The moments that make us

The lilting sound of my mother’s voice calling me home for supper through the woods near dusk on a sweet mid-summer’s eve.

The joyful giddy dizziness I felt as a toddler the moment Dad threw me high into the air (seemingly to the clouds) before catching me again as gravity returned me toward the earth.

The tantalizing aroma of my grandmother’s biscuits wafting through the front door on a Sunday after church, flooding my olfactory senses, while I snuck into the kitchen and opened the oven … and pried one up and out of the pan with a big wooden spoon.

The powerful but tender embrace of Marcus, a jail inmate I taught, who had told me plainly when we first met that he knew all white men were racists. Over time, as we got to know each other, we grew into more than friends - we became brothers. The day Marcus left for federal prison, I could feel the love leap like a band of angels from his soul into mine when he hugged me.

The free and full laughter of a dying homeless man, whom I sat with beneath the stars one night below the Anderson Street bridge in Bristol. As he recounted his life’s joys, I just listened in awe and reverence. I can still hear his laughter ringing out like a church bell, chasing away the darkness.

The first time I fell in love (well, okay, every time was wonderful). Such moments even Shakespeare felt inept to describe, so I’ll try no further here, except to say, “There’s no moment quite like the first time.”

The electric jolt of excitement in the air on the first day I ever taught school, when the bell rang and my students entered the room. I can still see the face of every child from that day. The anticipation and joy were so thick I felt I could scarcely breathe. It was the moment a true calling came to be.

The soul-searing physical and mental pain of my personally experiencing an absolutely unspeakable childhood tragedy (which, however, led me later on to more fully understand the pain of every similarly victimized child I ever taught … with a level of insight and devotion with which I otherwise would surely have been incapable).

The aching horror of hearing the mother of a student scream, straight into her child’s face, “I wish you had never been born!” I used to wish I could remove such a haunting moment from my mind forever. But now I realize I wouldn’t, even if I could. Though they still make me sad, such tragic moments serve also to make me a better person … kinder and gentler.

Much like the tiny cells that make up our bodies, our moments are the brief snippets of which our lives our made.

Oh. And one more moment. Perhaps my most “life changing” of them all.

The moment I realized Love was the Answer to everything. Not power. Not fame. Not material wealth.

I was reading Tolstoy in a trailer my family lived in at the time. My wife and young children were sound asleep. I wanted to wake them all up and scream with joy. In that moment the Answer suddenly “came to me”.