TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Take Time To Smell The Roses

ADVERTISEMENT

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 25, 2008

My wife and I flew to Connecticut last week to visit our daughter and her husband in their new home.

Naomi and Craig have been married one year and have relocated, settled in, mortgaged up and are planning a long future in small-town New England.

Our son, Andrew, is in Tacoma, Wash., for a three-month assignment that will complete his internship and ratchet his government service track into top gear. He moves to Italy in November.

He'll be working for the Army, renting a cottage in a small Tuscan village and soaking up more history and culture than most of us see in a lifetime.

A few years ago, we were sitting around with our friends boo-hooing about the trials and tribulations of raising teenagers. Now, they're off building grown-up lives, taking care of business, living like they mean it and changing the world.

Sometimes I'm afraid that if I pinch myself, I'll wake up with my old teaching job, two teens at home driving us nuts, a huge tension headache and no clue regarding the future other than that it all seems so far away.

Last week, the future grilled steak burgers for us on the deck of a lovely Connecticut home and next year it will serve its parents pasta on a golden hillside in Tuscany. The temptation, sitting on an airplane heading back to Tampa, is to say something banal: "Everything always works out in the end" or "We're good people, we prayed hard, now we're reaping the rewards."

That would miss the point.

Our lives were full, rich and meaningful even when the past was hard, the present difficult and the future foggy; and we will still know that kind of assurance when hard times come around again.

We are happy that our children are in good places, but neither our faith nor our sense of personal peace require sound bite-quality successes tailor-made for Christmas newsletter bragging rights. Life is too real for that kind of prosaic certainty; faith is too real for that kind of trite validation.

However, in the roller coaster ride of the here and now, I'm more than happy to pass on the enclosed nuggets of news. Rebekah and I, just a couple of years into our 50s, are very much in love, our careers are going well and our children are as happy as we have ever known them to be.

It's just gravy, I guess, but we'll take it in a heartbeat - every day.

Columnist Derek Maul can be reached at derekmaul @gmail.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT