LONG TIME GONE


he found his way home.

On a night like this, when there is much to say but not much time to say it, the hands and the head and especially the heart can be content to know that, on a cozy little porch in a crazy little corner of southwestern Pennsylvania, a wonderful family came together, twenty strong, all assembled for the first time in nearly six years, to eat a meal and celebrate a birthday but also, and perhaps most of all, to welcome home a father, grandfather, great-grandfather who'd gone away and was not expected back. There were smiles and hugs and handshakes and kisses, the lightning flash of family photos and the rolling thunder of hearty, healthy laughter, all at the thought and gift of a man who, almost ninety-four but still spry and sportive enough to tease and tickle the children rustling around him, found again what he'd never really left.

Tucked for a while in a small corner of that porch, when he was not eating or playing or posing or laughing himself, was a son, grandson, nephew, cousin who'd gone away and come back before most of them even noticed he'd been missing, but whose presence on that porch felt, to three of us at least, just as momentous, reminding us that days and weeks and years are all relative to the calendar of the heart, that silence within is never as hard nor as heavy as silence without, and that, even at twelve but especially at thirty-seven, there are few joys greater than a full and happy home.

Posted: Sun - July 23, 2006 at 10:43 PM          

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