My wife sent me this

In the days when country doctors would travel half a day in the snow to see a patient, a sick man turned to his doctor, as he was preparing to head off into the bitter cold and said, "Doctor, I am afraid to die. Tell me what lies on the other side."

Very quietly, the doctor said, "I don't know."

"You don't know? You, a God-fearing man, do not know what is on the other side?"

The doctor was holding the handle of the door; on the other side came a sound of scratching and whining, and as he opened the door, a dog sprang into the room and leaped on him with an eager show of gladness.

Turning to the old man, the doctor said, "Did you notice my dog? He's never been in this room before. He didn't know what was inside. He knew nothing except that his master was here, and when the door opened, he sprang in without fear. I know little of what is on the other side of death, but I do know one thing... I know my Master is there and that is enough."

Other people's grief

It is seven in the morning, and the beginning glow of morning is taking hold. The ground is covered with white snow, and the cloudy sky is glowing with a slight touch of pink.

Last weekend, I played accompaniment and sang descanto at a funeral. Yesterday I went to the funeral of a childhood neighbour, and today I am doing the music at a healing service. Ive been surrounded by other people's grief, and I suppose I am having a brief taste of what that must be like for a priest. And it isn't as awful as I always imagined it to be.

While there are certainly no joys in watching people suffer, grief is a terrible but potent reminder that love is in the world. People may leave the world, but the love others have for them does not. It is a little different every time I see it. At the memorials we have had in my wife's family, there is always, amid the grief, a certain degree of silliness: my brother in law wearing a chicken hat, me inserting funny lyrics into one of the songs, my wife bringing her mother's ashes to chaperone us at family camp.

Yesterday, there was none of that, because people do not do grief the same way. Instead, there was a brother, broken up, delivering an eulogy off the cuff. He asked simple questions: "Who's going to make me laugh? Who's going to fix my car?" There are only heartbreaking answers for the moment.

Funerals are for us, ultimately. They help us begin to picture the rest of our lives and make sense of it. Although it is beautiful to send people off with all of our love and affection, they already bask in it in a way that is beyond all understanding. For those who leave us, every tear will be wiped away, and there is no more sorrow. There are many rooms in the Father's house, and a Father who has waited a long time to greet us Himself.

Even his mistakes were brilliant

Einstein once called his cosmological constant his "greatest blunder." I am sure he would be amused to discover that even in this, apparently, he was quite right.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Supernovae Back Einstein's "Blunder"

Worst poet ever

I don't know if the man who wrote these particular "works" is the same Michael Newdow as that lawyerly fellow who worries about pledges and dollar bills, but whoever wrote this awful dreck has to be the worst poet ever. Worse than "William the Bloody Awful", a fictional bad poet from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Mr. Newdow perhaps embraces a worldview in which he has no soul. But from my perspective, I'd say it's more his poetry. :-) "In the sky a light quite meteoric?" Wow - I mean, that's bloody awful - there are no words for how grade four bad that is. He does have one funny line however. "I'm really not litigious
But now I'm in a bind. I'd like to just be kind," He writes, though I'm sure it is not intentionally ironic.

Michael Newdow Song Lyrics

These are a few of my favourite things

This comes from The Ignoble Experiment aka Live Dangerously!

10 Favorites
Favorite Season: I love them all, but summer tops it for me.
Favorite Sport: swimming, skiing
Favorite Time: Sunset
Favorite Color: blue
Favorite Actor: Robin Williams
Favorite Actress: Gillian Anderson; even when the X-Files scripts sucked, agent Scully always had a fascinating emotional and intellectual complexity, thanks to the presence Anderson gave her.
Favorite Ice Cream: Vanilla
Favorite Food: Raspberries, blackberries, green grapes, strawberries
Favorite Drink: Lemonade
Favorite Place: in the water

9 Currents
Current Feeling: melancholy
Current Underwear Color: Ain't nobody's business (to quote Billy Holliday)
Current Windows Open: None, silly.
Current Drink: water
Current Time: 9:06
Current Mobile(s): I lost my phone in the snow last winter. Second time I did it, so I never replaced it.
Current Show on TV: No idea. I imagine Regis is on somewhere. I don't watch anything other than news anymore.
Current Thought: That the TV show thing was a stupid question.
Current Clothes: Green collared button up shirt, black pants, my shoes, which I discovered this morning have holes in the soles.

