Thoughts

Item #1 on the Summer 2017 Bucket List has been accomplished.

Samuel, Ethan, Elyse and I went to Dorney Park in Pennsylvania on Saturday. First theme park/water park of 2017. Three of my favorite people. We screamed. We laughed. We got wet. We drank milkshakes. It was a great day.

On the way home we picked up an antique Art Deco mirror that my mom and dad bought online for me.

It's to replace the one that had been in our foyer for nineteen years, which Jen took with her. Here's the old one.

When Samuel and I went to buy wall mounts for the mirror, we learned that Bru, the big Black Lab from the hardware store, had passed away. We loved to pet Bru every time we went there. There were notes from kids covering the entire front window.

It was very touching. I told Samuel I'm not good with love transitions. I'm okay with my own life transitions. I don't mind getting older. But I'm sad knowing that this will probably be Kahlua's last year. I'm happy that the boys are healthy and growing up, but I'm sad knowing that they were once little boys, and you can't stop that river. We will all grow old and die.

I don't like saying goodbye to people that I love. I want the people I love to last forever.

When Einstein was asked to describe the theory of relativity in one sentence, he said, "There is no hitching post in the universe."

Human beings need hitching posts. We need to love and be loved. We need love to bind us to the earth, because if not love, then what else is there to bind us? And the deeper we love, the deeper we believe that it's permanent. And the deeper we give our entire selves to that love, the more we hurt when we're confronted with the fact that it's not permanent.

And yet, the alternative is to never love. That's a horrible alternative.

What can you do? We have to love. We have to have open hearts and move forward. We have to be strong for the people that we have vowed to love forever, because we need to be their hitching posts. We have to keep going to water parks, keep writing rhyming odes to little boys who will keep growing up, keep building those bonds deeper and deeper and deeper until we can't fathom ever living without them, because that's the only choice we have, and that's the only thing that makes life worth living.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to make a milkshake for a boy.

And behold: our new, big-ass Art Deco mirror.