And So It Goes With God

I just finished reading Life of Pi for the second time. I'm supposed to discuss it with a reading group Sunday afternoon, so I'm going to save blogging about the book as a whole until later. But there is one line I just had to comment on now.

At the end of the book, Pi is telling his story to some men who clearly do not believe him, so after giving up on convincing them he is telling the truth, he tells them an alternate version of the story that he suggests they might find more plausible. This seems to only confuse them even more. Then he asks which story makes the better story, the first one he's told about his experiences in surviving months in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean, the story that is full of animals, or the second story that has no tiger in it.

The men agree. The better story is the one with animals.

To which Pi replies, "And so it goes with God."

Wow. That line gives me shivers. I'm going to spend the next few days deciding what I think it means.

Mammaw's Family

We had a family thing today, and though Mammaw has been gone for many years, it was basically about getting her family together. Mammaw's family has, over the years, gotten both bigger and smaller, spreading out more and more as it keeps growing so that it's not nearly as big a group as I imagine when we actually get ourselves together. But then it's still us. Except that it's not. It's some weird older version of us. People kept commenting today on how the kids are growing up faster than we can keep up, and I kept looking around thinking, "Who are these old people, and what have they done with my family?" And that's just when I looked at my brothers and sisters (Heh. Kidding. Sort of.).

Time is such an odd little critter. It drags on and on when there is something you really want to happen and slows to a creepy crawl when you just wish some terrible situation would be over already. I'm not one to really keep up with my own aging process, but I was born in 1967, which should make me about 25 by now I figure. I'm not sure where other people found the years in there to get older.

But the main thing is that this reminded me that we don't get together enough. Of course, everybody has responsibilities, and everybody has their own children and their own friends and their own jobs to worry about. But somehow we keep finding ourselves inexplicably catapulted out into the future with no real idea of where the time went. It's a shame when those moment of realizing the time has gone keep cropping up at funerals, as they all too often do.

There are a lot of things you can find time for later. Getting together with the people you love as they are right now is not one of them. You can use up everything you have in you running around willy nilly just trying to deal with the most immediate pressures first, but there are few situations in which your time and attention are more valuable than in simply sitting down to visit.

Ya'll come to see us. The roads work both ways. Ya hear?