It's the most wonderful time of the year

This is the most wonderful time of the year, despite what the Christmas carol says. I can read outside till it's after 9pm and I don't even realize it's that late. It's still a teensy light out even at 10pm when I turn off the bedside lamp and go to sleep. I love these long days leading up to the summer solstice. Even though I have to go to work, I look forward to getting home and being outside doing things or being outside not doing things. Just...being outside. In the light. I like light.

This week I took three days off, since it's the week of the church rummage sale and our Social Justice group runs it. Three of us men lugged the tables over to the gym on Monday night. We had to get some from the second floor of the school and some from the church basement, and we never had to hunt for tables before. Then we set all fifty of them up. I was so tired I could barely function at work, so I decided to grab Friday as a day off too.

Just as well—I had to be home to take delivery of the new washing machine. Have you ever noticed that just when you happen to have four hundred dollars laying around, something pops up to swipe it out of your hand? The washer died on Wednesday morning. At first I scheduled a repair visit but then I realized that it would cost as much to fix it as it would to replace it. So now we have a new one, sparkling over in the corner of the laundry room.

Two guys came to deliver it, and neither one was especially big or heavily muscled as one might expect. They did a curious thing in removing the old one and then bringing the new one down into the basement. Instead of using a dolly, they wrapped a wide strap under the machines and around their necks and carried them that way. Never saw anyone do that before. I was talking to one of the guys about it, and remarked that surely he wouldn’t be doing this for the next twenty years, and was he in school now? He said he probably would be doing the same thing, since he didn’t graduate high school and didn’t get his GED, though different people told him he should. The job didn’t allow much time to do all that though. He said he was 31 years old now and it was apparent that he didn’t see much more for himself in the future.

This exchange made me think about my own privileged background, where it was understood that of course all the kids would go on to college. Kathy and I brought that same attitude into our own family, that of course our children would get their degrees.

I didn’t really know what sacrifices my own parents made for us, but I know that whatever we did for our own children, we didn’t think it as sacrificing anything. It was just what parents were supposed to do. Our parents valued education—Kathy’s mom was a teacher herself—and we carried that into our own family.

While the one guy was working on hooking up the new washer, the other guy was standing around looking at the stuff in our basement, noticing shelves and shelves of books. By the door to the laundry room there is poster from 1978 that one of the school children in our parish made. It says, “If you wake up one morning and Christ seems far away, guess who moved?” I saw him reading it but I didn’t remark about it, deciding to let the Holy Spirit talk to him about that while I exhorted his comrade to get back to school. Between the two of us, maybe we gave them each something to think about as they went on their way.

SPECIAL NOTE: Grandson Max is four years old today. One of his presents will be the box the washing machine came in: A four hundred dollar playhouse.