8 Firsts
First Nickname: The Martian, because in my first public speaking exercise I gave a speech called “The Blue Planet,” which I announced I was from. I guess I was the only kid in the class to understand what allegory was. They called me that for years.
First Kiss: I think it was some girl in Saskatchewan we were playing bulldog with. But I'm not really sure.
First Crush: Not really sure. Infatuations came and went like dandelion fluff when I was a boy.
First Best Friend: Stephane, with whom I was friends from the age of four on.
First Vehicle I drove: My great uncle's Cadillac.
First Job: .I rode an ice cream bike. Some days, I ate all my profits. :-)
First Pet: Samuel Leonard Pussycat.
First Shave: Geez, I dunno. The first time I was tired of looking like Shaggy from Scooby Doo?

7 Lasts
Last Drink: I don't think I've had anything to drink yet. That bottle of water is just sitting there.
Last Kiss: My wife
Last Time I Drove: I drove my bike a couple of days ago.
Last Time Shaved: This morning
Last Web Site Visited: Google
Last Movie Watched: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Last Pill I Had: Lactase

6 Have You Evers
Have You Ever Broken the Law: No doubt. They have laws against just about anything. No felonies though. Just fineable stuff, as far as I know.
Have You Ever Been Drunk: Boy, I could tell some stories, but in short – yes. Don't drink much now, though.
Have You Ever Kissed Someone You Didn't Know: Don't think so. Maybe a few aunts' cousins' nephews' former roommates' great aunts at my grandparents fiftieth, but that's not what you meant, is it?
Have You Ever Been in the Middle/Close to Gunfire or Bomb Blast: Yes. At an airshow once, I am sure I was no more than a couple of hundred feet away from a huge explosion when some kind of fighter-bomber dropped some sort of incendiary device on a target. You could feel the heat. And I've fired a gun a few times – the last few times, hunting pumpkins in the fall (beats shooting coke bottles anyday.)
Have You Ever Skinny Dipped: Yeah. But not for thrills. We were camping, and I was too lazy to hang laundry.
Have You Ever Broken Anyone's Heart: Probably not, but then who can speak for another's heart?

5 Things
Things You Can Hear Right Now: industrial equipment, a fan, someone shuffling plastic things. My hands whacking keys on a keyboard. Papers shuffling.
Things on Your Bed: four pillows, a duvet.
Things You Ate Today: Two samosas, an orange, and a bowl of ramen noodles. I know that's only four things, but there has not been anything else.
Things You Can't Live Without: You can actually live without a lot, but who wants to? I can't live without food. You can't live without water. And you can't live without meaning.
Things You Do When You Are Bored: Make music. Sometimes I'll just bask in the boredom – as an archbishop of Canterbury once said when asked his greatest accomplishment, I am proud of learning how to do nothing at all.

4 Places You Have Been Today
Home. Greenboro park. The bus. Here.

3 Things On Your Desk Right Now
A bottle of water. A headset. A USB adapter.

2 Choices
Black or White: Black. Doesn't show when its dirty. :-)
Hot or Cold: Cold. I don't mind the cold, and it can be very peaceful.

1 Thing You want to do before you die

Visit the places I have never been.

How to lose a war without losing

It has happened. Consider Viet Nam or any other war that ended with occupation. If the locals were unwilling to be occupied, all they had to do was wait out the occupier while he suffered the proverbial death by a thousand cuts. This quote is worth considering:

It may be an apocryphal story, but it is told that after the American evacuation from Vietnam in 1975 an embittered American Colonel told a North Vietnamese officer, “You know, you never beat us in a single tactical engagement.” The North Vietnamese responded, “That may be true, but it is also irrelevant.”


Center for Defense Information

open book: In honor of St. Cecilia..

Amy Welborn asks In honor of St. Cecilia that people tell a memorable story of how music moved them.

Here is one, though I have many.

Not a church moment, but profound for me anyway. I was on my way to a theatre to see "The Gospel of John" film that Garth Drabinsky had produced. I was in a very dark place, and had been for days - perpetual rainclouds over my head regarding my own inadequacies.

