Appreciating Life's Blessings

For everything there is a season.

As I return from visting my daughter in Britain, I am reminded of this.

When I was a boy in Britain in the 1950s in the northwest London suburbs my parents would drop me and my sister off down the street at the house of a pair of maiden sisters and drive to Stratford-on-Avon for a Shakespeare play.

Then the day came when my sister and I got to go. We saw Much Ado About Nothing in 1958 with Christopher Plummer as Benedick. I still have a visual recollection of Plummer on the Stratford stage.

Twenty years later we were driving with two daughters to Ashland, Oregon to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for a week of Shakespearing and getting together with my parents.

Then the next year we took our daughters to Seattle Opera for a performance of Don Giovanni. The orchestra was on strike so there were two grand pianos in the orchestra pit. But who cares!

Twenty years later I was driving to Ashland for the Shakespeare festival because my daughter was organizing a week of Shakespeare for her husband and two sons. For some reason her sons were really energized by the fight scenes. Unlike my daughters twenty years before.

Last summer I visited my daughter in Britain and she took me to Stratford-on-Avon to see a couple of Shakespeare plays and visit the schoolroom where William Shakespeare went to school and learned all about the classical figures he featured in his plays. And then on to Bath to check out the Jane Austen scene.

Last night my daughter took me to the Royal Opera in Covent Garden, right next to the flower girls of which you've heard tell, and we saw a fine performance of La Traviata. Earlier in the day we had a cream tea in the cafe at the British Museum where it seemed that everyone was outnumbered by the East Asians.

And so the whirligig of time brings on her revenges. Or the old'uns merely hand off the future to their posterity, in the realization of Burke's dictum that human society is a "contract… between those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are to be born." A contract never originally planned, or carefully carried out, or monitored or, at the last, reviewed and judged, but just an unrolling phenomenon from a disappearing past striding forth into an unknown future. And a blessing when you discover that life is giving you much mure than you deserve.