I Wonder

   When I come home from work at lunch time, there is a postman making his rounds. The regular collections of cars are parked at the school. I wave to my neighbors. I know the face of the people at the check-out at the store, the pharmacist, the UPS driver, and the lady who makes the great sandwiches at the Avenue Subs. I have a general idea of the different positions and jobs within the community, and know some of who make them up. In a smaller community, I can imagine that this network would be even tighter. So, this is really where my curiosity is presenting itself.

   We have the telling of how Christ was born into our world, His world, as a baby. But, as a community is born and lives, it is multi-faceted creature where connections have various levels of density and relations of linkage. Understanding though that things can happen in a community which creates a ripple effect, moving the links in waves of news and information, serves to fuel my curiosity. What did that community think, not only in the days of the actual birth of Christ, but in the months leading to it?
  What was the reaction to the silence of one man, the compassion of another, the obedience of a woman, the awe of another? What did the neighbors think; the shop keeper, the priest, the family, the people who moved through the lives of Mary and Joseph?
   I’ll kick off again trying to explore that concept and will continue to explore that in the days to come, but I just wanted to pause and think about how information moves through my own community. In many ways it is vastly different than the community of these parents, but in other ways very similar. We share news and ideas, we hear a broadcast of something that has happened and share the information. I wonder what our reaction would be, what the ripple effects would be.

You’ve Got Mail

One of my favorite movies was on last night, “You’ve Got Mail,” with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. I love the movie, the word play and the characters. And those words that are in the title, “You’ve Got Mail.” Isn’t it such a nice thing to open up your e-mail and find a message waiting there for you from a friend? But I think it’s the character of Kathleen Kelly that I like most of all. I understand her musings on the bouquets of sharpened pencils, having a view of the world which is colored by her own perspective. Mostly I think it is that this character walks about, not oblivious that others may not see the world as she does, but at the end content to be herself and walk in her own shoes.

I love that, because I find that too often I worry about what others think. I try not to, but at times I vary somewhere between obliviousness towards others perceptions of me, simply not caring, and then caring a bit too much. Oh, not caring in a way to persuade me from my principles, but when you have a twinge of what others are thinking. It’s the ability to twirl, to read and soak in knowledge, to sing, to smell daisies, to read or write e-mails. When I am standing out on the driveway, warmed by the sun and under a clear night sky, I can twirl and sing, or just sit down and watch the dogs play. It is times like that, the moments when I am happily oblivious of what others may be thinking. I can’t say that I can always twirl, sing, and smell daisies (and bouquets of sharpened pencils), but I do like to as much as possible.