Outside the theatre, I heard the echoes of a song I'd heard a few times on the radio, I think. But this time, I listened to the words - it was Josh Groban's rendition of "You Raise Me Up."

You raise me up
So I can stand on mountains
You raise me up
To walk on stormy seas
And I am strong
When I am on your shoulders
You raise me up to more than I can be.

Tears welled up as I realized this was exactly how I needed to feel. Of course, I could expect inadequacy in my life. But I also had a God capable of taking me past them. What a cathartic moment, brought by a lovely rendition of a simple song.

Catholic school teacher fired for... pregnancy?

I just can't understand this. If there is anything that singles the Catholic church out, it is the unwavering conviction that people who are not yet born ought to have the opportunity to make it all the way to birth.

Statistics have shown that economic reasons dominate among women who choose to have abortions. How, exactly, is this school board being pro-life when it is both rendering her unemployed and without health care, and also stigmatizing her as though she is a leper?

One assumes that the rule that teachers must not "violate the tenets of Catholic morality" has a certain amount of leeway. A lot of things violate Catholic morality, and most of us, in small ways, do some of these things every day. That is why we have confessionals.

This woman has made a difficult choice - to become a mother, even though her choice to do so jeopardizes her career and alters her future irrevocably. When confronted with the big picture choices (and not petty fix it in the confessional stuff), she is making exactly the sort of moral decision the church calls on her to make. For this, she is to be punished?

7Online.com: New York City and Tri-State News from WABC-TV

Bad habit

I have a bad habit of shouting at the news on television. I don't even know why I do it. The issue that really gets me going is war: I can't stand listening to saber-rattlers. I am thinking in part of the Iraq war, where here in Canada, we had people arguing we had to go along with that to preserve our economic interests - the most crass and callous explanation I have ever heard to justify war. And then there is the recent call by Iran for the destruction of Israel.

Now you, dear reader, may be well aware of my opinions on these matters. You may agree with them, and you may disagree with them. But you probably find them uncontroversial. What is odd, however, are the debates I have with the television. For all my clever heckling, it never seems phased by my outbursts.

For someone in Phoenix

I know you believe that you are not close to God. That absence can seem very real, and I know what it feels like. Sometimes in my own life, God has seemed absent. And sometimes, even worse, it feels like his absence is because I chased him away. But know that it is precisely in these moments, in fact, that God has drawn closest to you. He has never walked more closely by your side.

One of the most mysterious and beautiful passages of the entire Bible is found in Genesis 32. Here are the relevant excerpts:

And Jacob said, "O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O Lord who did say to me, `Return to your country and to your kindred, and I will do you good,' I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness which you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan; and now I have become two companies. Deliver me, I pray you, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I fear him, lest he come and slay us all, the mothers with the children. But you said, `I will do you good, and make your descendants as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.'"

...

And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and Jacob's thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then the man said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." And he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob."

Then he said, "Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Tell me, I pray, your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peni'el, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved."

The sun rose upon him as he passed Penu'el, limping because of his thigh. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the sinew of the hip which is upon the hollow of the thigh, because he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh on the sinew of the hip.

In the worst state of anxiety over his brother Esau, whom Jacob had once cheated out of Isaac's inheritance, Jacob had reached his lowest ebb in this place. Seeing another man, Jacob desperately sought out validation – I will not let you go unless you bless me – from another man. He fought all night for the man's embrace and acknowledgment. And only upon winning it and asking the man's name did he realize that a truth far more wonderful than anything he could have hoped for had unfolded before him – God himself had blessed him!

You are right to say that “God will know the details” as I pray for you. For my part, it is only necessary that I pray for you, and love you. And I do – both.

Hurray for Texas!!

A petulant and reluctant Sony, clearly resenting the circumstances, finally issued a recall on CDs that many technical commentators basically called spyware (such as the famous Mark Russinovich, the NT mag guy everyone admires.) The discs installed low level files in Windows operating systems designed to prevent CD copying and ripping, and then used some sloppy code to prevent the files from being detected.

