The Things I Saw Sunday
The nimble, tiny Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) coming to the feeder and singing for his morning breakfast…

Driving along the bluff shortly after 8 am, watching a hawk cross the road, forty feet above, clutching a squirrel in its talons. The squirrel was lifeless, having lost the struggle, but its tail fluttered behind. After the first hawk was another, skimming the treetops, heading for Sunday morning brunch.

Holding the old woman’s gnarled and twisted hands, paper-thin and showing delicate veins and taunt tendons.

“How long have you been here?” I asked, “the last time I came to visit, you were at Margaret’s house.”

“I’m at Margaret’s house,” she replied.

I smiled, “Let’s say the Lord’s Prayer together. Our Father, who art in heaven…”

The woman who came up to me at the restaurant and introduced herself as Gail “from way back.” I didn’t recognize her. Not at all…

Watching my daughter in the rear-view mirror falling asleep in her seat. Her eyes were getting so heavy after supper and a big morning. The drone of the highway carried her off and she napped all the way home, out of the car like a limp doll over my shoulder and up into the house and her new ‘big girl’ bed. The gentle rise and fall of her chest under her favorite blanket.

The heat lightning illuminating the towering clouds over the Gulf.

Mars, getting redder and brighter in the east over Zack’s new home…

The old and the young, the quick and the dead, the gaudy and the sublime: I saw them all on Sunday. Sometimes it overwhelms you, the magnitude of life. The seriousness, the silliness: it’s all there. Sometimes, while sitting on the porch overlooking the bay, eavesdropping via baby monitor on my little one’s sleepy, nonsensical baby talk, I stop to wonder where I fit in. I am a father, a husband: I am a man who wants to live a life worthy of the unbelievably good fortune I have been given.

I am not a man of constant sorrow. I am a man of constant amazement.