner. I was going to clean the bathrooms, but Ann beat me to it, a nice birthday present.

Then Jonathan and his dad came for dinner as they do every Wednesday, and I made sloppy joes, and Ann and I worked together on potatoes. She did the cauliflower and we had left over pudding. But the focus is not the food, it’s the company.

By the end of the day we were tired. It was a messy day, but a day full of joy. Which is the way life should be.

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