So people who thought they were going to listen to music as they put CDs in their drive bay were instead installing a root kit without consumer's knowledge, and doing it in a way that hackers could come in and exploit. Meanwhile the program, according to EFF staff who've launched a class action suit, would be "spying on their listening habits with surreptitiously-installed programs."

The tactic is so bad that anti-spyware programs have been modified to detect and remove this incredible invasion of privacy. Sony's music discs are being treated like a leprous computer infection.

So Texas has decided to sue Sony for distributing spyware. Good for them! If Sony is unwilling to accept the chastizing of its own customers, maybe Texas can teach it some humility.

Texas Sues Sony Under Anti-Spyware Law

(Here's the technical description of what Sony did.)

Forgot to make this entry...

(wrote it about a week ago)

For the first time this year – at least, for the first time in such a way that it didn't melt right away – it snowed. The first snow is something I always greet with some ambivalence now. While I enjoy winter's many activities, the first things that occur to me tend to include:

• The salt will be out soon, and will ruin my shoes

• The snow is not going to go away for as many as six months

• Every day will be bright white, but in that dull winterly way that comes from lack of sunlight, for at least another month and a half.

• Trudging through the dark, making my way too and from overcrowded malls, is a large and looming part of my future.

But Advent is coming. Advent is a season where dim light begins to accrue in the dark, one candle at a time, and reminds me that hope always filters into the world. In the seasons. And in a small helpless child in a manger.

"Scotty, do you always multiply your repair estimates by a factor of four?"

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Space trip delay for Trek actor

Fading Things

On Friday night as we drove to the cottage, I was not in a good mood. It had been a difficult day full of workday challenges, and while I was looking forward to getting up to the cottage, this particular birthday had me dining on ashes, as I would later tell my wife. Half my life was now in my past. And why did it have to be the half that featured more vigor and better health?

When we got there, my mood changed instantly. My other brother in law was there, my sister in law, my niece. To see them smiling, happy to see me, reminded me why it is that life is worth living: it isn't how much health you have, it is how much love you have. That's never in short supply if you just share your best self with everyone you can. At midnight, my brother in law handed me a parcel to unwrap, something he'd prepared with great glee. I opened it – it was a “campfire song leader's kit”, and included, wrapped delicately, firewood, matches, kindling, kazoos, and lots of funny little items, including John Prine's “Dear Abby.” He had put great care and heart into this (not to mention humour), and I was quite touched.

Saturday was a normal day. Or rather, a normal day that happened to have perfect weather. The other boys worked on tiling the new bathroom. I cleaned the gutters, a job nobody else likes. I like doing it, if the weather is nice. Many people are scared of heights, but I rather like them. After spending the day on yard work and chores, my wife and the other ladies went shopping. One brother in law went onto the computer, and the other went to take a nap.

So I went out for a walk as the sunset. The wind had stilled and the woods took on a quiet stillness, though it was still warm. I walked over and down a lane of abandoned-during-winter cottages to a nearby beach. A number of logs lined the beach, and I took up a perch on one at the right edge of the beach. The sun was long past now, but the afterglow lining the trees on the far edge of the lake was a deep and burning salmon red. The woods were still – there were no birds singing or flapping, no creatures scurrying through the limbs, or bugs buzzing. All there was was myself, and the burning lake and sky.

There is no greater beauty than fading things, I thought perhaps God was reminding me.

Was it so bad that my life might slowly begin the journey towards fading? After all, what has been given to me over the years? In my youngest years, I had my parents, my brother, my grandparents, my best friend Stephane, the forests of Orleans and Green's Creek, and summers in Saskatchewan. When I grew older, I had received the gift of my own family – my wife, who is my partner, and my children. I gained the friendship of my brothers-in-law and my wife's family. I reestablished a connection with my own family that contained a new closeness I had not known before. And I had been given the opportunity to make music an important part of my life. If my life had ended right there on that beach, I should be perfectly content that I have been given everything any man could ever hope for, and even more.

In the dark, I walked home, back down the road towards the glowing amber lights of the cottage, a hearth of warmth and love. Some friends of ours arrived in their van with my older daughter, we had a nice big dinner, ate cake, I opened presents while my brother-in-law was also made to open his (his birthday is the day after mine,) and we lived another simple day. Could anyone ask for any more?

