Passages

We had a big weekend not long ago. My grandson took his first communion at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church. I understand that this is not something that may be interesting to everyone out in the blogosphere (I wondered how long it would take me to use that word). However, it’s not the event itself that makes it worth talking about. It is that there was an event in our lives that marked passage of time, passage of the torch, passage of generations, that makes it relatable.

I have no trouble remembering when my children, Justin and Emily, hit this milestone. It seems like a minute ago some days. Some days it feels like another lifetime. Suddenly, I was the grandmother sitting in the pew feeling all the feels that grandmas feel. He looked so grown up. My daughter looked so proud and relieved, somehow. My husband was bursting at the seams. It was Kevin, after all, who started all this. He is a faith-filled, thoughtful man who took me to church before our first date. He didn’t want to miss Mass, but knew he might not be up for it on Sunday morning. That spoke volumes to me. I wasn’t Catholic, but something woke up in me that evening, at that service. A spark was lit that grew into a desire to join the church and I think Kevin can take at least partial credit for it.

Anyway….nearly 46 years later, there we were. Peepaws and Meemaws, sitting in a pew in a church that had seen our daughter’s first communion and confirmation, our son’s funeral, our daughter’s wedding and the baptism of both our grandchildren. It was a wonderful, accomplished feeling to watch another generation in our family participate fully at the same kind of service that meant so much to me so long ago.

It is days like these that make folks stop and reflect on the life behind them and the life ahead. My role in life is evolving and changing in so many ways, just as everyone’s does. I realize how very lucky I am to have the family I do. I realize how lucky I am to have the right and freedom to sit in that church and not be afraid to worship. I am warm and fed and clothed and have a home to go to. I work, I visit with friends, I have a partner to be beside me. He takes care of me and I take care of him and neither of us fuss when it is our turn to do the caretaking. I won’t pretend that I don’t wish Justin could be here to go through these days with us. I would love to see him with his niece and nephew. I would love to see who he would have become. That is not our fate and so we just remember how lucky we were even to have him for 20 years. We realize how lucky we are to have Emily and her family with us, living close enough to us to be able to be part of their lives.

Naturally, we mark time with events like these. Birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, weddings, goodbyes and new adventures have made me who I am. Sitting in church I found myself looking back with smiles and tears. Some of those memories make me blush, some of them make me very proud, some of them make me laugh or cry out loud and some of them make me want to strive to be a better person.

The times we are living in now are so very different than when I was a child. I welcome some of the changes and rue the loss of some of the attitudes and customs we took for granted. As I watched my grandson go through the ceremony that weekend, I couldn’t help but reflect on some of the things he and his sister may never know in their lives.

On summer days when I was really young, we hit the door after a quick bowl of cereal, sometimes topped with milk from our neighbor’s cow, sometimes from the milk that the dairy truck put into a galvanized box on our front step. Those days were spent riding a bike, exploring the nearby cemetery, wading in the creek (crick!) behind our property, tending a huge garden plot or designing a construction site under the lilac bush with my brother’s Tonka trucks and dirt hauled in from the garden. We used the railroad track rails as a balance beam, played baseball with 13 kids (or 5 kids) on each team or just sat in the grass and searched for four-leaf clovers while we talked about the important topics of the day for pre-teens. We stayed far away from the “log lot” where the sawmill stored logs before they were processed. It was very well known that you could be crushed to death in that lot and we gave it a wide berth. We weren’t allowed on the other side of the railroad tracks or in a “rough” part of town we called Bucktown. I don’t think it was really rough, but Mom didn’t want us that far away, so the railroad tracks made a good border and Bucktown sounded scary. We knew when to be home for lunch, and we knew the day ended when the “security lights” came on. We never, well, hardly ever, strayed very far and lots of moms kept their eyes on lots of kids. It was a bucolic and sweet way to spend a childhood. It will be an interesting series of stories for my grandchildren who will wonder how I ever survived without cable or streaming or internet or cell phones. Just for a little more emphasis, my grandparents had an outhouse and we had a telephone party line until I was a teen.

I am blessed with an age-diverse group of people in my life. Some of them are right now smiling a smile of remembrance, some are teary thinking about times past, some are wrinkling their forehead or raising an eyebrow wondering exactly how old I am. I have been alive in 8 different decades. I just barely made it into the 50s. The 60s and 70s were when I formed all those sweet memories and more. In the 80s I was a newlywed and a new mom. The 90s were a blur of kids’ sports activities all year long. The 2000s were graduations and proms and college and grief and reinvention. The 2010s made me a mother-in-law and a grandmother. The 2020s are going to challenge me with some real changes, but I am looking forward to all of them. I love my life. I love what it was, what it is, and what it will be. I have a some regrets, big and little, but I know reflecting on those gets me right back to where I am and who I am today. Time moves on and I am happy to keep moving with it. I can’t wait to see what’s next.