The other day a glass landed on our tile floors and exploded, like always. For me this is generally a time of mourning and wishing I was more coordinated or something. I feel bad no matter how small the loss. Part of it is growing up with a feeling of scarcity and part of it is reading how Gandhi made his grandson crawl over the ground to find the stub of a pencil so as to honor the work of the man who made the pencil.
The particular glasses we are breaking at the moment are thick and when they break there is a sparkly pile of generally non-threatening shards, and as I started to sweep them up, I heard a voice inside saying "e=mc2." I immediately relaxed. I know it's not an exact application, but in general principle it's true. Somehow the entropy that my clumsy choice unleashed is not final. In a mysterious, grand theme of the universe kind of way, my glass isn't lost--it's just transformed. I'd never thought of it that way, and it backed up and illumined the ways I'd considered loss before.
The last year has been a shower of death and loss and it looks like there are at least two more coming. All of them were/are men that I expected to live much longer. I lost Uncle Ed who always provided a sort of quiet bass to my father's tenor. He was the sort of person who was comfortable with a kid watching him fix a stone wall for hours. I lost Uncle Tom who introduced me to the joys of rare meat. My favorite memory of him is the pride he took in getting a grant for RIF. I lost my biological Uncle Bob. He was funny and he took my side against Mother. He helped me to have faith that brainy genes really were in there somewhere. On our wedding day, he prayed over Kurt and I just as he had prayed over Mother and Dad.
"All things work together for good..." is sometimes as hard to see as the usefulness of a pile of broken glass, but that doesn't make it any less true.