It Looks like...

...some variant on scenario #2. I'll fill you in later. :-)

Party (part ii)

The truth of Earthly existence is that we are in a sense alone. Alone in our heads. We can hear the words other people say, but for those words to reach our comprehension they must:

• originate as thoughts in his or her head

• Be formulated as words;

• He or she must then speak them

• The words must travel as pressure waves through the air

• We must render the pressure waves as hearing with our ears

• We have to interpret the sounds, as well as any accompanying body language and any contextual knowledge we have about about the individual, and try to translate them into simpatico thoughts.

In other words, it is a very long and indirect route from your mind to my mind. Henri Nouwen points out that we often are more appreciative of our friends when they are not around then when they are. When we have them present, we speak and are worried for how our words will be taken, we concentrate on conveying our real inner meanings. When our friends are not present, instead, we often bask in glowing thoughts about their decency, generosity of spirit, and any other good qualities they possess.

And so it is that I can be cavalier about whether or not I see friends or family this weekend. I am alone. They are alone. But I can appreciate that they have attempted to reach beyond their solitude and into mine. And it is true that I can often appreciate it more when I have solitude to contemplate it with.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

Sing and dance together and be joyous,
but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone
though they quiver with the same music.

(Kahlil Gibran)

To party or not to party?

I am turning forty on Saturday. You don't have too many fortieth birthdays, and people often try and spring a surprise party on people who happen to turn forty. In this post, I examine the odds of a surprise party under certain scenarios.

Party at home, Friday Night

My wife wants to go to the cottage on the weekend. She said something on the weekend in exasperation about how tired she was by our busy weekend, and how she needed to be there next week to relax. So if anything is happening at home, it is likely on Friday night.

Pros: She took time off work and has been rearranging rooms, cleaning junk piles, going over the arrangement of furniture and shelves all through the house, top to bottom, all things she would do if she expected a lot of company soon. In theory this is happening because we are getting our windows changed this week. But why would workmen changing windows care about the arrangement and décor of our house?

Cons: She has been wanting to do these things for a while. Plus, she said the other day that we don't ever have company because she doesn't like our furniture, and it would be nice to change it so we could have company at Christmas. Also I recently spoke to some people I would have expected to be invited to any such affair, and the part of town I lived in came up – they didn't seem to have a clue as to which end of town I lived in, which certainly suggests they lacked knowledge about any party that would take place there.

Odds: 3:1

Party at the cottage, Saturday Night or Day

My wife does want to go to the cottage on the weekend. :-)

Pros: When we planned a birthday party for my brother in law in the past, she had the idea of having people 'just turn up' at the cottage until it dawned on him there was a huge crowd of people. She tends to repeat her modus operandi at these things. Also my sister in law called me today looking for my wife, which means she could be planning a trip over to the cottage. This would be a smaller gathering than the previous scenario, with more family but fewer friends, and so would be more manageable a party to throw. To boot, it is my brother in law's birthday the next day, so it would occur to her to try and combine the events.

Cons: Getting birthday party supplies up to the cottage would be hard to do and still escape notice.

Odds: even

Party at the Barley Mowe, Sunday Night

This is a pub on south Bank Street in Ottawa.

Pros: This would be the easiest way to gather church friends, for this is where they all go to drink.

Cons: My wife works very, very early in the morning the next day.

Odds: 5:1

No party at all

*sniff*

Pro: My wife has been very tired, and is quite busy with work. It may simply not be possible for her to organize anything.

Cons: I got her good three years ago with a surprise party.

Odds: 2:1

---

The surprise? I am finding myself struggling with containing disappointment at the possibility that this last may be true. Why should I care if nobody throws me a party? I'm often uncomfortable at them anyways, due to my painful shyness. I already know that there are some people who like me, some who do not, and the existence of a party has no impact on the likelihood of either. It all brings me back to Henri Nouwens solitude vs. loneliness... a question I will address in my next post.

Forgiveness

Is forgiveness always necessary? In my opinion - yes! It is not easy. It may not even be possible - each of us is only human, and some wounds are nearly impossible to heal. But forgiving is always an ideal to strive for.

