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Life is either a collision of random events, like billiard balls during a break careening off and into one another, or if you are so inclined to believe, our predetermined fate—what my mother took such great comfort in calling God’s will.
We’d be who we were, and we could either come to grips with this fact and like the person we’d become, or live with regret and disappointment.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I said. “I mean, you could look at it like you’d be opening the door for other kids of color.” “Those kids will open that door on their own, in the classroom,” Mr. Cantwell said. “Just as you have done.”
But we expect that of our grandparents. Not our parents. For some reason, we think our parents will never grow old, perhaps because when they do, we are forced to acknowledge that we will one day grow old, and we face our own mortality.
There are moments, I believe, when we are capable of communicating with those we love without using our voices, moments when we think of someone and the phone rings, or we speak the person’s name and suddenly they are standing beside us.
There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.
My father was telling me that while we tend to remember the dramatic incidents that change history—Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Nixon’s resignation, and the Loma Prieta earthquake—we live for the quiet, intimate moments that mark not our calendars but our hearts: The day we marry. The days our children are born. Their first step. Their first word. Their first day of school. And when our children grow, we remember those moments with a touch of melancholy: the day they get their driver’s license, the day we drive them to college, the day they marry, and the day they have their children. And the
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We realize it is in those quiet moments that each of us has the ability to make our lives extraordinary.
Sam wanted to believe. He wanted to believe that God really did have a plan for him and for his life, that his hardships as a child would all help mold for him an extraordinary life. He wanted to believe that his prayers had a purpose, that God truly is benevolent, despite so many in the world so often being malevolent. He wanted to believe that God’s will really meant something and was not just a mother’s way of dismissing a curious son.
my two children, Joe and Catherine. Thank you for teaching me that the true meaning of success can be found in the quiet moments of my life—the moments when you all fill my heart with love.