Here is what forgiveness is not: forgiveness is not saying of an evil thing, "It's OK, that's fine." Forgiveness is discovering that there is something better in you - something divine, something not present in the act that you grant forgiveness for. Forgiveness is that theological virtue called Hope; hope that your love has power to make things better.

Pile of crap

MSN Tech & Gadgets

I am a musician, I have discs out of my music, and there are even artists who've covered my songs. I don't love the idea of file sharing and trading. However, I deeply regret the corporate push that is out there to limit fair use - technologies that limit how many copies you can make of a CD you buy, or restrict your rights to burn a CD of music you've downloaded. These things are often called "digital rights management" - but in fact, they aren't rights at all. The creator of music is NOT entitled by law to restrict the personal usage of home listeners, provided it remains personal usage.

Copyright is a limited granting of rights, entitled to foster creativity. It does not mean the author owns a work in that the same sense that they own property. Artistic creation was meant to eventually become the property of everyone, once the benefit no longer accrued to the original artist and their family. The US Constitution in fact actually outlaws perpetual copyright, a precept that the every-twenty-year Disney extensions break in spirit, if not in actual letter.

Patrick Ross hysterically proclaims that, "No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will, but that's what HR-1201 permits. That hated TPM would disappear from the market, as there's no reason to employ a lock if everyone has a legal right to the key. But as TPM leaves, so do the digital offerings that come with it."

Then tell me - how does he explain GarageBand?

The New York times once wrote about the coming of copyright perpetuity:

Artists naturally deserve to hold a property interest in their work, and so do the corporate owners of copyright. But the public has an equally strong interest in seeing copyright lapse after a time, returning works to the public domain -- the great democratic seedbed of artistic creation -- where they can be used without paying royalties.

In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. Public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment.

Similar words could be said about the implosion of fair use.

River: Movies and Dreams

This is heartbreaking to read: Baghdad Burning: Movies and Dreams

BBC NEWS | Health | 'Nagging helped dad find cancer'

See? Nagging is good for something! :-)

BBC NEWS | Health | 'Nagging helped dad find cancer'

PCWorld.com - Sony Uncloaks Hidden DRM Code

It is pretty sad when putting an audio CD in your computer basically hacks your machine using computer virus techniques...

PCWorld.com - Sony Uncloaks Hidden DRM Code

First Stars in Universe Detected?

Let there be light.

The big bang did not bring into existence the universe as we know it. After the universe cooled enough for molecules to form, it became a "formless void" of hydrogen clouds. After a hundred million years, gravity began to concentrate the clouds until they began to coalesce into supermassive stars. The bigger a star is, the shorter its lifespan. These stars were so large that they lasted only sixteen million years apiece, flaming out as giant supernova.

But those giant supernova introduced the heavier elements into the universe - metals, carbon, oxygen - that the next generations of stellar objects would use as the universe began to take shape in a way recognizable to us today.

Accents

I have never entirely figured this out. My brother and I were raised in Orleans, just outside of Ottawa. We were actually at the edge of Cumberland, so we grew up hearing English spoken with a mix of French, Ottawa valley, and standard Canadian accents. For a time, my brother had the Ottawa valley accent, but I never did (I can mimic it perfectly, but I've never had it.)

I've never understood how I could have a different accent from my brother!

Fleeting Things

On Sunday, before pulling the motorboat out for the season, we took a spin around the lake. It was unseasonably warm, like a late September day. And although the leaves peaked two weeks ago, the oak trees have kept their leaves, and are still bright orange. The sky was blue, and the water shimmered in the bright midday sun. Little moments like that are as small blisses fallen from heaven.

Last night was one, too. My youngest daughter is almost twelve, and on the verge of being too old to be taken about trick or treating by Dad. And she almost did not want me to. But she did let me.

There are so many Halloween memories, my own, both daughters. They were so small in their first costumes, kind of clueless about how to say “Trick or treat” before and “Thank you” after, but they were excited, almost like Christmas. To take my much older daughter trick or treating is like a last wisp of connection to those innocent days, like the orange glow of oak leaves two weeks past their prime. Things are beautiful because they are fleeting.